Middleware Consulting International

Mitsui Chemicals, Inc. (Head Office: Chuo-ku, Tokyo, President & CEO: HASHIMOTO Osamu) and IBM Japan, Ltd. (Head Office: Chuo-ku, Tokyo, General Manager and President: YAMAGUCHI Akio) started verifying to assess agility and accuracy in discovering new applications of Mitsui Chemicals products by combining Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT)(*1), a generative AI, with IBM Watson(*2) Discovery. This initiative aims to expand top line (sales) and revenue share of Mitsui Chemicals products by advancing digital transformation in the business domain.

Since June 2022, Mitsui Chemicals has been implementing IBM Watson for new application discovery in Mitsui Chemicals Group. More than 20 business units are utilizing IBM Watson, and more than 100 new applications have been discovered. In 2023, Mitsui Chemicals will further expand the departments implementing IBM Watson, including R&D and corporate. For one subject of new application discovery in a business unit, more than 5 million points of external big data, such as patents, news and SNS, are input into IBM Watson, and also a dictionary specific to Mitsui Chemicals products. Mitsui Chemicals’ specialists in the sales and business domain are using IBM Watson to efficiently analyze the big data and discover new applications for their products that exceed human preconceptions and current knowledge. For example, in SNS analysis, Mitsui Chemicals found that there were many posts such as “musty smell in the local railway,” which led to sales activities of Mitsui Chemicals’ antifungal products for a railway.

While there have been many outcomes for new application discovery utilizing IBM Watson Discovery, there is still a challenge that it takes time to discover new applications. To address this challenge, Mitsui Chemicals will implement GPT to generate new applications from a huge amount of text data such as patents, news, and SNS. With more information about why to focus on the new applications and external environmental factors, the team can drastically increase the agility and accuracy of discovering new applications.

Mitsui Chemicals and IBM Japan have started verifying with Microsoft Azure OpenAI for new application discovery. Mitsui Chemicals will identify and extract notable new application candidates by optimizing the instruction prompt for GPT to meet the purpose of the new application discovery.  By applying the data to IBM Watson, even users unfamiliar with using IBM Watson will be able to specify keywords for new application discovery in a short time. Furthermore, new application discovery will be automated by making it multimodal, including SNS videos, and by inputting information about new applications that were discovered utilizing IBM Watson into GPT.

By combining Generative AI and IBM Watson, Mitsui Chemicals aims to accelerate the process from market development to product development by integrating data between different departments, such as lines of business and R&D, through utilizing Sales Force Automation (SFA) / Marketing Automation (MA), Materials Informatics (MI) and Robotics.

Masao SAMBE, CDO, Mitsui Chemicals, Inc. 

Conventional use of Artificial Intelligence has been mostly focused on productivity and efficiency. This time, we are engaging with IBM Watson to discover new material applications which will contribute to portfolio transformation by lifting the top line and increasing market share. For the sake of accelerating Corporate Transformation through DX, combined GPT/Generative AI with Watson will enable us to enhance agility, accuracy and usability in discovering new applications and to optimize stakeholders’ benefits between LOB and R&D.

*1 About GPT

GPT is OpenAI’s Large Language Model (LLM) that applies a deep learning model called Transformer, which has Attention mechanism to dynamically identify noteworthy data from big data, and with over 100 billion pre-trained parameters using a large data set of over 1 trillion sentences and words in the world. It supports a variety of natural language processing tasks such as sentence generation, document summarization, language translation, QA, and keyword extraction.

*2 About IBM Watson

Watson is IBM’s AI technology for business, helping organizations to better predict and shape future outcomes, automate complex processes, and optimize employees’ time. Watson has evolved from an IBM Research project, to experimentation, to a scaled, open set of products that run anywhere. With more than 40,000 client engagements, Watson is being applied by leading global brands across a variety of industries to transform how people work. To learn more, visit: https://www.ibm.com/watson.

24 May 2023 – Diageo, the maker of Guinness, Smirnoff and Johnnie Walker, today announces a five-year business transformation program in partnership with SAP (NYSE: SAP) and IBM. This new initiative, which marks the company’s most significant ever investment in technology and services, will redesign and improve Diageo’s processes across the 180 countries where it operates.

Fully global in nature, the program will revolutionise Diageo’s IT environment by introducing intuitive processes, powered by market-leading technology, to provide more information to enable the company to make better and quicker decisions. This transformation will enhance Diageo’s business resilience in a constantly evolving external landscape, improve its customer service offering and help the company adapt to a fast-changing consumer base.

The program involves a move to RISE with SAP S/4 HANA Cloud, with the support of IBM Consulting. Diageo’s implementation of the new cloud-based model will ensure its IT infrastructure is simplified and supported in a unified way.

IBM Consulting, which has been selected to lead the project, has a proven track record in the consumer sector and supporting client transformations and migrations to the SAP S/4 HANA Cloud platform. Diageo, SAP and IBM will work together to apply the latest technology to make Diageo’s business more efficient.

The five-year program will transform Diageo’s business finance operations in a number of areas:

• Advanced workflow solutions will allow orders to be tracked in real-time on a global scale and facilitate more effective customer engagement and better customer service.
• By moving to a single operating platform, Diageo will simplify its technology support model and IT landscape, making it easier for the company to do business and evolve amid changing consumer trends and market needs.
• The program will transform Diageo’s performance reporting capabilities, giving the company better insight into trade and growth opportunities.
• The digitisation of controls and compliance will make the business more robust, resilient and adaptable to changing market conditions.

Lavanya Chandrashekar, Chief Financial Officer, Diageo, said: “This partnership with IBM and SAP demonstrates our continued investment in digital transformation. It will enable greater agility in how we respond to our global consumer and customer needs. It will provide us with world-class actionable insights and enhanced data capabilities to support growth whilst allowing us to be more efficient in our day-to-day operations.”

Scott Russell, Executive Board Member, Customer Success, SAP, said: “In today’s disruptive consumer goods industry, success lies in navigating unpredictable supply chains, managing ongoing macro-economic volatility and staying one step ahead of ever-shifting customer demands. Through our continued partnership with Diageo, one of the world’s leading brand builders, we’re proud to support them in building a more resilient business that is enhancing the customer experience and can adapt to rapidly changing market pressures, realising its vision to revolutionise the consumer goods industry.”

Rahul Kalia, Managing Partner, IBM Consulting, UK & Ireland, said: “The consumer goods industry is striving to address the challenges posed by inflationary pressures and supply chain disruptions, while staying focused on delivering exceptional products and services for its customers and consumers. IBM is proud to partner with Diageo and SAP to bring our global business and digital transformation experience on this exciting journey.”

ARMONK, N.Y. and ORLANDO, Fla., May 10, 2023 /PRNewswire/ — IBM today announced at its annual Think conference in Orlando, Florida, new IBM Quantum Safe technology: a comprehensive set of tools and capabilities, combined with IBM’s deep security expertise, designed as an end-to-end solution to be made available as organizations, including governmental agencies, prepare their quantum-safe journey towards the post-quantum era.

Quantum technology is rapidly advancing. Quantum systems are on a path to solve previously unsolved problems beneficial to business and science, but this progress also poses security risks. As quantum computers continue to advance, they will reach the ability to break the most widely used security protocols in the world.

Recognizing this risk, IBM has leveraged its extensive expertise across cryptography, quantum computing, and critical infrastructure to develop IBM Quantum Safe technology.

This set of capabilities is designed to help clients prepare for the post-quantum era via:

• IBM Quantum Safe Explorer to enable organizations to scan source and object code to locate cryptographic assets, dependencies, vulnerabilities and to build a Cryptography Bill of Materials (CBOM). This allows teams to view and aggregate potential risks into one central location.
• IBM Quantum Safe Advisor allows the creation of a dynamic or operational view of cryptographic inventory to guide remediation and analyzes cryptographic posture and compliance to prioritize risks.
• IBM Quantum Safe Remediator enables organizations to deploy and test best practice-based quantum-safe remediation patterns to understand the potential impacts on systems and assets as they prepare to deploy quantum-safe solutions.

IBM is also unveiling its IBM Quantum Safe Roadmap to help clients understand and support them through this security transition. This is IBM’s first blueprint that charts the technology milestones towards increasingly advanced quantum-safe technology, which is engineered to help organizations address anticipated cryptographic standards and requirements through crypto-agility and protect systems against emerging vulnerabilities.

This journey is comprised of three key actions:

1. Discover: Identify cryptography usage, analyze dependencies, and generate a CBOM.
2. Observe: Analyze cryptography posture of vulnerabilities and prioritize remediation based on risks.
3. Transform: Remediate and mitigate with crypto-agility and built-in automation.

“As a leader in quantum computing, IBM recognizes the importance of comprehensively addressing the critical needs of our clients as they also consider transforming their cryptography for the quantum era,” said Ray Harishankar, IBM Fellow and lead for IBM Quantum Safe technology. “Our new suite of quantum-safe technologies and milestones laid out on our roadmap is designed for the continuous evolution of post-quantum security in tandem with useful quantum computing, including solutions to help industries navigate this shift effectively and easily.”

Last year, the United States government released new requirements and guidelines calling upon federal agencies to start the quantum-safe transition. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) selected four quantum-resistant algorithms for standardization — three of which were developed by IBM, alongside academic and industry collaborators.

Then, the National Security Agency (NSA) announced new requirements for national security systems to transition to quantum-safe algorithms by 2025, and the White House released requirements for federal agencies to submit a cryptographic inventory of systems that could be vulnerable to cryptographically relevant quantum computers.

“As the era of quantum computing quickly approaches reality, it is imperative that quantum-safe technologies are also deployed to protect today’s classical systems and data,” said Patrick Moorhead, CEO and founder of Moor Insights & Strategy. “What the world needs to secure data for the quantum age is expertise in world-class quantum technology and advanced cryptography, alongside decades of product development experience for critical infrastructure. These pillars are where I believe IBM excels, and now with a quantum-safe roadmap to lead the industry and new technologies to simplify migration, I look forward to seeing the advancement of quantum-safe journeys globally.”

The IBM Quantum Safe Roadmap and technology will expose organizations to their existing cryptographic landscape so they can begin to address changes that may be necessary to thrive in the post-quantum era.

For more information about IBM Quantum Safe technology or to request a demo, visit: https://www.ibm.com/quantum/quantum-safe.

ARMONK, N.Y., May 9, 2023 /PRNewswire/ — Today, IBM (NYSE: IBM) at its annual Think conference, announced IBM watsonx, a new AI and data platform to be released that will enable enterprises to scale and accelerate the impact of the most advanced AI with trusted data. Enterprises turning to AI today need access to a full technology stack that enables them to train, tune and deploy AI models, including foundation models and machine learning capabilities, across their organization with trusted data, speed, and governance – all in one place and to run across any cloud environment.

Also at Think, IBM is announcing further planned advancements, including a GPU-as-a-service infrastructure offering designed to support AI-intensive workloads, an AI-powered dashboard to measure, track, manage, and help report on cloud carbon emissions, and a new practice for watsonx and generative AI from IBM Consulting that will support client deployment of AI.

With watsonx, IBM is offering an AI development studio with access to IBM-curated and trained foundation models and open-source models, access to a data store to enable the gathering and cleansing of training and tuning data, and a toolkit for governance of AI into the hands of businesses that will provide a seamless end-to-end AI workflow that will make AI easier to adapt and scale.

“With the development of foundation models, AI for business is more powerful than ever,” said Arvind Krishna, IBM Chairman and CEO. “Foundation models make deploying AI significantly more scalable, affordable, and efficient. We built IBM watsonx for the needs of enterprises, so that clients can be more than just users, they can become AI advantaged. With IBM watsonx, clients can quickly train and deploy custom AI capabilities across their entire business, all while retaining full control of their data.”

Clients will have access to the toolset, technology, infrastructure, and consulting expertise to build their own — or fine-tune and adapt available AI models — on their own data and deploy them at scale in a more trustworthy and open environment to drive business success. Competitive differentiation and unique business value will be able to be increasingly derived from how adaptable an AI model can be to an enterprise’s unique data and domain knowledge.

The IBM watsonx platform consists of three unique product sets to address these needs:

IBM watsonx.ai: A next generation enterprise studio, expected to be generally available in July 2023, for AI builders to train, test, tune, and deploy both traditional machine learning and new generative AI capabilities powered by foundation models through an open and intuitive user interface.

• The AI studio provides a range of foundation models, training and tuning tools, and cost-effective infrastructure that facilitate the entire data and AI lifecycle, from data preparation to model development, deployment, and monitoring.
• The studio also includes a foundation model library that gives users easy access to IBM curated and trained foundation models. The IBM foundation models use a large, curated set of enterprise data backed by a robust filtering and cleansing process and auditable data lineage. These models are being trained not just on language, but on a variety of modalities, including code, time-series data, tabular data, geospatial data, and IT events data. An initial set of foundation models will be made available in beta tech preview to select clients. Examples of model categories include:
  • fm.code: Models built to automatically generate code for developers through a natural-language interface to boost developer productivity and enable the automation of many IT tasks.
  • fm.NLP: A collection of large language models (LLMs) for specific or industry-specific domains that utilize curated data where bias can be mitigated more easily and can be quickly customized using client data.
  • fm.geospatial: Model built on climate and remote sensing data to help organizations understand and plan for changes in natural disaster patterns, biodiversity, land use, and other geophysical processes that could impact their businesses.
• As part of a new collaboration between IBM and Hugging Face, the watsonx.ai studio will build upon Hugging Face’s open-source libraries and offer thousands of Hugging Face open models and datasets. This is part of IBM’s commitment to delivering to clients an open ecosystem approach that allows them to leverage the best models and architecture for their unique business needs.

IBM watsonx.data: A fit-for-purpose data store built on open lakehouse architecture that is optimized for governed data and AI workloads, supported by querying, governance, and open data formats to access and share data. The solution is expected to be generally available in July 2023 and:

• The solution can manage workloads both on-premise and across multi-cloud environments.
• Through workload optimization, with this solution, an organization can reduce data warehouse costs by up to 50 percent.¹
• Watsonx.data will allow users to access their increasingly robust data through a single point of entry while applying multiple fit-for-purpose query engines to uncover valuable insights.
• It will also provide built-in governance tools, automation and integrations with an organization’s existing databases and tools to simplify set-up and user experience.

IBM watsonx.governance: An AI governance toolkit to enable trusted AI workflows. The solution, expected to be generally available later this year:

• Operationalizes governance to help mitigate the risk, time and cost associated with manual processes and provides the documentation necessary to drive transparent and explainable outcomes.
• Provides the mechanisms to protect customer privacy, proactively detect model bias and drift, and help organizations meet their ethics standards.

With the watsonx platform, clients are enabled to meet the needs of their organization in five key areas of their business: interacting and conversing with customers and employees; automating business workflows and internal processes; automating IT processes; protecting against threats; and tackling sustainability goals.

IBM also plans to infuse watsonx.ai foundation models throughout all its major software products going forward, for example:

• Watson Code Assistant: A solution, expected later this year, that taps generative AI to allow developers to generate code with a straightforward English language command.
• AIOps Insights: AI Operations (AIOps) capabilities enhanced with foundation models expected for code and NLP to provide greater visibility into performance across IT environments, helping IT operations (ITOps) managers and Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) resolve incidents in a more expedient and cost-efficient way.
• Watson Assistant and Watson Orchestrate: IBM’s digital labor products are expected to be combined with an NLP foundation model to enable enhanced employee productivity and customer service experiences.
• Environmental Intelligence Suite: IBM EIS Builder Edition is planned to be enabled by the geospatial foundation model and available in preview later this year, allowing organizations to create tailored solutions that address and mitigate environmental risks based on their unique goals and needs.

Also at Think 2023, IBM will announce a number of additional upcoming offerings that are planned to help drive AI adoption, including:

• New GPU offering on IBM Cloud: Addressing the global need for foundation models, IBM is announcing new GPU offerings on IBM Cloud, an AI-tailored infrastructure designed to support enterprise compute-intensive workloads. Later this year, IBM is expected to offer full stack high-performance, flexible, AI-optimized infrastructure, delivered as a service on IBM Cloud, for both training and serving foundation models.
• IBM Consulting Center of Excellence for Generative AI: IBM Consulting announces a Center of Excellence for generative AI with over 1,000 generative AI experts and plans to build a watsonx-focused practice which will actively build and deploy watsonx for clients. IBM Consulting has completed dozens of client engagements infusing generative AI with IBM Watson and a portfolio of ecosystem partners through its proven IBM Garage method.
• IBM Cloud Carbon Calculator: An AI-informed dashboard to enable clients to measure, track, manage and help report their carbon emissions associated with their hybrid multi-cloud journey. Based on technology from IBM Research, IBM Cloud Carbon Calculator is expected to be generally available later this year. The dashboard complements IBM’s existing sustainability solutions with a comprehensive portfolio of technology and expertise, including the IBM Envizi ESG Suite, IBM Turbonomic, IBM Planning Analytics and IBM LinuxONE, that help organizations accelerate their sustainability and business objectives.
• New study revealing generative AI is among seven trends shaping business: A new report from the IBM Institute for Business Value, titled Seven Bets, shares seven trends impacting business today and describes the seven bets worth making to enhance their business, including insights on why businesses should adopt an “AI-first” mindset and how leaders can most effectively capitalize on AI’s opportunities now and in the future, as well as manage the enhanced risks across their organizations.

The Think 2023 broadcast can be accessed at www.ibm.com/events/think. During his keynote airing Tuesday, May 9, 8:30 a.m. – 9:15 a.m. EDT, IBM CEO and Chairman Arvind Krishna will be joined on stage by leaders from Delta Airlines, Citi, and Red Hat to discuss their visions for creatively turning challenges into opportunities with hybrid cloud and AI. On Wednesday, May 10, 4:30 p.m. – 5:00 p.m. EDT, Darío Gil, Senior Vice President and Director of IBM Research, will give a keynote on how generative AI can be applied for business use cases.

Following the flagship event in Orlando, Think on Tour will travel to more than a dozen cities around the world. For updates on confirmed cities, please visit: https://www.ibm.com/events/think/on-tour/.

About IBM
IBM is a leading global hybrid cloud and AI, and business services provider, helping clients in more than 175 countries capitalize on insights from their data, streamline business processes, reduce costs and gain the competitive edge in their industries. Nearly 4,000 government and corporate entities in critical infrastructure areas such as financial services, telecommunications and healthcare rely on IBM’s hybrid cloud platform and Red Hat OpenShift to affect their digital transformations quickly, efficiently and securely. IBM’s breakthrough innovations in AI, quantum computing, industry-specific cloud solutions and business services deliver open and flexible options to our clients. All of this is backed by IBM’s legendary commitment to trust, transparency, responsibility, inclusivity and service. For more information, visit www.ibm.com.

Hugging Face and IBM to partner to help democratize access to foundation models

“To benefit from the latest AI capabilities, enterprises want to build on open-source machine learning: open-source models trained on accessible datasets that can run within a secure environment with compliance and proper data governance,” said Clem Delangue, co-founder and CEO, Hugging Face. “We are excited to partner with IBM to deliver a top-tier developer experience based on Hugging Face open-source and community-driven machine learning, within the new watsonx platform offering the enterprise-readiness and trustworthiness of IBM.”

Meta’s PyTorch team and IBM change one line of code to massively improve AI model training

“Businesses today cannot get the most from their AI and cloud technologies unless these innovations are equipped to succeed at scale,” Damien Sereni, Engineering Director, Meta. “Meta has enjoyed a multi-year collaboration with IBM to address this key challenge. And, with the release of IBM watsonx, the PyTorch team at Meta and IBM are collaborating further to build a production-ready software stack for end-to-end training, fine-tuning and inference of large-scale foundation models.”

How IBM and NASA’s AI foundation model can help track and adapt to climate change

“NASA is committed to the full, free and open sharing of over 100 PB of scientific data and information. This is the first-time foundation models have been applied to the immense archive of Earth science data and we are working with IBM to evaluate the foundation model stack within NASA’s Science Managed Cloud Environment,” said Kevin Murphy, Chief Science Data Officer at NASA. “Next-generation AI technology can expedite our analysis and discovery of mission-critical insights pertaining to Earth and climate-related issues, enabling scientists to gain insights that can help us protect our planet.”

WIX leverages IBM large language models to improve customer care

“Wix is proud to leverage state-of-the-art IBM large language models to uncover novel insights from vast amounts of PII-stripped customer care data and thereby increase our support of more than 243 million clients across the globe,” said Yoav Abrahami, Chief Architect at Wix and Head of Velo.

IBM’s plans, directions, and intentions may change or be withdrawn at any time at IBM’s discretion without notice. Information about potential future products and improvements is provided to give a general idea of IBM’s goals and objectives and should not be used in making a purchase decision. IBM is not obligated to provide any material, code, or functionality based on this information.

ARMONK, N.Y., May 3, 2023 /PRNewswire/ — Today, IBM announced Cadence Design Systems, Inc. (Nasdaq: CDNS), is leveraging high-performance computing (HPC) with IBM Cloud HPC to help develop its chip and system design software faster. With more than 30 years of computational software experience, Cadence helps companies deliver innovative electronic products, including chips, boards and systems for dynamic market applications such as hyperscale computing, 5G communications, automotive, mobile, aerospace, consumer, industrial and healthcare.

Building on its decades long history of delivering electronic design innovation and offering hosted design services, Cadence started its public cloud journey in 2016 and has since evolved to adopt a hybrid, multi-cloud approach, which includes IBM. The company has leveraged multiple research and development (R&D) workloads in IBM Cloud to achieve a variety of benefits, including those related to resiliency, performance, security, compliance and total cost of ownership.

With the integrated IBM Spectrum LSF deployed in a hybrid cloud solution for HPC, Cadence is able to flexibly manage its compute-intensive workloads on-premises and in the cloud with high levels of resiliency and performance. Using IBM HPC both on-prem and on IBM Cloud, Cadence can take advantage of the solution to address compute demand peaks while helping to mitigate the risk of downtime, which benefits enablement of strategic R&D work.

“As Cadence continues to drive computational software innovation, continuity is critical when it comes to optimizing operations across our business unit teams who are responsible for delivering chip and system design software to customers at a rapid pace. Leveraging IBM Cloud as part of our multi-cloud environment and IBM Spectrum LSF as the HPC workload scheduler, we’ve successfully achieved high-compute utilization, which lets us efficiently utilize our cloud budget and streamline our computational workload,” said Tarak Ray, corporate vice president and chief information officer, Cadence.

“As organizations modernize, IBM is committed to helping Cadence make the best workload placement decisions for their business based on resiliency, performance, security, compliance requirements and total cost of ownership. For IBM clients like Cadence, demanding HPC workloads require higher utilization capabilities, and with a hybrid cloud solution, they can better manage peak workloads. IBM Cloud HPC is designed to deliver increased storage performance, greater compute power and higher levels of security and with these capabilities we are helping Cadence improve HPC for computational software workload performance and drive overall efficiency,” said Rohit Badlaney, GM, Industry Cloud Platforms & Solutions, IBM.

With IBM Cloud for HPC integrated with IBM Spectrum LSF, Cadence reports it is able to perform more regressions, and as a result, can support more predictable and faster time to value. Bringing IBM’s longstanding experience in workload management and scheduling with IBM Spectrum LSF together with IBM Cloud for HPC provides the Cadence team with added value. As enterprises like Cadence work continuously to remain competitive, IBM Cloud HPC helps overcome large-scale, compute-intensive challenges and speed time to insight.

WALLDORF, Germany and ARMONK, N.Y. — May 2, 2023 — SAP SE and IBM today announced that IBM Watson® technology will be embedded into SAP® solutions to provide new AI-driven insights and automation to help accelerate innovation and create more efficient and effective user experiences across the SAP solution portfolio.

SAP will use IBM Watson capabilities to power its digital assistant in SAP Start , which provides a unified entry point for cloud solutions from SAP. With SAP Start, users can search for, launch and interactively engage with apps provided in cloud solutions from SAP and SAP S/4HANA® Cloud. New AI capabilities in SAP Start will be designed to help users boost productivity with both natural language capabilities and predictive insights using IBM Watson AI solutions built on IBM’s trust and transparency and data privacy principles.

“This milestone collaboration with IBM aims to provide SAP customers a better user experience, faster decision-making and greater insights to help transform their business processes,” said Christian Klein, CEO and Member of the Executive Board of SAP SE. “Working together to incorporate additional AI, machine learning and other intelligent technologies into SAP solutions can lead to better business outcomes for our joint customers. Today’s news, along with the recent news of our expanded use of Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a prime example of how the rich, 50-year partnership between our companies continues to grow stronger and move the industry forward.”

New digital assistant capabilities in SAP Start will be extended across SAP solutions to help answer diverse questions for managers and employees. By automating and speeding up common tasks, the capabilities are designed to help unlock employee productivity to focus on more strategic work. SAP Start will allow customers to benefit from intelligence at the point of decision-making with the ability to use AI and machine learning to extract information from a variety of data sources and answer user questions across lines of business. Today, IBM technology currently available in the TripIt mobile app from SAP Concur is helping nearly 13 million users easily access AI-derived weather insights to make more sustainable travel choices before and during their trips.

IBM delivers market-leading AI capabilities with Watson products deployed by more than 100 million users across 20 industries. In addition, SAP and IBM Consulting are currently supporting customers with 25 joint intelligent industry solutions that use IBM Watson capabilities underpinned by SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP). These industry solutions help customers across industries such as retail, manufacturing and utilities accelerate their business transformation and use data to make more informed decisions.

“IBM and SAP are joining forces to give businesses new and exciting ways to harness the transformative power of AI and use it as a source of competitive advantage,” said Arvind Krishna, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, IBM. “With this announcement, we are infusing IBM Watson’s powerful, enterprise-grade AI capabilities into SAP’s leading ERP platform to help businesses reimagine customer experiences, boost productivity and fuel growth.”

In addition to natively embedding IBM Watson AI capabilities into SAP solutions, SAP and IBM are collaborating on generative AI and large language models aimed to deliver consistent continuous learning and automation based on SAP’s mission-critical application suite.