IBM’s AI strategy: Ecosystem collaboration & AI-native products

IBM Corp. is embracing artificial intelligence as part of a broader ecosystem strategy, recognizing that businesses need flexibility in how they adopt and deploy AI-native solutions across different platforms.

Rather than relying on a single approach, companies must integrate AI solutions that work across a diverse range of platforms and partners, according to Mohamad Ali (pictured), senior vice president and head of IBM Consulting at IBM.

IBM’s Mohamad Ali talks with theCUBE about AI integration, IBM’s ecosystem strategy and how businesses can adopt AI-native solutions.

“Our clients need a variety of technologies,” Ali said. “They need open-source technologies; they need closed-source technologies. They need technologies from our partners like SAP, AWS, Microsoft, Salesforce [and] Palo Alto, and that has become our new strategy … this ecosystem, this community, once again of products.”

Ali spoke with theCUBE’s Dave Vellante and Savannah Peterson at MWC25, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed AI integration, IBM’s ecosystem strategy and how businesses can adopt AI-native solutions. (* Disclosure below.)

How IBM’s Consulting Advantage platform drives AI-native business transformation

IBM Consulting Advantage is focused on helping businesses reimagine their operations with AI at the core rather than simply adding AI on top of existing workflows. By shifting toward AI-native strategies, companies can create systems that inherently adapt to evolving technologies. As organizations struggle to keep pace with changing technologies, IBM Consulting Advantage plays a crucial role in bridging that gap. To support this shift toward AI business transformation, IBM Consulting Advantage recently launched AI Integration Services. This offering is designed to help businesses decompose complex processes and integrate generative AI beyond just technical implementation, according to Ali.

“As you go to agentic frameworks, you go to a chief information officer, and the CIO says, ‘What am I going to do with this?’” he said. “It requires an organization like IBM Consulting that can come and help decompose that process, determine how to integrate the gen AI.”

IBM has also empowered its consultants to actively create AI applications rather than relying solely on pre-built solutions. This approach has led to the development of thousands of AI assistants and agents, with IBM curating 2,000 of them as production-ready tools, according to Ali.

“We’ve gotten our 160,000 consultants to be creators because they’re actually the doers,” he said. “They’re the ones that are writing the code, designing the specs, etc. If you are doing that, why are you not the ones that help create these assistants, these agents?”

AI-driven product integration

IBM is embedding AI deeply into its product suite, ensuring that automation and intelligence are foundational rather than supplemental. This AI-native approach optimizes processes and enhances user experiences, according to Ali.

“We are redesigning our products to be AI-native rather than AI-enabled,” he said. “That means AI is at the core of how these tools function — not just an add-on feature.”

IBM also integrates AI into existing products to improve efficiency and streamline operations. Instead of requiring companies to replace their legacy systems, IBM leverages AI to enhance them, allowing businesses to modernize without disrupting their core infrastructure.

“We happen to be lucky in that we have a whole technology business, a whole product business within IBM, and we can use some of those things and get a fast start,” Ali said. “We have a product called watsonx.governance. We have something called watsonx.data that allows us to put the data in the right form and vectorize it so that the AI can use it. There’s watsonx.ai, which is a catalog of our models and other company’s models that we can mix and match to get the most efficient thing.”

IBM has shown how AI can enhance enterprise systems without disruption. Its AI-native strategy streamlines workflows by integrating AI into legacy environments. Using IBM watsonx Orchestrate, IBM unified 63 separate human resources systems, enabling simplified, AI-driven automation at scale, most notably for transactional HR processes, according to Ali.

“We’ve seen massive efficiency in just that one area,” he said. “We did not [have to rip and replace.]”

Here’s the complete video interview with Mohamad Ali, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of MWC25:

(* Disclosure: IBM Corp. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither IBM nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE