Boston Consulting Group (BCG) and Intel announced a strategic collaboration to enable generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) using end-to-end Intel AI hardware and software, bringing fully custom and proprietary solutions to enterprise clients while keeping private data in the isolation of their trusted environments.
“Generative AI is an emerging and dynamic space, which means organizations must pick the right technology to power their GenAI journey,” says Suchi Srinivasan, a managing director and partner at BCG. “The technology must be enterprise grade from day one and allow for privacy, security, ease of use, and scalability. Our collaboration with Intel will enable enterprises to develop competitive advantages via custom GenAI solutions while thoughtfully navigating the people, process, and policy changes required to derive the maximum value from these transformative solutions.”
The ability to scale AI applications throughout the enterprise continues to challenge businesses across industries. While the new wave of GenAI capabilities has the potential to transform entire industries and create long-term competitive advantage, a barrier to enterprise adoption is the inherent risks associated with data privacy and security. At the root of this collaboration is embedded security to better safeguard data both today and in the future. According to joint research by BCG and MIT Sloan Management Review, 84% of global executives believe responsible AI (RAI) should be at the top of management agendas, yet only 25% have comprehensive RAI programs in place.
“Generative AI requires a truly democratized approach that enables more secure and scalable choice so enterprises can safely benefit from the technology,” says Sandra Rivera, executive vice president and general manager of the Data Center and AI Group, Intel. “Our collaboration with BCG allows us to help customers build generative AI applications that require technology optimized across the entire stack completely inside their chosen security perimeter.”
Enterprises also struggle with nascent tools to monitor and manage these GenAI solutions at scale and integrate them easily into existing enterprise workflows. This collaboration allows for an out-of-the-box, turnkey enterprise-grade offering that enables enterprises to meet scaling and life-cycle management requirements easily and in a more cost-effective manner.
BCG leveraged Intel’s AI supercomputer powered by the complementary advantages of Intel Xeon Scalable Processors and AI-optimized hardware accelerators (Habana Gaudi) as well as production-ready hybrid cloud-scale software to power a domain specific foundation model trained on BCG proprietary data, which delivers insights based on over 50 years of highly confidential and proprietary data. In addition, all AI training and inferencing was completed within BCG’s security perimeter.
Together with a custom natural language chatbot interface powered by Intel AI hardware and software, BCG employees were able to retrieve and summarize information via semantic search that was previously buried in long lists of multi-page documents. Compared with the existing keyword search solutions utilized by BCG employees, users reported step change improvements of a 41% increase in satisfaction, 25% growth in result relevancy, and 39% increase in improved work completion rates using the production-grade GenAI application.
The joint offering powered by this collaboration is designed to solve diverse real-world business problems such as employing automated portfolio management agents for the asset management industry, airline maintenance operations using proprietary airline data, and more-secure software development agents with custom confidential codebases.