IBM is opening another front door for OpenAI inside big companies. On Thursday it announced a partnership to take OpenAI models and tools to IBM’s enterprise customers through IBM Consulting. Deal terms were not disclosed. The timing is the tell: it arrives less than a year after IBM struck a similar alliance with Anthropic, so the consulting giant is clearly refusing to pick only one model family.
IBM will stand up a dedicated OpenAI practice, jointly market offerings, and build industry packages for financial services, government, telecom, and retail. Mike Healy, managing partner at IBM Consulting, said the firm will train and certify tens of thousands of consultants over the coming months — mostly by retraining people already on staff. The curriculum covers Codex, the API, cybersecurity, and consultative credentials. IBM will also create “Forward Deployed Experts” trained through OpenAI’s Partner Network.
On the product side, IBM plans to drop GPT-5.6, Codex, and ChatGPT Work into IBM Consulting Advantage, the AI platform its consultants already use with clients. For OpenAI, this is distribution into accounts that still buy through a trusted systems integrator. For IBM, it is another way to stay in the room when a bank or telco asks which model to put on core workflows. Enterprises should read it as a multi-model services stack, not a divorce from Anthropic.
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/13/ibm-partners-with-openai-to-bolster-enterprise-ai-push/
