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IBM's Consulting Arm To Help Orgs Build Custom Microsoft Copilots

• By Gladys Rama
• May 09, 2024

Big Blue has launched a new program that guides organizations through the steps of planning, designing, building and deploying custom AI assistants built on Microsoft's Copilot technology.

IBM Copilot Runway, available now via the IBM Consulting unit, "facilitates the creation and deployment of Copilots that seamlessly integrate into the goals and activities of diverse organizations," wrote IBM's Ramya Kousik in a blog post Thursday.

Through the program, organizations work directly with IBM's consultants to custom-create Microsoft Copilots, tailoring them for their specific workflows, data sets, scalability needs and AI model preferences.

"[F]or some businesses, there is a need for a more specific, customized solution. That's when custom Copilots come into play," Kousik said. "Custom Copilots can be tailor-made to a business's specific use case and built to its exact specifications."

There are three prongs of the IBM Copilot Runway program. The Copilot Runway Adoption Framework, as its name suggests, is a framework for building and implementing custom Copilots. It assesses an organization to determine what types of Copilots would yield the biggest ROI and prioritizes building those first.

The second prong, Copilot Catalyst, is a Copilot accelerator. Per Kousik, it "streamlines the deployment of custom Copilots, facilitates seamless data integration and comes with multi-model support so you can select the optimal large language model (LLM) for the specific task."

Finally, the IBM Copilot Runway program provides organizations access to prebuilt Copilots. For example, there are Procurement and Finance Contract, Customer Service and Field Service, and Employee Experience copilots.

Also on Thursday, IBM announced it is building more IBM-Microsoft Experience Zones, which are brick-and-mortar spaces where customers can interact with IBM Consultants to workshop cloud, AI and other solutions to implement in their businesses. They can also test drive the IBM Copilot Runway Program at these Experience Zones. Said John Granger, senior vice president of IBM Consulting in a prepared statement, these spaces help IBM "meet clients where they are and bring them the right generative-AI-enabled solutions for their businesses."

The first IBM-Microsoft Experience Zone opened last month in Bangalore, India. On Thursday, IBM said it plans to open similar spaces in the United States, United Kingdom and Romania later in 2024.