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IBM Collaborates With Salesforce to Accelerate AI Adoption

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International Business Machines Corporation (IBM - Free Report) has collaborated with Salesforce, Inc. (CRM - Free Report) to facilitate higher adoption of AI by business enterprises. The partnership is likely to drive increased productivity and help accelerate business transformation with generative AI.

Generative AI is a type of AI technology that can produce a wide array of content, including text, imagery, audio and synthetic data. It is driven by a large language model, which uses a lot of data to understand and generate conversations. Salesforce forayed into the generative AI space with the launch of Einstein GPT in March 2023. The company is continuously expanding its generative AI offerings for incremental revenues.

In June 2023, it expanded its generative AI tools with the launch of the AI Cloud service. With this, Salesforce claims to offer a one-stop AI-powered platform for enterprises looking to enhance productivity. Along with the launch of AI Cloud, the company raised its venture capital fund for generative AI to $500 million from $250 million announced in March 2023. With this enhanced fund, Salesforce Ventures, the company’s global investment arm, will support the generative AI ecosystem and promote the development of responsible and trusted technology.

In order to drive increased adoption of its generative AI tools, IBM has partnered with Salesforce. Leveraging indigenous IBM technologies such as IBM Garage methodology, the company aims to help business enterprises undergo rapid digital transformation by embracing generative AI. The IBM Garage approach enables firms to manage strategic initiatives, quantify business outcomes and advance organizational and cultural change through bold IT transformations, re-imagined customer and employee experiences and automated business processes.

IBM is further likely to help the clients complement Salesforce's generative AI tools with IBM Watsonx, a cutting-edge enterprise-focused AI and data platform designed to harness the power of advanced AI capabilities for businesses. IBM Watsonx offers a unified platform that enables enterprises to train, fine-tune and deploy AI solutions according to their requirements. Tailoring the AI per the business-specific needs significantly multiplies output. Watsonx exhibits greater flexibility and facilitates the seamless adaptation of traditional machine learning models and generative AI into new scenarios.

Moreover, IBM will work closely with a diverse AI partner ecosystem through an open and collaborative approach to plan, build, implement and operate generative AI solutions. This open ecosystem approach is likely to help clients define the right models and architecture to deliver their desired outcomes. This, in turn, is expected to strengthen its market position in the rapidly evolving landscape of technology optimization and management.  

IBM expects its growth to be driven primarily by analytics, cloud computing and security services. A better business mix, improving operating leverage through productivity gains and increased investments in growth opportunities will likely drive its profitability. IBM is poised to benefit from strong demand for hybrid cloud and AI, driving growth in Software and Consulting.

The stock has gained 14.9% over the past year compared with the industry’s rise of 10.3%. We are impressed with the inherent growth potential of this Zacks Rank #3 (Hold) stock.

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AudioCodes Ltd. (AUDC - Free Report) is a Zacks Rank #2 stock. It has a long-term earnings growth expectation of 4.3% and delivered an earnings surprise of 2.2%, on average, in the trailing four quarters.

Headquartered in Lod, Israel, AudioCodes offers advanced communications software, products, and productivity solutions for the digital workplace. It provides a broad range of innovative products, solutions and services that are used by large multi-national enterprises and leading tier-1 operators around the world.

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