How Slalom customers can leverage the NVIDIA effect: Five innovations reshaping the technology landscape in 2024
What the latest in AI and industrial simulation mean for Slalom’s customers and beyond
By Adam Limoges and Tosia Morris
Across industries, AI is proving to be the indispensable catalyst driving business modernization. Cutting-edge generative AI (GenAI) techniques from large language models (LLMs) to computer vision are augmenting creative and knowledge worker productivity at enterprise scale. With tools that simplify the deployment of these AI models as cloud-native microservices, companies can seamlessly integrate GenAI into production workflows. The digitization of industrial processes has been accelerated by AI capabilities like predictive maintenance, smart manufacturing, and quality inspection. As consumer expectations intensify around rapid order fulfillment, AI-driven supply chain planning and routing are allowing logistics providers to hyper-optimize scheduling and delivery dispatch to match the on-demand pace of today’s economy.
Slalom works at the intersection of business, technology, and humanity to deeply understand customers’ “why” and deliver practical, end-to-end solutions. From the best strategists to the most talented engineers and everyone in between, Slalom team members drive actionable results and long-term impact. One of the ways we do this is through our collaboration with NVIDIA as a service delivery provider, where we serve companies across manufacturing and mobility, life sciences, and more.
At the forefront of driving AI innovation, NVIDIA recently unveiled a comprehensive portfolio of new and enhanced offerings — a sweeping array of advanced AI technologies, from cutting-edge cloud services and accelerated platforms to breakthrough capabilities for drug discovery, computational research, industrial design automation, and other transformative applications.
For Slalom, these innovations in GenAI enablement through inference microservices with NVIDIA NIM, industrial digitization through the NVIDIA Omniverse Cloud platform, and supply chain velocity optimization with NVIDIA cuOpt pose an exciting opportunity to further our work with clients in enabling powerful customer experiences, new ways of working, and business transformation with AI.
In this article, we unpack how five of NVIDIA’s latest announcements, debuted at this year’s GTC, are driving transformation across nearly every domain of human endeavor, and share our predictions for how this technology will continue to reshape industries, accelerate scientific breakthroughs, augment human ingenuity, and expand the frontiers of what’s possible with AI.
Blackwell’s big bold move: Powering the next chapter of AI and computing
“Accelerated computing has reached the tipping point — general purpose computing has run out of steam.” — Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA, GTC 2024 keynote
Nearly 60 years ago, Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel, predicted that the number of transistors on a microchip would double every two years, while the cost of computers would be halved. Today, the newly released NVIDIA Blackwell AI platform (named after the mathematician David Harold Blackwell) is poised to power a new era of computing and GenAI. If that wasn’t enough, the NVIDIA GB200 Grace Blackwell Superchip connects two Blackwell B200 Tensor Core GPUs to the NVIDIA Grace CPU to offer trillion-parameter models, with 720 petaflops of AI training performance and 1.4 exaflops of AI inference performance in one rack. In other words, GB200 is a powerful piece of hardware capable of tackling increasingly complex problems and unlocking new discoveries and innovations previously out of reach. In addition, the new Blackwell chips provide a cost and energy usage reduction of up to 25x compared to the previous generation NVIDIA Hopper GPUs.
As the Blackwell platform gains adoption across technology giants and global industries, we expect to see significant advancements to the state of AI, scientific computing, and accelerated engineering that will have ripple effects across the technology landscape.
NVIDIA NIM: Your AI team has arrived
Continuing advancements in its AI software strategy, NVIDIA’s latest software platform, NVIDIA NIM, aims to simplify and accelerate the deployment of AI models using a microservices architecture. In his keynote at NVIDIA GTC, Huang described the platform as “a new way for you to receive and package software.” These pre-built containers support models from providers including NVIDIA, Google, Meta, and Mistral. By packaging inference processes into microservices, organizations can benefit from fast time to value including leveraging integration with industry standard APIs, cost efficiency, and deployment choice across preferred infrastructure or cloud service provider. NIM promises to make it easy for companies to assemble a team of AIs working together to tackle increasingly complex and multidisciplinary problems.
In our recent Life Sciences Industry Outlook, we discuss how embracing enterprise and mature large language model (LLM) subscriptions will be crucial for maintaining a critical advantage in the life sciences. To this end, NVIDIA announced new foundation models within NIM designed to advance drug discovery, medical technology, and digital health. These include MolMIM for generative chemistry, ESMFold for proteins, and DiffDock for researchers to understand drug molecule interaction.
We predict NIM will help accelerate the adoption and integration of GenAI and LLMs within enterprise applications by simplifying the deployment process and providing optimized, domain-specific capabilities. This could lead to faster time to market and wider integration of advanced AI. Further down the road, microservices like NVIDIA NIM could be a stepping stone toward enabling the creation and deployment of agentic AI systems — teams of cooperative AI agents that can perceive, learn, reason, and act in concert to tackle complex real-world problems. By facilitating the composable assembly of specialized AI capabilities as microservices, NVIDIA NIM lays the groundwork for constructing sophisticated multi-agent AI architectures in the future.
NVIDIA Omniverse Cloud: Everything built physically is first built digitally
“Every manufactured object, from massive physical facilities to handheld consumer goods, will someday have a digital twin, created to build, operate and optimize the object. NVIDIA Omniverse Cloud is the digital-to-physical operating system for industrial digitalization.” — Huang
Slalom is building solutions on the NVIDIA Omniverse platform. First announced with Microsoft Azure, Omniverse Cloud APIs enable developers to easily integrate core Omniverse technologies directly into existing design and automation software applications for digital twins, or their simulation workflows for testing and validating autonomous machines like robots or self-driving vehicles. Universal Scene Description (OpenUSD) helps enable large-scale multiuser collaboration and an open ecosystem around 3D world-building. The newly announced Omniverse Cloud APIs represent a significant step toward NVIDIA’s vision of facilitating the creation of industrial metaverse applications.
A striking real-world use case comes from the L’Oréal Group, where the global beauty brand is exploring augmented marketing with GenAI “to fast-track creativity.” Omniverse enables L’Oréal to create immersive, flexible 3D marketing assets efficiently, while AI and personalization tools powered by NVIDIA allow them to elevate the consumer experience in line with their vision of technology-led beauty transformation.
The digital simulation (twin) and design ecosystem continues to evolve and become more accessible. We believe more and more companies will use platforms like Omniverse to collaborate, simulate, design, and develop the synthetic data required to train and implement best-of-breed AI.
NVIDIA cuOpt’s algorithmic leap: Last mile is best mile
Let’s go fast, really really fast. The recent general availability announcement of NVIDIA cuOpt, a record-breaking optimization engine focused on use cases related to field dispatch, fleet management, and last-mile delivery, promises to usher in a new era of transformation in retail, manufacturing, and field-force-related industries, such as telco and energy. Slalom is excited to be a featured partner, with our work with Kawasaki Heavy Industries Ltd. showcased onstage at this year’s GTC (you can watch the recording here).
With last-mile routing and scheduling accounting for roughly half of the total end-to-end supply chain logistics costs, we have no doubt that the adoption of AI and advanced computing technologies like NVIDIA cuOpt will drive significant cost savings, improve efficiency, enhance customer service, and enable more sustainable and resilient supply chain operations.
In the clouds: Slalom customers can integrate easily with NVIDIA and partners
Many Slalom customers use data platforms hosted by cloud service providers. NVIDIA’s relentless pursuit of integrating its hardware and software with cloud service providers (CSPs) and data clouds enables customers to leverage NVIDIA’s AI/data capabilities where they already run workloads. This comes as NVIDIA recently announced expanded collaborations with its partners including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Oracle Cloud, Snowflake, and Databricks.
Overall, we believe this cloud marketplace approach is a strategic way for NVIDIA to significantly expand the accessibility and consumption flexibility of its cutting-edge AI arsenal. Having full-stack AI software and accelerated computing available through major CSP marketplaces continues to lower the barrier to adoption, especially for smaller organizations.
Final thoughts
As AI continues its unprecedented acceleration, fueled by innovations showcased at events like NVIDIA’s GTC, we find ourselves at the forefront of a transformative era. The advancements we witness today in scientific discovery, human creativity, and operational efficiency are just the beginning of AI’s profound impact across industries. However, this rapid progress presents challenges in effectively harnessing and sustaining cutting-edge AI capabilities.
Looking forward, organizations investing in AI must demonstrate tangible returns on these investments. It’s not just about adopting the latest technology; it’s about leveraging AI to drive measurable outcomes and staying ahead in an evolving market. Success will depend on how well leaders navigate these challenges, ensuring that their teams capitalize on AI’s potential to transform industries. To learn more about how Slalom can help align your vision to value, check out our Business Value Framework.
What impacts are you observing in your industry? Share your predictions on how AI will continue to reshape your field in 2024 and beyond.
Slalom is a next-generation professional services company creating value at the intersection of business, technology, and humanity. Learn more about how Slalom is collaborating with NVIDIA to predict the future by reaching out to us today.
