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LONDON, 24 September 2024 — The EY organization today announces an expansion of its work with IBM (NYSE: IBM) to leverage software from Apptio, an IBM Company. EY strategy and consulting experience, used in concert with Apptio software, can help enable organizations to focus their resources on their strategic priorities at all levels of the organization. Two new solutions, with another expected later this year, bring together the EY organization’s deep industry experience across Tax, Corporate Transactions, IT Financial Management and Cloud FinOps with Apptio’s powerful tools and insights to help customers effectively manage through the complexities of enterprise technology spend. These new solutions include:

EY Agile Planning & Portfolio Management: To help organizations realize value from their IT investments and resources, the EY organization, with support from IBM, has developed an integrated tooling, process and governance solution to better plan, budget, deliver and monitor strategic outcomes across product and portfolios. With methodologies currently in use by banking and financial services industry clients, the solution can help unlock IT capacity and redirect resources to priority technology investments in cyber, artificial intelligence (AI) and other emerging technologies.

EY Cloud FinOps and Apptio Recommendation Engine: Worldwide end-user spending on public cloud services is forecasted to grow 20.4% to total $678.8 billion in 2024 according to Gartner, creating challenges from maintaining operational efficiency, managing spend with greater transparency and reducing human-error inaccuracies. A new EY solution leveraging Apptio in cloud cost and operations management together can help clients right-size cloud investments, improve cost and operational transparency, and establish and track targets for sustainable consumption of cloud resources.

IT cost modeling for transactions: Expected to launch in the fourth quarter of 2024, this solution will combine EY market-leading services in Strategy & Transactions, and Technology Transformation with Apptio Costing technology in a platform to model and manage transactions, transition services agreements and post-transaction transformation programs for corporate separations, large-scale mergers and private equity firms. The solution is expected to help reduce manual reporting efforts and improve visibility over large-scale transaction activities.

Anja Allen, Principal, Technology Consulting, Ernst & Young LLP, says:

“The EY organization and IBM have joined forces to find differentiated solutions to help our customers effectively manage through the complexities of enterprise technology spend. The solutions developed through this collaboration are distinctive from both a service and product perspective. The EY organization aims to enhance visibility into IT and cloud expenditure and streamline transaction modeling and analysis.”

Henrik Nilsson, Global VP of Partner Sales, Apptio, an IBM Company, says:

“Apptio’s innovations deliver technology business management and cost transparency. Collaborating with the EY organization’s experience in Strategy & Transactions, FinOps and cost excellence, these solutions can help clients seeking to get the most value from their enterprise spend.”

Terms and details of definitive agreements to establish the upcoming joint solution to be finalized. Statements regarding IBM’s future direction and intent are subject to change or withdrawal without notice, and represent goals and objectives only.

About EY

EY exists to build a better working world, helping to create long-term value for clients, people and society, as well as building trust in the capital markets.

Enabled by data and technology, diverse EY teams in over 150 countries provide trust through assurance and help clients grow, transform and operate.

Working across assurance, consulting, law, strategy, tax and transactions, EY teams ask better questions to find new answers for the complex issues facing our world today.

EY refers to the global organization and may refer to one or more of the member firms of Ernst & Young Global Limited, each of which is a separate legal entity. Ernst & Young Global Limited, a UK company limited by guarantee, does not provide services to clients. Information about how EY collects and uses personal data, and a description of the rights individuals have under data protection legislation are available via ey.com/privacy. EY member firms do not practice law where prohibited by local laws. For more information about our organization, please visit ey.com.

ARMONK, N.Y., Sept. 17, 2024 /PRNewswire/ — IBM (NYSE: IBM) and United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) today launched new interactive models on energy within UNDP’s global GeoHub platform. These innovative solutions use technologies such as the IBM watsonx AI and data platform to enable users — from policymakers at the national and community level to the general public — to analyze complex energy issues through advanced artificial intelligence (AI) technology and access a wide range of resources, helping support data-driven decision-making toward a just energy transition.

“Bringing together UNDP’s knowledge and global leadership in sustainable development and IBM’s breakthrough innovations in AI and hybrid cloud, we are proud to unveil solutions that demonstrate the power of technology to make a lasting, positive impact on our environment and in our communities,” said Justina Nixon-Saintil, IBM Vice President and Chief Impact Officer. “By making innovative models freely accessible to the public, we aim to empower leaders, organizations and community members alike with the insights to make impactful energy decisions around the world.”

As part of UNDP’s Data Futures Exchange (DFx), GeoHub is a centralized ecosystem of geospatial data and services. It provides a platform to easily upload, visualize and analyze datasets, combining time-oriented and geographic data with satellite imagery. GeoHub supports a granular, localized, and evidence-based approach to development challenges and integrated policy making— from determining subnational distribution of electricity access, to assessing levels of vulnerability to the effects of climate change for communities over time.

“UNDP’s innovative collaboration with IBM helps countries leverage development data and technology innovation to improve lives and protect the planet. The solutions we’ve co-created provide a credible evidence base to help countries make meaningful and practical progress towards a just energy transition. Net-zero investment and people-centered development strategies are fundamental to accelerate the SDGs,” said Laurel Patterson, Head of the UNDP SDG Integration Team, UNDP Bureau for Policy and Programme Support.

UNDP and IBM worked together over two years through the IBM Sustainability Accelerator program. This project started with a collaborative engagement through the IBM Garage, and resulted in the enhancement of UNDP’s GeoHub with two innovative models: the AI model Electricity Access Forecasting and the statistical geospatial model Clean Energy Equity Index.

• The Electricity Access Forecasting AI model uses the IBM watsonx AI and data platform, IBM Cloud, and an open-source machine learning library to provide future forecasts at scale of electricity access through 2030 by evaluating a set of factors including population, infrastructure, urbanization, elevation, and satellite data in addition to land use data provided by IBM Environmental Intelligence. By modeling these factors to make a future forecast, the Electricity Access Forecasting model provides a distinct advantage compared to more commonly available, current-day estimates of electricity access. The model will contain data from 102 countries across the Global South, including in Africa, Asia Pacific, Latin America and the Middle East.
• The Clean Energy Equity Index, developed by IBM and UNDP together with Stony Brook University, is a first-of-its-kind statistical geospatial model combining geospatial analytics with environmental, economic and social factors – such as education, greenhouse gas emissions, and relative wealth — to generate a Clean Energy Equity score of 0-1. This score reflects both opportunities for clean energy development as well as urgency, through the lens of equity and a just transition. In this dashboard, GeoHub users can also individually view and customize each environmental, economic, or social factor analyzed in the model, to evaluate which factors have the greatest impact on equitable access to clean energy, empowering better decision making. The model will provide data from 53 African countries.

Historically, advanced models like these have not always been freely accessible and applicable to all users. Together, IBM and UNDP set out to co-create solutions that would strengthen free public access to complex clean energy information and advanced technology, while simultaneously providing essential energy resources for policymakers, governments, journalists and decision makers.

About the IBM Sustainability Accelerator
Launched in 2022, the IBM Sustainability Accelerator is a social impact program that addresses environmental threats impacting vulnerable communities around the world. Each year, the program selects about five projects to scale technology and AI solutions within a new sustainability topic area. To date, the IBM Sustainability Accelerator has supported 15 global projects across three active cohorts, focused on sustainable agriculture, clean energy and water management. For more information: https://www.ibm.com/impact/initiatives/ibm-sustainability-accelerator/

About United Nations Development Programme
UNDP works in about 170 countries and territories, helping to eradicate poverty, reduce inequalities and exclusion, and build resilience so countries can sustain progress. As the UN’s development agency, UNDP plays a critical role in helping countries achieve the Sustainable Development Goals.

ARMONK, N.Y., Sept. 10, 2024 /PRNewswire/ — Today, IBM (NYSE: IBM) announced it has expanded its consulting services and solutions to help clients derive greater value from Oracle’s cloud applications and technology and extend generative AI with an open, orchestrated approach.

The average cost of compute spend is expected to increase by 89% between 2023 and 2025, according to new research from the IBM Institute for Business Value. In addition, 42% of executives report concern that inadequate expertise could preclude progress with generative AI.

To help clients address these growing challenges, IBM Consulting is launching an expanded network of consultants to support Oracle clients, including thousands of consultants worldwide who are certified across core Oracle technologies – such as OCI Generative AI, OCI AI Services, and OCI Data Science – as well as deeply skilled in the IBM watsonx AI and data platform.

The consultants will be committed to helping clients extend high value generative AI use cases coupled with traditional AI and automation solutions, aimed to maximize their return-on-investment and optimize compute and implementation costs. That includes helping clients choose and deploy the right fit-for-purpose AI models for their unique requirements, including enterprise-grade models such as IBM Granite, open source or other third-party models. With their deep skills in IBM watsonx and technologies from IBM’s open ecosystem of business partners, IBM consultants can help guide clients’ critical decisions around technology architecture, generative AI and software licensing, data and analytics architecture, security risks and more to enhance automation of their workflows and help establish a stronger and more cost-efficient technology foundation for developing and deploying generative AI applications.

In addition, IBM just announced its intent to acquire Accelalpha, a global Oracle services provider with deep expertise helping clients digitize core business operations and accelerate adoption of Oracle Cloud Applications, further expanding IBM’s Oracle consulting expertise.

“Our clients are eager to extend generative AI initiatives but they’re also concerned about rising compute costs, lack of in-house AI skills, AI assistant sprawl, and management oversight,” said Corinne Koppel, Global Oracle Practice Leader, IBM Consulting. “We’re proud to bring clients even more skills and solutions to help them optimize their investments with Oracle’s full stack generative AI technology leveraging an open architecture.”

Helping Extend Oracle Fusion Applications

IBM Consulting is already helping Oracle clients apply generative AI, traditional AI and automation in domain and industry-specific solutions to complement Oracle Fusion Applications’ embedded AI offerings. For example, IBM Consulting has helped Oracle Fusion Applications customers expand use cases in human resources, procurement and sourcing, finance and the public sector.

Accelerating clients’ time to value with IBM Consulting Advantage

IBM consultants supporting Oracle clients bring the power of the AI-powered engagement platform, IBM Consulting Advantage, to help accelerate clients’ time-to-value and improve consistency, repeatability, quality and speed-of-delivery.

For example, IBM Consulting has expanded its OCI migration and modernization capability with generative AI powered assets in IBM Consulting Advantage to help clients fast-track moving their applications and data to OCI. IBM consultants use an asset-first migration approach to support clients from discovery and design to build, migrate, test and deployment.

IBM and Oracle have a 38-year partnership spanning both technology and services, and continue to find new opportunities for collaboration like Red Hat and Oracle’s recent announcement of the availability of Red Hat OpenShift hybrid cloud application platform on OCI. Oracle is also part of the AI Alliance, which IBM co-founded in 2023. The AI Alliance brings together leading organizations across industry, startups, academia, research and government to support open innovation and open science in AI.

With deep industry expertise spanning strategy, experience design, technology, and operations, IBM Consulting is the catalyst for business transformation and the trusted partner to over 3,000 of the world’s most innovative and valuable companies. Our 160,000 consultants embrace an open way of working, bringing a diverse set of voices, experiences and technologies like hybrid cloud and AI together to accelerate business transformation. Supported by IBM Garage, our proven collaborative engagement model, we bring speed and scale to innovation with an enduring ecosystem of technology leaders to deliver solutions for some of the world’s most complex challenges.

Statements regarding IBM’s future direction and intent are subject to change or withdrawal without notice, and represent goals and objectives only.

ARMONK, N.Y., Sept. 10, 2024 /PRNewswire/ — IBM (NYSE: IBM) and ESPN are unveiling enhancements to the ESPN Fantasy app – powered by generative AI technologies from IBM’s AI and data platform, watsonx – designed to deliver a more customized and engaging digital experience for more than 12 million fantasy football users. The announcement comes as new research commissioned by IBM and conducted by Morning Consult confirms fantasy football users are increasingly embracing AI to improve their rosters and overall fantasy football experiences.

Now available, the “Top Contributing Factors” within the Waiver Grade and Trade Grade features offers more detailed reasoning around a player’s assigned grades. The information appears as bulleted statements and is generated by IBM’s Granite large language model. The grades themselves are personalized to each team and produced by AI models built with IBM watsonx, taking into account large volumes of complex data including player performance, articles written by football experts, and the specific needs of each fantasy owner’s roster. Examples of the benefits to fantasy football participants include:

• Personalized player grades based on each team’s needs
• Transparent explanations of AI-generated player grades
• Predictions of each player’s potential upside and downside

The new and updated features bolster a suite of IBM watsonx-powered tools, including Trade Analyzer with IBM watsonx and Player Insights with IBM watsonx, all of which transform large volumes of football data into insights that can help ESPN Fantasy Football users make more informed decisions about their lineups.

A new survey¹ from IBM and Morning Consult of 500 fantasy football users in the United States confirms that surveyed fantasy football users are embracing AI-powered solutions to help enhance their lineups and overall league performances. Key highlights from respondents include:

• Nearly 90% of users regularly engage with at least one AI or AI-related tool.
• 82% confirmed they leverage trade and waiver suggestions to improve their fantasy lineups.
• Of users not yet engaged with the technology, 92% surveyed indicated they would find AI helpful in their fantasy football efforts.

“Millions of people participate in fantasy football on the ESPN Fantasy platform each year, and they are constantly looking for the best information available to complete in and win their leagues. This year’s enhancements in the ESPN Fantasy platform put watsonx-powered insights directly in their hands, giving them access to  personalized, data-driven insights that help deliver on these expectations,” said Noah Syken VP, Sports and Entertainment Partnerships. “These same generative AI technologies on watsonx including IBM Granite are also at work for businesses across all sectors, turning complex information into actionable insights that modernize their workflows.”

Entering its eighth consecutive year, the collaboration between IBM and ESPN Fantasy Football continues to tap into the latest technologies from watsonx to transform football data into compelling and helpful information for fantasy team owners. This includes IBM’s Granite collection of large language models, as well as IBM watsonx Code Assistant which provides AI-generated coding recommendations and developer insights.

For more information on watsonx, visit: https://www.ibm.com/watsonx.

To play ESPN Fantasy Football, sign up at ESPN.com/FFL or download the ESPN Fantasy App from the App Store and Android stores.

¹ Based on an online survey conducted in August 2024, among a sample of 500 Fantasy Football Users Ages 18 to 45 in the US.

ARMONK, N.Y., Sept. 9, 2024 /PRNewswire/ — IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced its intent to acquire Accelalpha, a global Oracle services provider with deep expertise helping clients digitize core business operations and accelerate adoption of Oracle Cloud Applications. This acquisition expands IBM’s Oracle consulting expertise in supply chain and logistics, finance, enterprise performance management (EPM) and customer transformation.

As Oracle applications have matured in depth of functionality, customers have prioritized working with more strategic services partners to enable transformation¹. Upon close, Accelalpha will join IBM Consulting, bringing over a large global team of skilled consultants to help clients modernize with Oracle Cloud Applications.

“Many enterprises depend on Oracle to run the workflows that are at the heart of their enterprise,” said Kelly Chambliss, Senior Vice President, IBM Consulting, Americas. “With our acquisition of Accelalpha, IBM will be even better positioned to help our clients deploy and manage Oracle solutions, including generative AI and cloud technology, for competitive advantage.”

Headquartered in Bellevue, Washington, Accelalpha is a leading global provider of Oracle Cloud Applications consulting across advisory, implementation and managed services. Its highly skilled team serves clients across North America, Europe, Asia, the Middle East and South America, with a focus on distribution, industrial and financial services sectors.

Accelalpha’s consultants bring expertise across the Oracle Cloud Applications Suite including Oracle Supply Chain Management (SCM) and Logistics, Oracle Cloud Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Oracle Cloud Enterprise Performance Management (EPM), Oracle Cloud Customer Transformation (CX), and Oracle Configure, Price, Quote (CPQ). As an Oracle Cloud Excellence Certified Implementer, Accelalpha boasts the largest Oracle logistics practice globally and was the first Oracle partner to implement Oracle Fusion Financials. Since its founding in 2009, Accelalpha has grown organically and through acquisition. Notable past acquisitions include Prolog Partners, Key Performance Ideas, LogistiChange and Frontera Consulting.

“IBM’s client and employee-centric culture and long-established scale and reach in more than 175 countries is a great fit for the next stage of our growth,” said Nat Ganesh, CEO, Accelalpha. “We’re thrilled to bring our expertise in Oracle Cloud solutions and targeted domain and industry knowledge to bear together with IBM’s strength in generative AI and hybrid cloud. With Accelalpha’s history of being a pioneer in Oracle Cloud and IBM’s deep-rooted dedication to innovation that matters, we can further accelerate value creation for our clients.”

IBM and Oracle’s partnership to serve clients spans almost 40 years. IBM was named a Leader in the 2023 IDC MarketScape for Oracle Implementation Services Ecosystem Worldwide².

Accelalpha is recognized by Fortune as a best medium workplace and certified as a Great Place to Work. For more information on Accelalpha, please visit www.accelalpha.com.

The acquisition is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2024, subject to customary closing conditions and regulatory approvals. Financial details of the transaction were not disclosed.

WASHINGTON, Feb. 28, 2024 /PRNewswire/ — Deepfakes – realistic AI-generated audio, video, or images that can recreate a person’s likeness – are one of the most pressing challenges posed by generative AI, given the potential for bad actors to use it to undermine democracy, exploit artists and performers, and harass and harm everyday people.

What this moment requires is both technical and legal solutions. That’s why IBM (NYSE: IBM) signed the Tech Accord to Combat Deceptive Use of AI in 2024 Elections (Munich Tech Accord), pledging to help mitigate the risks of AI being used to deceive the public and undermine elections. It’s also why IBM has long advocated for regulations that precisely target harmful applications of technology.

We outline below three key priorities for policymakers to mitigate the harms of deepfakes:

• Protecting elections,
• Protecting creators, and
• Protecting people’s privacy

Protecting elections

Democracy depends on a population’s ability to participate in free and fair elections. Unfortunately, bad actors can use deepfakes to impersonate public officials and candidates to deceive voters in a variety of ways that would undermine this key principle. For example, deepfakes could mislead voters about where, when, and how they can vote, or falsely portray a candidate making controversial statements or participating in scandalous activity.

Policymakers should prohibit the distribution of materially deceptive deepfake content related to elections. For example, the Protect Elections from Deceptive AI Act, introduced by Senators Klobuchar, Hawley, Coons, and Collins, would curtail the use of AI to generate deceptive content falsely depicting federal candidates in political advertisements with the intent of influencing an election. Other policy approaches could enable candidates targeted by materially deceptive AI-generated content used in political advertisements or fundraising campaigns to seek damages or remove deceptive content, while preserving protections for free speech.

In the EU, IBM has been supportive of the Digital Services Act, which imposes on large internet platforms certain obligations regarding the moderation of online content. Recent guidelines published by the European Commission have also proposed additional requirements for consumer-facing platforms to mitigate against “systemic risks for electoral processes.”

Protecting creators

Musicians, artists, actors, and creators of all kinds use their talents and likeness to help shape culture, inspire, entertain, and make a living. Deepfakes can enable bad actors to exploit creators’ likenesses to push deceptive advertising, scam and mislead consumers, improperly reduce a creator’s ability to profit from their talents, and more.

Policymakers should hold people accountable for producing unauthorized deepfakes of creator performances and hold platforms accountable if they knowingly disseminate such unauthorized content. Some jurisdictions already have what are known as “likeness laws” that prohibit the unauthorized use of a person’s likeness for commercial exploitation, but these can be inconsistent, and few explicitly cover digital replicas or the rights to use a person’s likeness after they die. Given these jurisdictional inconsistencies, IBM supports the NO FAKES Act in the U.S., which would create federal protections for individuals whose voices and/or likenesses are generated by third parties without their consent.

Protecting people’s privacy

Everyday people are already being harmed by deepfakes in profoundly concerning ways, particularly by bad actors using their likeness to create nonconsensual pornography. This abuse primarily targets women, victims have included minors, and could potentially enable further abuse and extortion by bad actors. Nonconsensual sharing of intimate imagery, also known as revenge porn, is expanding with the use of deepfakes but ultimately is not a new problem. But few existing laws adequately hold bad actors accountable for sharing or threatening to share this material, or necessarily cover AI-generated content.

Policymakers should create strong criminal and civil liability for people that distribute nonconsensual intimate audiovisual content, including AI-generated content, as well as for people that threaten to do so. Penalties should be particularly severe when the victim is a minor. Legislators can act on this recommendation now by supporting and passing the bipartisan Preventing Deepfakes of Intimate Images Act in the U.S. This bill would create liability for individuals who disclose, or threaten to disclose, a nonconsensual intimate digital depiction of someone, including AI-generated content, and allow affected parties to pursue damages. This legislation would create a much-needed federal baseline of accountability that is inconsistently addressed in various revenge porn laws at the state level, providing greater protections for victims and individuals across the United States.

The EU AI Act – which IBM has long-supported – already addresses many of these types of issues, covering deepfakes more generally and imposing transparency requirements that clarify when particular content is not authentic. As policymakers look towards the Act’s implementation in the coming months, particular attention should be paid to ensuring individuals are protected from non-consensual intimate audiovisual content.

Conclusion

Solving the problems posed by deepfakes will require thoughtful, whole-of-society approaches leveraging both changes in law and technology. Technology companies have a responsibility to pursue technical and governance solutions that address AI-generated content, such as those articulated in the Munich Accord, the White House Voluntary AI Commitments, and Canada’s Voluntary Code of Conduct on the Responsible Development and Management of Advanced Generative AI Systems.

IBM encourages policymakers to seize this opportunity to swiftly target three of the most significant harmful applications of deepfakes to ensure that AI remains a positive force for the global economy and society.