‘Part of why IBM has been successful for many, many, many decades is that we don’t just sell you products. We bring some of the smartest people on the planet to implement it,’ says IBM Consulting Senior Vice President Mohamad Ali.
As an example of IBM Consulting’s growing capabilities in artificial intelligence, Mohamad Ali, senior vice president of the organization, points to the collaboration between the organization’s human consultants and AI agents around cybersecurity.
Clients of IBM Consulting—No. 8 on CRN’s 2026 Solution Provider 500—can leverage the Autonomous Threat Operations Machine (ATOM) and have dozens of AI agent digital workers investigate threats. ATOM can sift through low-level threats significantly faster than humans, and then even after a human reviews ATOM’s work, the investigation can finish in one-third of the time required for an entirely human-led investigation.
“This is the new IBM Consulting,” Ali said. “These digital workers sit on top of this stack. And they are defending you at the speed that the AI is attacking you. That’s been a big initiative for us.”
IBM Consulting is at the forefront of advancing IT services through AI, Ali said. He put the organization at least 18 months ahead of the competition and sees IBM Consulting completing more projects faster and with fewer humans thanks to its AI investments.
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IBM Consulting In The Agentic AI Era
But Ali also notes that an advancing IBM Consulting—where he’s held the senior vice president role since 2024—is also to the benefit of other IBM solution providers, some of which count among the hundreds if not thousands of subcontractors Ali’s organization works with on projects.
“When we do [some projects], we bring together 50-plus companies in order to execute that,” Ali told CRN in an interview.
Clients engaging with the agentified IBM Consulting can draw not only on 150,000 consultants and IBM engineers, but also on thousands of AI agents that support customers’ preferred models and technology stacks.
These clients can hire consultants and these digital workers to collaborate on projects across the organization’s practices in technology transformation, business transformation, application management services, business process outsourcing and cybersecurity.
IBM Consulting Combines Human Expertise With 6,000 AI Agents
IBM Consulting has built what Ali calls an “uber harness” in its IBM Consulting Advantage platform that allows clients to leverage any AI vendor and technology stack for accomplishing projects. IBM Consulting today leverages about 6,000 digital workers, bringing in some of IBM’s finest engineers to reduce the number from an initial 50,000.
The solution provider has also partnered with Pearson to verify AI-agent capabilities and give agents credentials to boost client confidence in the technology, Ali said.
Ali has also seen IBM Consulting’s midmarket customer segment grow over time thanks to the division leveraging AI agents to complete more work more quickly with smaller teams.
“IBM Consulting has always been known for high quality—if you want to get a project done and done right, you go to IBM Consulting,” Ali said. “Where we’re going next is high quality at affordable costs.”
IBM Consulting is still working out the right licensing and pricing mechanism for clients interested in buying digital workers, Ali said. “That is the next frontier,” he said.
The organization is experimenting with rate-card pricing for using digital workers for a period of time.
In IBM’s most recent quarterly results—covering the three months ended June 30—the Consulting division brought in $5.3 billion in revenue, up 1 percent ignoring foreign exchange. IBM Consulting saw signings grow 6 percent year on year, a second consecutive quarter of growth.
IBM Consulting’s profit margin also grew 160 basis points during the quarter, faster than IBM Software’s 110 basis points. IBM Consulting reported a gross profit margin of 28.9 percent for the quarter and segment profit margin of 12.1 percent for the quarter.
IBM expects IBM Consulting to accelerate revenue growth to low- to mid-single digits for the year, according to the vendor.
IBM Consulting’s Ali On Its AI Services Lead
Asked about IBM Consulting maintaining its differentiation in the channel should more solution providers adopt AI and AI agents in a similar way, Ali put the organization’s institutional knowledge above those of competitors and how IBM Consulting builds all its skills—modular packages of instructions, scripts and resources for AI agents—within its IBM Consulting Advantage platform in a way that protects intellectual property.
“The bigger that pool of IP, the harder it is for another consulting company to catch up,” Ali said. “Which then makes us an incredible channel partner to the OpenAIs, the Anthropics, the [Google] Geminis, as well as the [Microsoft] Azure AI Foundry stack, the AWS Bedrock stack, etc. This is the moat we’re building.”
Ali estimated that IBM Consulting Advantage uses about 500 billion tokens a month, with a model router feature optimizing token use as another differentiator for the organization and a “Procedure Eater” workflow analysis tool to help with re-engineering processes.
About 30 percent of IBM Consulting’s largest projects are using humans plus digital labor, Ali said. “I don’t think any of our competitors have that and have that running at this massive scale,” he said.
At a time when solution providers of various sizes are exploring what pricing models make sense in the AI era, IBM Consulting has been moving more into a fixed-price model because of its confidence in teams’ abilities to complete the projects, Ali said. But the division is comfortable with outcome-based pricing for clients who prefer that model.
Today, IBM Consulting serves not just as a major solution provider for IBM, but Microsoft, Google and Amazon Web Services as well as ISVs. The division has also struck major partnership deals with some of the hottest AI upstarts in technology.
On Aug. 13, IBM revealed a strategic partnership with ChatGPT maker OpenAI that includes embedding GPT-5.6 and other OpenAI frontier models plus Codex, ChatGPT Work and other OpenAI products into IBM Consulting Advantage, IBM’s AI platform for delivering consulting services to clients.
As part of the deal, IBM also pledged to launch a dedicated OpenAI practice with thousands of consultants and engineers obtaining expert-level certifications under the OpenAI Partner Network plus leveraging forward-deployed units (FDUs) of specialized engineers and consultants trained through the OpenAI Partner Network to work with clients to accelerate AI implementation across complex business workflows and highly regulated environments.
IBM Consulting’s investment in FDUs comes as vendors across the channel—including Microsoft, Salesforce, Anthropic and OpenAI—have been investing in forward-deployed engineers, with vendors largely positioning FDEs as resources for their channel partners.
“Part of why IBM has been successful for many, many, many decades is that we don’t just sell you products,” Ali said. “We bring some of the smartest people on the planet to implement it.”
