General AI
Deloitte | October 13, 2023
Deloitte integrates Generative AI into SAP BTP to optimize ERP services.
The Clean Core + Edge Innovation strategy streamlines cloud development and AI in SAP BTP.
Deloitte's AI commitment evident in training 120,000 professionals, recognized by SAP.
Deloitte's latest move involves an expansion in its practices for the SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) by incorporating generative AI solutions for its clients. The integration of these advanced technologies aims to streamline processes and provide data-driven insights, ultimately enhancing the value delivered to clients within the enterprise resource planning (ERP) domain.
Deloitte's strategy, known as Clean Core + Edge Innovation, emphasizes the fusion of cloud application development and AI capabilities within the SAP BTP framework. The goal is to enable clients to derive tangible business outcomes while minimizing technical complexities. By leveraging SAP BTP's capabilities in conjunction with Generative AI, Deloitte anticipates delivering tailored solutions optimized for cloud-based ERP platforms.
Chip Kleinheksel, Enterprise Performance Generative AI Leader and SAP Chief Technology Officer at Deloitte Consulting LLP, reportedly emphasized,
Our efforts to drive innovation and value for clients remain at the forefront of our strategy. Expanding our SAP BTP practices is the next step in our journey, bolstering our AIOPS.D micro-solutions and enabling SAP AI Services to facilitate autonomous processes within industry-specific cloud solutions.
[Source – CISION PR Newswire]
Juergen Mueller, Chief Technology Officer and Executive Board Member of SAP SE, highlighted the significance of SAP BTP in fostering generative AI-powered applications across various business functions. He reportedly stated,
Deloitte's Clean Core + Edge Innovation approach can accelerate opportunities for transformation through generative AI, particularly in conjunction with SAP S/4HANA and SAP BTP. This expansion highlights our commitment to continuously innovating and unlocking new value for customers.
[Source – CISION PR Newswire]
Furthermore, Deloitte's Clean Core + Edge Innovation approach aims to reduce technical debt and facilitate agile innovation through SAP BTP's capabilities, such as low-code application extensions and API-driven integration. The integration of generative AI applications, including agent-based simulation, virtual assistants, predictive analytics, computer vision, and natural language processing, seeks to bolster enterprise productivity and expertise.
Deloitte's commitment to advancing its generative AI capabilities is underscored by its investment in training over 120,000 professionals through the AI Academy, as well as its substantial financial commitment to global technology learning and development initiatives.
With the recent recognition from SAP through the SAP Pinnacle Award and the Premium Supplier Designation for Cloud Managed Services, Deloitte remains dedicated to delivering innovative solutions to its clients, solidifying its position as a leader in the professional services landscape.
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AI Applications
Google | September 20, 2023
Google announces Bard chatbots’ integration into popular apps for an enhanced user experience.
Bard overcomes regulatory hurdles for global launch and introduces extensions for Google Drive, Gmail, and YouTube.
Users can use Bard for summarizing emails, finding routes, and fact-checking; privacy controls are emphasized amid competition with ChatGPT.
Google is set to integrate its Bard chatbot into popular applications such as Gmail, YouTube, and more, as part of Alphabet's efforts to enhance user experiences. This move follows OpenAI's release of ChatGPT, which prompted Google to develop Bard in response.
Earlier this year, Google overcame regulatory hurdles to launch Bard worldwide, despite concerns about data security from European regulators. To gain public support, Google is now introducing Bard extensions, enabling it to function as a plug-in within Google Drive, Gmail, YouTube, and other platforms.
Users will be able to leverage Bard to summarize lengthy emails, find quick routes on Google Maps, and extract bullet points from dense documents. To address concerns about accuracy, a fact-checking feature will be included to verify Bard's responses in real time.
Generative AI relies on data scraping from extensive databases to provide human-like responses. Google assures users that Bard will access private data only with consent and will not use it for targeted advertising or training Bard. Private content will remain inaccessible to Google employees, and users will have control over their privacy settings.
Google remarked in a blog post,
You’re always in control of your privacy settings when deciding how you want to use these extensions, and you can turn them off at any time.
[Source - Voanews]
This development comes after Microsoft incorporated ChatGPT into Bing earlier this year but failed to challenge Google's search engine dominance. Google aims to capitalize on ChatGPT's declining user base and position Bard as a strong competitor in the generative AI landscape.
While Bard's integration into Google's ecosystem offers convenience, it may face competition with established AI models like ChatGPT. Some users might still have reservations about privacy and data usage, despite Google's assurances. Additionally, Bard's success in challenging ChatGPT's dominance remains to be seen, as generative AI popularity fluctuates.
Google's integration of Bard into popular apps enhances the user experience, making tasks like summarizing emails and finding routes more convenient. Bard's global launch and extensions for Google Drive, Gmail, and YouTube offer versatility. The fact-checking feature ensures accuracy, and Google emphasizes privacy controls, addressing concerns about data security.
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AI Tech
PR Newswire | October 20, 2023
IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced an expansion of its relationship with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to help more mutual clients operationalize and derive value from generative artificial intelligence (AI). As part of this, IBM Consulting aims to deepen and expand its generative AI expertise on AWS by training 10,000 consultants by the end of 2024; the two organizations also plan to deliver joint solutions and services upgraded with generative AI capabilities designed to help clients across critical use cases.
IBM Consulting and AWS already serve clients across a variety of industries with a range of AI solutions and services. Now, the companies are enhancing those solutions and services with the power of generative AI designed to help clients integrate AI quickly into business and IT operations building on AWS. IBM Consulting and AWS plan to start with these specific solutions:
Contact Center Modernization with Amazon Connect – IBM Consulting worked with AWS to create summarization and categorization functions for voice and digital interactions using generative AI, which are designed to allow for transfers between the chatbot and live agent and provide the agent with summarized details that expedite resolution times and improve quality management.
Platform Services on AWS – Initially introduced in November 2022, this offering is newly upgraded with generative AI to better manage the entire cloud value chain including IT Ops, automation, and platform engineering. The new generative AI capabilities give clients tools to enhance business serviceability and availability for their applications hosted on AWS through intelligent issue resolution and observability techniques. Clients can expect an improvement of uptime and mean time repair which means they can act quickly and effectively to potential issues that arise.
Supply Chain Ensemble on AWS – This planned offering will introduce a virtual assistant that can help accelerate and augment the work of supply chain professionals as they aim to deliver on customer expectations, optimize inventories, reduce costs, streamline logistics, and assess supply chain risks.
Additionally, for clients looking to modernize on AWS, IBM Consulting plans to integrate AWS generative AI services into its proprietary IBM Consulting Cloud Accelerator to help accelerate the cloud transformation process. This will help with reverse engineering, code generation and code conversion.
Commitment to deepening expertise and expanding AWS on watsonx integration
IBM has already built extensive expertise with AWS's generative AI services including Amazon SageMaker and Amazon CodeWhisperer, and is one of first AWS Partners to use Amazon Bedrock, a fully managed service that makes industry-leading foundation models (FMs) available through an API, so clients can choose the model that's best suited for their use case.
AI expertise and a deep understanding of AWS capabilities are critical for clients looking to implement generative AI, and IBM is already providing mutual clients with access to professionals from IBM Consulting's Center of Excellence for Generative AI with specialized generative AI expertise.
With today's news, IBM Consulting plans to train and skill 10,000 consultants on AWS generative AI services by end of 2024. They will have access to an exclusive, partner-only program that provides training on the top use cases and best practices for client engagement with AWS generative AI services. This will help advance their knowledge, allow them to engage with technical professionals and better serve clients innovating on AWS.
Enterprise clients are looking for expert help to build a strategy and develop generative AI use cases that can drive business value and transformation – while mitigating risks, said Manish Goyal, Senior Partner, Global AI & Analytics Leader at IBM Consulting. Paired with IBM's AI heritage and deep expertise in business transformation on AWS, this suite of reengineered solutions with embedded generative AI capabilities can help our mutual clients to scale generative AI applications rapidly and responsibly on their platform of choice.
IBM is also responding to client demand for generative AI capabilities on AWS by making watsonx.data, a fit-for-purpose data store built on an open lakehouse architecture, available on AWS as a fully managed software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution– which clients can also access in AWS Marketplace. The company also plans to make watsonx.ai and watsonx.governance available on AWS by 2024. This builds on previous commitments made by the two companies to make it easier for clients to consume IBM data, AI and security software on AWS.
"Our customers are increasingly looking for the technical support and AI expertise they need to build and implement a generative AI strategy that drives business value from their entire cloud value chain," said Chris Niederman, Managing Director, Global Systems Integrators at AWS. "We are excited to be working with IBM to include embedded generative AI capabilities that assist our mutual customers scale their applications – and help IBM consultants deepen their expertise on best practices for customer engagement with AWS generative AI services."
Generative AI at scale for telecommunications
Clients are already benefitting from the longstanding relationship between IBM and AWS. Bouygues Telecom, a leading French communications service provider with a history of industry-leading innovation, engaged IBM Consulting to support the company's evolving cloud strategy to explore, design and implement AI use cases at scale while giving teams flexibility to select cloud and AI providers based on departmental and application needs.
Leveraging the IBM Garage approach, the team co-designed a custom data and AI reference architecture covering multiple cloud scenarios that can extend to all AI and data projects across Bouygues Telecom's cloud and on-premises platforms.
"As we sought to leverage generative AI to extract insights from our engagements with clients, we were confronted with some unfamiliar issues around storage, memory size and power requirements," said Matthieu Dupuis, Head of AI for Bouygues Telecom. "IBM Consulting and AWS have been invaluable partners in identifying the right model for our needs and overcoming these technological barriers."
With the new AI platform on AWS, IBM Consulting enabled Bouygues Telecom to develop proof-of-concept models and scale them into production quickly while helping to minimize costs and risks. The platform also enables their data scientists to work with greater efficiency, purpose, and satisfaction by allowing them to spend more time on complex, high-value AI projects rather than launching standalone solutions.
An evolving relationship
With over 40 years of combined experience on AI solutions, IBM and AWS have been working together to respond to clients who are looking to leverage AI for cost, efficiency, and growth, whether they are looking for a demonstration of the technology, defining potential use cases or full co-creation of bespoke solutions.
Additionally, IBM is an AWS Premier Tier Services Partner with over 22,000 AWS certifications globally and has achieved 17 AWS Service Delivery and 16 AWS Competency designations. Today's news builds on this longstanding relationship and a shared value of the importance of enterprise AI. Getting to enterprise AI at scale requires a human-centric, principled approach, and IBM Consulting helps clients establish guardrails that align with the organization's values and standards, mitigate bias and manage data security, lineage, and provenance.
IBM Consulting accelerates business transformation for our clients through hybrid cloud and AI technologies, leveraging our open ecosystem of partners. With deep industry expertise spanning strategy, experience design, technology, and operations, we have become the trusted partner to many of the world's most innovative and valuable companies, helping modernize and secure their most complex systems. Our 160,000 consultants embrace an open way of working and apply our proven co-creation method, IBM Garage, to scale ideas into outcomes.
Statements regarding IBM's future direction and intent are subject to change or withdrawal without notice, and represent goals and objectives only.
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