A flurry of technology companies among AWS, IBM, SAP, Accenture, Snowflake and Lenovo have recently unveiled collaborations with NVIDIA at the company’s global conference GTC AI in San Jose, California.
While once seen as jumping on the bandwagon of the latest tech buzzword, the boom of the AI enthusiasm that we’ve witnessed over the past 16 months doesn’t show any signs of slowing down.
Instead, as evidenced by the growing investment and R&D in the technology, more enterprise tech companies are heavily betting on the gains AI promises, with some of these present in partnerships with NVIDIA, as the company is known for holding roughly 80 percent of the global market share in GPU semiconductor chips.
IBM pursues enterprise-ready AI adoption at scale
As a recent IBM Institute for Business Value study found that fewer than half of executives say their companies have identified specific innovation use cases for generative AI, IBM emphasized that “to deploy explainable AI at scale, organizations must remember AI is not a one-size-fits-all proposition”. Instead, it “requires finetuned, trained models with quality data to maximize the technology”.
Reinforcing this, IBM Consulting has decided to join forces with NVIDIA to help clients solve complex business challenges and accelerate their transformation journeys with AI in an open ecosystem.
So the duo is combining IBM Consulting’s deep industry and technology expertise and NVIDIA’s technologies like NVIDIA AI Enterprise software, the new NVIDIA NIM microservices and NVIDIA Omniverse. Through these efforts, they aim to help streamline AI workflows, enhance use case-to-model optimization and develop business- and industry-specific AI use cases to help organizations accelerate the adoption of GenAI, including those in the public, banking and industrial sectors.
Another factor that motivated the partnerships is that clients would be able to run their applications in a variety of hybrid, multi-cloud architectures to deliver value from the edge to the cloud, based on a client’s technology stack and business needs. One of its future anticipated projects includes optimizing IBM Consulting Advantage, the company’s AI services platform, for NVIDIA’s technology stack.
AWS to advance GenAI innovation
AWS also announced the extension of its collaboration with NVIDIA to advance Generative AI innovation with the new NVIDIA Blackwell GPU platform – unveiled at the recent conference, which is coming to AWS.
Expanding the companies’ longstanding strategic collaboration, AWS will offer the NVIDIA GB200 Grace Blackwell Superchip and B100 Tensor Core GPUs, to deliver secure and advanced infrastructure, software and services to help users unlock new GenAI capabilities.
Together, the duo provides infrastructure and tools to enable customers to build and run real-time inference on multi-trillion parameter large language models faster and at a lower cost than previous-generation NVIDIA GPUs on Amazon EC2.
“AI is driving breakthroughs at an unprecedented pace, leading to new applications, business models and innovation across industries,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. “Our collaboration with AWS is accelerating new generative AI capabilities and providing customers with unprecedented computing power to push the boundaries of what’s possible.”
Accenture to showcase AI-powered immersive experiences for Defender
Accenture also announced that it is pioneering the use of advanced GenAI and real-time graphics capabilities with Defender to elevate the modern client experience, using NVIDIA’s Omniverse platform and NVIDIA Edify-powered models.
The rapid evolution of AI and XR devices is ushering in a new generation of immersive experiences, where 3D data is consumed via both 2D and 3D interfaces. For this reason, Accenture Song decided to lean on NVIDIA Omniverse and AI microservices across its industry portfolio, including automotive.
Accenture Song currently uses NVIDIA’s Omniverse platform to generate the highest fidelity Defender vehicles from computer-aided design data for marketing purposes. Coupled with the NVIDIA Edify-powered generative AI microservice, Accenture Song is enabling the creation of cinematic 3D environments via conversational prompts to achieve fully immersive 3D scenes, harmonizing realistic, generated environments with a digital twin of the Defender vehicle.
David Droga, CEO of Accenture Song, said: “Defender embodies the spirit of adventure and that is also true to our mission of reinventing creativity and design through pioneering technologies.
“This ambition and energy are shared between Accenture Song and Defender and we’re incredibly excited about the future of experiences we’re pioneering in collaboration with NVIDIA.”
This AI strategy is part of Accenture’s broader $3bn investment in data and AI to help clients accelerate transformation, including its investment in Writer.com and the launch of a global network of GenAI studios.
SAP accelerates GenAI Adoption to power global industries
SAP and NVIDIA also announced their partnership expansion to accelerate enterprise customers’ ability to harness the transformative power of data and GenAI across SAP’s portfolio of cloud solutions and applications.
The duo will collaborate to build and deliver SAP Business AI, including business-specific generative AI capabilities inside the Joule copilot from SAP and across SAP’s portfolio of cloud solutions and applications – underpinned by the SAP generative AI hub. The generative AI hub helps facilitate responsible business AI and provides access to a broad range of large language models.
As part of SAP’s ongoing initiative to build generative AI directly into the applications that power businesses, the partnership aims to help customers adopt GenAI capabilities at scale across their organizations.
SAP will use NVIDIA’s generative AI foundry service to fine-tune LLMs for domain-specific scenarios and deploy applications with new NVIDIA NIM microservices. SAP and NVIDIA plan to make the new integrated capabilities available by the end of 2024.
“SAP is sitting on a gold mine of enterprise data that can be transformed into custom generative AI agents to help customers automate their businesses,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. “Together, NVIDIA and SAP will bring custom generative AI to the thousands of enterprises around the world that rely on SAP to power their operations.”
Looking into the future, SAP also plans to build additional generative AI capabilities in SAP BTP using NVIDIA’s generative AI foundry service, featuring NVIDIA DGX Cloud AI supercomputing, NVIDIA AI Enterprise software and NVIDIA AI Foundation models. Designed to be the basis of SAP’s development and deployment of GenAI for customers, these new capabilities are expected to be accessible in the generative AI hub in SAP AI Core and SAP Datasphere.
Lenovo unveils hybrid AI solutions in a tailored approach
As more industries are seeking to use AI for analyzing vast bodies of data, power efficiency remains crucial to making the rollout of these compute-intensive workloads accessible for all businesses.
In response to this demand, also at NVIDIA GTC, Lenovo announced its new hybrid AI solutions built in collaboration with NVIDIA, to deliver tailored generative AI applications to enterprise and cloud, in various industries.
In a continuation of the engineering collaboration announced with NVIDIA during Lenovo’s Tech World conference, these latest innovations are targeted to help enterprises and cloud providers with the critical accelerated computing capabilities needed to succeed in the AI era. These efforts promise to take AI from concept to reality and empower businesses to efficiently develop and deploy new AI use cases that drive innovation, digitalization and growth.
Lenovo hybrid solutions, which has been optimized to run NVIDIA AI Enterprise software for secure, supported and stable production AI, will also provide developers access to the just-announced NVIDIA microservices, including NVIDIA NIM and NeMo Retriever.
“Lenovo’s work with NVIDIA is pushing the boundaries of augmented intelligence for businesses everywhere, taking AI compute to where their data lives with a comprehensive portfolio of cutting-edge, hybrid AI solutions that will power generative AI from virtually anywhere while supporting sustainability efforts,” said Kirk Skaugen, president of Lenovo Infrastructure Solutions Group.
