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Helping organizations that don’t yet have the generative AI capabilities to move that space is big business now. To cash in on the rising wave of generative AI investments, Accenture and Microsoft have deepened their partnership with Seattle-based IT services company Avanade to develop new solutions for the enterprise.
In a statement about the deepened partnerships with Microsoft, Julie Sweet, chair and CEO of Accenture, said that the objective is to enable client companies to build and scale the new technology across the digital workplace. Accenture has also announced similar partnerships with AWS and Google.
The new initiative, powered by Microsoft Azure, will offer companies access to Azure OpenAI Service and Microsoft 365 Copilot to deliver AI-empowered solutions.
The Google partnership, which Accenture made public earlier this month, is focused on using Google Cloud’s AI products, such as Vertex AI, Generative AI App Builder and others, to offer organizations working in Google environments access to generative AI.
Accenture and AWS, meanwhile, aim to develop new industry-specific and cross-industry solutions to develop pre-built models and trainings and to help clients move rapidly from experimentation to scaled generative AI technologies within their organizations.
The Microsoft partnership comes on the heels of Accenture's recent announcement that it plans to invest $3 billion over the next three years in its data and AI practice to help clients across all industries develop their generative AI tools and businesses as much as possible. These partnerships span several focus areas, including:
- Finance: This is mainly for financial institutions and enables these organizations to evaluate low-risk, high-value risk cases. These solutions will be focused on content aggregation, summarization and transcription analysis built on the Azure OpenAI Service to help business analysts streamline processes, improve efficiency and gain valuable insights.
- Healthcare: Accenture plans to use Microsoft Power Platform and Azure OpenAI Service to enable patient care. These solutions are designed to transform care with medical image analysis and clinical decision making, while also automating administrative tasks.
- Life sciences: Using AWS technologies, Accenture aims to transform work in lab transformation as well as speeding up research and discovery, and even document generation for regulatory filings.
- AI blueprint: Accenture also plans to use AWS technologies to enable clients to navigate and accelerate responsible AI strategy, decisions, practices and journeys. It also aims to develop an AI that minimizes unintended bias, improves transparency and provides end-to-end governance.
- Code generation: Accenture is working with Google Cloud’s Foundational Model for code, Codey, to enhance Accenture’s existing software engineering capabilities.
Accenture's plans have quite a bit of cross-over, as AWS, Google and Microsoft are operating in many of the same parts of the digital workplace.
Dropbox Improves Workflows With AI Additions
Dropbox is also bringing generative AI onto its platform with a suite of AI-products that are designed to improve workflows and make users more productive. For the moment, the two principal tools are Dropbox AI and Dropbox Dash.
Dash aims to solve the problem of siloed content by providing AI-powered search that pulls all your tools and content together and can also connect to major platforms such as Google Workspace, Microsoft Outlook and Salesforce. Dash also offers Stacks, a smart collection for links that offers a quick way to save, organize and retrieve URLs, as well as a start page, which the company describes as a single dashboard that lets users access Dash universal search, view Stacks, get shortcuts to recent work and start meetings.
Dropbox AI is also designed to make retrieving and using content easier. It will offer users a summary of large documents, videos and meeting recordings. It will also allow users to ask questions about an organization's content and get a response within seconds.
Dropbox has a long history with machine learning, so diving into generative AI is a logical next step for the company. The goal, the company wrote in a blog post, is to create a series of personalized AI experiences that will enable users to discover, organize and manage their work across the entire Dropbox platform.
Competitor Box announced something similar in May with the private beta release of Box AI. It, too, is designed to uncover content as well as create content based on an organization’s data in Box.
IBM Expands FinOps Biz with $4.6B Apptio Buy
IBM plans to buy cloud company Apptio, an operational IT management and optimization (FinOps) software developer, from Vista Equity Partners for $4.6 billion.
According to a statement from IBM, the acquisition will build IBM's IT automation capabilities.
Founded in 2007, Apptio has a firm foothold in the rapidly-growing FinOps space and says it serves about 1800 clients. It offers a suite of analytics applications that can pull data from financial operations and billings systems to provide users with insights into the cost-effectiveness of an organization’s technology.
Organizations use FinOps platforms to assess and align their spending on technology with business goals and outcomes and streamline IT processes. The Apptio acquisition gives IBM three main platforms:
- ApptioOne: This gives insights into the cost and value of hybrid cloud spending and management and enables organizations to build repeatable planning and financial management processes.
- Apptio Cloudability: This offers insights into public cloud spending and optimization in organizations that have a multi-cloud and SaaS infrastructure. It also offers financial best practices insights to optimize cloud deployments.
- Apptio Target process: This offers investment planning capabilities to align development resources and business outcomes.
In a statement, IBM says the buy confirms its deep focus and investment in hybrid cloud and AI and will drive significant synergies across key growth areas such as automation, Red Hat, IBM's broader AI portfolio and IBM Consulting, as well as strong partnership with other leading systems integrators.
The Apptio buy is an all-cash deal and comes nearly five years after Vista Equity Partners Management bought Apptio for $1.94 billion. The transaction is expected to close in the second half of 2023.Otter.ai Pulls Generative AI Into Voice Transcriptions
Voice transcription provider Otter.ai is the latest company in the space to pull generative AI into its offering.
Otter AI Chat is an intelligent chat that acts as a meeting participant and answers questions, collaborates with other people in the meeting and creates content based on what is said in the meeting. Some of its capabilities include:
- Answers: Otter AI Chat can answer questions from meeting users about what is being discussed in the meeting, providing contextual answers that refer to what has already been said.
- Collaborate with AI: Collaborate with other meeting members to get clarification about issues that were raised during the meeting without interrupting the meeting.
- Generate Content: Using discussion points and information that is raised during the meeting, Otter AI Chat can generate content and turn that content into proposals for action. It can also create blog posts and summaries from that content.
Otter has developed its own LLM to drive the new service. Sam Liang, founder and CEO of Otter, said in an interview with VentureBeat that the company has built its LLM on mostly verbal data, meaning the model was trained with interaction where speakers are often less formal and more casual. As a result, Liang said, Otter can understand sentiment in verbal communication better than a model built on written communications.
Otter AI Chat is rolling out now. As with previous Otter.ai features, data used in Otter AI Chat will not be stored by third parties.Spike Launches Unified Communications for Teams
Finally this week Spike, has announced the launch of Spike for Teams — not to be confused with Microsoft Teams — an email and team chat service for small-to-medium businesses.
According to the company, the new release enables users communicate internally as well as externally with partners and clients even if they are not Spike users.
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It does this by pulling email, messaging, video conferencing and AI-assisted services together with collaborative document management and project management all into a unified space. It also allows users to keep their own email domain or buy a custom domain directly from Spike. A statement from the company says with it, users can jump from one kind of mode of communication to another seamlessly.
Launched in 2018 by Dvir Ben Aroya (CEO) and Erez Pilosof (CTO), Spike pulls email, chat, calendar, calls, team collaboration and other communication tools together into a single feed. To date it has raised $30.3 million, according to Crunchbase.