IBM Consulting

This was something that impeded, uh, eccentric federal services.

We, we also saw that impacting, negatively impacting, uh, IBM Consulting's federal business.

Vendors are being more selectively tasked to establish platforms, data foundations, and governance frameworks, and use cases for AI integration into agency workflows.

Vendors are, are leveraging their authorized commercial offerings, uh, to, to gain more traction in the civilian space.

Today, we're delighted to be joined by Andy Baldwin, Senior Vice President of Offerings and Growth and Chair of the IBM UK board.

Andy leads IBM Consulting's asset-based consulting transformation, helping drive the company's AI-enabled offerings and scale its go-to-market engine.

With more than twenty-five years of consulting experience across banking, insurance, wealth management, tech-technology, he's advised clients on transformation, innovation, and regulatory change throughout the UK and Europe.

Before joining IBM, Andy spent more than two decades with EY, most recently serving as Global Managing Partner, where he led operations and strategy across hundred and fifty-four countries.

Yeah, well, I'd say it's one of the big differences, having spent a large part of my career in a consulting firm, which I would say is one of the best advisory consulting firms in the world.

Um, having gone to an organization which owns a very large consulting business.

I think IBM Consulting is probably top four, top five in the world, but it's a software company.

IBM is a software company, software hardware company.

And you're about to hear the latest of these conversations recorded live in London.

Journalist Kamal Ahmed was joined by former Chancellor of the Exchequer Jeremy Hunt, Dr. Angela Spatharou, senior partner and EMEA leader for healthcare and life sciences at IBM Consulting, and Lawrence Tallon, chief executive of the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency.

Together, they explore what it takes to adapt when technological change becomes constant and how we can embrace innovation while keeping people at the center of it.

Let's join Kamal, Jeremy, Angela, and Lawrence now with more.

And I-I'll give you an example.

IBM Consulting was one of our pilot programs for AIM.

We just conducted their pilot this last February.

Two-week process for the pilot appraisal.

We walked in six functional groups and projects across the globe, um, and four support functions from within IBM Consulting, so about 10 different teams.

We started out, those 10 teams had 26 agents working in there doing everything from like software, like they were building PMO environments from the contract saying, "This is what you're gonna need.

If you-- It's got an earned value, so you're gonna need this module and you're gonna need this." So the AI agent was setting this stuff up for them and setting up their whole environment to deliver this product or service to the, to the customer.

I started my career at IBM as an engineer, so I'm on the technical side of insurance, always have been.

I was in IBM Global Services and Consulting for many years, left IBM to go to my client, which is Ohio Casualty, as their technology leader.

Spent a wonderful seven years there at Ohio Casualty, Liberty Mutual bought Ohio Casualty, probably you know, and so I had the opportunity to go to Accord.

So I'm actually coming back to Accord.

So again, you're gonna have to do some research, but here's how this one works.

So there are companies out there called custom development shops, system integrators, dev shops, consultants if you want it, technical consultants, and all they do is write code to solve business problems for existing companies, okay? So all these companies have logistic issues, reporting needs, whatever it is, and they hire development companies, and at the enterprise level you got like IBM Global Services, Tata Consulting, Infosys, you have all these, I mean these are billion dollar companies, And all they do is, for the most part, not all they do, but they provide development resources for companies to build custom solutions.

So if you can talk to somebody in the IT department of a bigger company and ask them the question, hey, have you guys ever hired a contractor or a development firm, et cetera, to build you a custom solution? And they say yes, say, hey, I'm just curious, what problem did it solve for you? Here's what you're looking for, because I'm going to tell you, all of these, you know, development shops would love to build a SaaS product to become the next Salesforce or Box.net or Slack, but it's literally two different business models.

It's really tough to have one foot in custom development and another foot in pure software, okay? But where the opportunity is for you is to find another company that's already building the code base, they have the code base, they have maybe five or six reference customers, because they've been reusing the code base, and you can extract it from that company and actually bring it to market.

And my hunch is that because of that meltdown, All the enterprises in the world will essentially now need to put a sort of layer in between themselves and Anthropic directly.

That layer historically has been IBM Consulting, Accenture, Gartner.

If they do that sort of work, I'm not 100% positive.

But that is the class of companies that kind of historically does that and is a bit of an integration sort of company that does it for the enterprises and essentially could be a guinea pig if something goes wrong.

Um, I interviewed with a consultancy firm that were looking for sort of IT professionals with oil and gas experience.

This consultancy, part of IBM Global Services, was standing up a oil and gas or IS oil SAP practice.

I asked my friend at the time, worked for I think it was Arthur Andersen then.

I said, "Steve, what's SAP?"

there.

IBM had, where I worked with IBM Consulting, they had a business transformation practice.

I said, all right, well, transformation is the best word there.

So it really was in early 1994 that I discussed it.