IBM's OpenAI gamble: retraining 21k consultants on GPT-5.6
ibm is training tens of thousands of consultants on openai's gpt-5.6 and codex to secure enterprise ai contracts.
ibm announced a partnership with openai to bring gpt-5.6, codex, and chatgpt work to enterprise clients through ibm consulting. the firm will retrain tens of thousands of consultants and establish a specialized openai practice to target financial, government, and telecom sectors. this model-agnostic strategy follows ibms similar alliance with anthropic and attempts to bolster growth after a lowered 2026 revenue forecast. the deal highlights how ai adoption is moving to a services-led integration phase for global system integrators.