- Lumen Technologies (LUMN) and IBM (IBM, Financial) announce a collaboration to develop enterprise-grade AI solutions at the edge.
- The partnership aims to offer real-time AI processing with latency of less than 5 milliseconds.
- IBM Consulting will act as the preferred systems integrator to support scalable AI deployments.
Lumen Technologies (LUMN) and IBM (IBM) have announced a strategic collaboration to create enterprise-grade AI solutions designed for edge computing environments. By integrating IBM's watsonx AI portfolio with Lumen's Edge Cloud infrastructure, the partnership seeks to enable real-time AI inferencing, bringing AI processing closer to data generation points and offering latency of less than 5 milliseconds.
The collaboration aims to address key challenges such as cost, latency, and security barriers that enterprises face while scaling AI adoption. Industries that stand to benefit from these innovations include financial services, healthcare, manufacturing, and retail. These sectors will be able to process massive volumes of data in near real-time, facilitating smarter decision-making and enhanced customer experiences.
In a practical application, the companies are assisting a major retailer in transforming customer service. By integrating AI-driven digital assistants and visual inspection tools with customer data and inventory systems, they aim to create seamless and personalized shopping experiences.
IBM Consulting will play a crucial role in this initiative by serving as the preferred systems integrator. This will involve helping clients to scale deployments while reducing costs and fully leveraging AI capabilities through IBM's extensive technology, domain, and industry expertise.
According to Ryan Asdourian, Chief Marketing and Strategy Officer at Lumen, the collaboration is about turning vision into action, making it easier for businesses to tap into real-time intelligence wherever their data resides, accelerating innovation, and delivering smarter, faster customer experiences. Such strategic moves underscore a strong commitment to advancing enterprise-grade AI and hybrid cloud capabilities, meeting clients where they are and driving new use cases in edge computing.
This collaboration not only promises to redefine what is possible with AI at the edge but also emphasizes an important shift in strategy by focusing on bringing AI to the data rather than the other way around. This approach is beneficial for maintaining data control, compliance, and real-time performance, which are critical in regulated industries like financial services and healthcare.
