IBM unveils Future of Consulting Where Humans Monitor AI Agents’ Work

IBM Consulting transitions to a live operational model where human experts oversee and verify real-time AI agent workflows.

IBM Consulting Senior Vice President Mohamad Ali recently unveiled the company’s ongoing plans for ensuring collaboration between its employees and AI agents. He revealed that the company is preparing for the future by moving beyond merely theorizing about AI’s impact on operations to running a live model where AI agents work with clients in real-time and are monitored by humans. In his opinion, this shift essentially sets the benchmark for a new template of consulting. Ali also highlighted the corporate strategy’s most important question at present, involving preparations for a world where humans work alongside AI agents.

Furthermore, Ali backed the company’s latest move by noting its consistency in vision, with IBM Consulting’s internal platform “Consulting Advantage” being launched back in 2024 to assist its consultants’ efforts in building and managing teams of AI agents. He emphasized that the company does not simply play an advisory role of suggesting suitable markets to its clients. Instead, its comprehensive solution involves aiding its clients in identifying their corporate strategy for implementation. According to him, “Every hour I can see what’s going on with all the humans associated with digital workers, and vice versa. This is the new consulting model going forward.” In January, they released a client-facing version called “Enterprise Advantage” that allowed organizations to build and manage AI agents at scale.

Moreover, Ali demonstrated the model working in practice, with AI handling operations of a typical security operations centre at IBM. A human investigator usually requires 45 minutes to review logs after an alert to understand what went wrong and suggest corrective measures, but AI can achieve results much more quickly. First, an investigation plan is generated by digital workers who execute it in real time. Second, they produce a report after running a risk analysis that takes a couple of minutes at best. Third, humans verify these findings, including the highlighted key actions. CIO Bulletin views this development as a foresighted move to ensure equitable AI and human contributions in IBM’s future operations that others can take a leaf out of, with the current $12.5 billion valuation of the broader IBM business only expected to grow.