At IBM's consulting arm, the future isn't a slide deck or a strategy memo — it's a live dashboard where humans monitor the work of AI agents in real time.

Earlier this month, Mohamad Ali, senior vice president of IBM Consulting, walked Business Insider through the dashboard that the company both uses internally and recently released to clients.

"Every hour I can see what's going on with all the humans associated with digital workers," and vice versa, he said. "That is the new consulting model going forward."

The dashboard is known internally as "Consulting Advantage." The company unveiled it in 2024 to help its own consultants build and manage teams of AI agents. This January, it unveiled "Enterprise Advantage," a similar version of the platform for clients that allows them to build and manage AI agents at scale.

In recent years, the firm has made itself the testing ground for building and deploying digital workers as it prepares clients for a future defined by AI. Ali said the firm has digital staff working side by side with humans on more than 150 client engagements.

Take the example of a typical security operations center, he said. When an alert comes in, a human investigator would normally spend about 45 minutes combing through logs to figure out what went wrong and what to do next. At IBM, he said, that process is increasingly handled by AI.

Digital workers first "generate an investigation plan." Then they execute it in real time. Multiple agents tackle different parts of the problem simultaneously, passing tasks back and forth, he said. Then they run a risk analysis and produce a report.

The process now takes just a couple of minutes. The findings are then passed back to a human — with key actions highlighted — and the human verifies it.

In January alone, IBM used this approach to complete 52,000 investigations, Ali said.

IBM has evolved dramatically from its early days as a maker of mainframe computers into a key player in the AI boom. The company said its generative AI department was valued at $12.5 billion during its fourth-quarter earnings call.

Its consulting department, especially, has seen an uptick due to demand for generative AI and services that help clients implement it. Consulting revenue for 2025 came in at over $21 billion, up from about $20.7 billion in 2024.

IBM Consulting has been around for decades. The company acquired PwC's consulting arm in 2002. PwC would later rebuild its consulting business after a five-year noncompete clause expired.

IBM Consulting now employs about 150,000 employees and says its work overlaps with the Big Four and more technology-focused firms like Accenture.

"We don't do, like, what markets you should be in," Ali said. "We do strategy around 'how do you take your corporate strategy and implement it?'"

And right now, he said, there's a big question in corporate strategy: How do you prepare for a world where humans work alongside AI agents?