Dive Brief:
- IBM connected its Consulting Advantage platform to Google’s Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform and launched a Google Cloud consulting practice, the companies said in a Thursday announcement.
- IBM’s Google Cloud Practice will be staffed with thousands of certified consultants and forward deployed engineers, according to the release. IBM and Google Cloud said the partnership represents a multibillion-dollar opportunity to help clients modernize legacy systems, manage hybrid-cloud infrastructure and drive AI adoption.
- The platform integration builds on an alliance that earlier this year brought several AI-related IBM products into Google Cloud Marketplace, including the watsonx data lakehouse, Hashicorp automation and Red Hat OpenShift virtualization. IBM launched a Microsoft consulting practice last year and deployed its Consulting Advantage platform on AWS’ government cloud in May.
Dive Brief:
As IBM expands its business to software and services, consulting has become a focal point, particularly in the realm of AI.
IBM CEO, President and Chairman Arvind Krishna made the case to investors in April during the company’s Q1 2026 earnings call. “AI is both a growth driver and a productivity engine,” he said. “As agents take on more work, delivery becomes faster, more software-driven and more scalable. IBM is leaning into the shift through our Consulting Advantage platform.”
Consulting accounted for roughly one-third of IBM’s Q1 revenues, which totaled nearly $16 billion. It drove about 40% of the company’s signing during that time, according to IBM CFO and SVP of Finance and Operation James Kavanaugh. The consulting business has become central to the company’s “services-as-software” model, he said during the earnings call, referring to AI automation that performs service-related tasks.
IBM road tested its generative and agentic AI solutions in-house among its consultants for two years before making the IBM Consulting Advantage platform generally available to clients. The company is creating squads of AI agents for industry-specific applications in aerospace, financial services, government, healthcare and telecommunications. It is also building data pipelines to connect enterprise data with Gemini models, per the Thursday announcement.
Expanding its army of Google Cloud technical consultants, which includes forward-deployed engineers that work on-site, addresses another client need as big tech continues to drain the existing AI talent pool, despite cutting jobs elsewhere.
“We’re using the term ‘forward-deployed unit,’” Andy Baldwin, IBM Consulting SVP of offerings and growth, told Channel Dive. “We’re deploying squads where you have a process domain person, an industry expert and engineers who are using the platform.”
