Windy Haven USA Inc.

PARIS and NEW YORK, July 10, 2025 – Elior Group, and IBM announce their association to create an “agentic AI & Data Factory” to serve Elior Group’s innovation, digital transformation, and improved operational performance.

This collaboration represents a major step forward in the innovation and digitization of the Elior Group, a world leader in contract catering and services for businesses and local authorities.

The aim of this collaboration is to use IBM’s full services portfolio, and leverage IBM’s expertise in data and AI to support Elior Group’s improvement of its operational processes and offering of innovative solutions to Elior’s customers. IBM will contribute its expertise in setting up AI agents, capable of autonomously processing and analyzing large quantities of data to optimize the performance of Elior Group’s various business units.

A key aspect of this collaboration is the creation of an “Agentic AI & Data Factory”, a centralized platform to manage and orchestrate AI agents deployed across Elior Group’s countries and business units. This platform will be designed to be flexible and scalable, in order to adapt to the specific needs of each entity and integrate with existing systems.

“By collaborating with IBM, we are reaching a new milestone in our digital transformation,” said Boris Derichebourg, President of Elior and Derichebourg Multiservices. “This effort will enable us to take full advantage of the power of data and artificial intelligence to improve our operational performance and offer our customers ever more innovative and personalized services. It is a strategic step forward that confirms our ambition to remain at the forefront of innovation.”

Alongside Elior Group’s teams, IBM will actively contribute to the implementation of Elior’s data governance and change management strategy, to help ensure the successful adoption of the new technologies by Elior’s internal teams. Work sessions will be organized to make employees aware of the challenges and opportunities associated with AI and data, and to help them take advantage of the new solutions being implemented.

This collaboration with IBM is part of Elior Group’s drive to remain at the forefront of innovation and strengthen its leadership position in the foodservice and related services market. By drawing on IBM’s cutting-edge technologies and expertise, Elior Group plans to offer its customers even more effective services tailored to their needs.

“Agentic AI can help accelerate business execution by intelligently orchestrating actions and making faster, more informed decisions,” said Alex Bauer, General Manager IBM Consulting France. “IBM is proud to support Elior in meeting its transformation goals through the expertise of our people and our solutions.”

Through this collaboration, Elior Group and IBM France are each demonstrating their commitment to innovation and digital transformation, in the service of performance and customer satisfaction.

About Elior Group 

Founded in 1991, Elior Group is a world leader in contract catering and multiservices, and a benchmark player in the business & industry, local authority, education and health & welfare markets. With strong positions in eleven countries, the Group generated €6 billion in revenue in fiscal 2023-2024. Our 133,000 employees cater for 3.2 million people every day at 20,200 restaurants and points of sale on three continents, and provide a range of services designed to take care of buildings and their occupants while protecting the environment. The Group’s business model is built on both innovation and social responsibility. Elior Group has been a member of the United Nations Global Compact since 2004, reaching advanced level in 2015.

To find out more, visit www.eliorgroup.com / Follow Elior Group on X: @Elior_Group

About IBM

IBM is a leading provider of global hybrid cloud and AI, and consulting expertise. We help clients in more than 175 countries capitalise on insights from their data, streamline business processes, reduce costs and gain the competitive edge in their industries. Thousands of governments and corporate entities in critical infrastructure areas such as financial services, telecommunications and healthcare rely on IBM’s hybrid cloud platform and Red Hat OpenShift to affect their digital transformations quickly, efficiently and securely. IBM’s breakthrough innovations in AI, quantum computing, industry-specific cloud solutions and consulting deliver open and flexible options to our clients. All of this is backed by IBM’s long-standing commitment to trust, transparency, responsibility, inclusivity and service.

New York and Madrid, July 14, 2025. Nedgia, the gas distributor of the Naturgy Group, has transformed its customer service model through a leading digital evolution project that uses generative artificial intelligence agents. IBM (NYSE: IBM) Consulting designed and implemented the project, creating an innovative contact center supported by virtual agents.

This solution, a cutting-edge application of generative AI, strengthens customer service by incorporating intelligent virtual agents into the company’s standard telephone and digital customer service channels. This allows the company to replicate and scale automation use cases, improving service by allowing AI agents to successfully resolve most interactions.

The automation process will include, among other things, services like appointment management for periodic inspections, access to meter reading information, and, in the future, the ability to modify supply point data. All of these advancements will allow customers to manage their appointments automatically, enjoy a seamless experience, and significantly reduce wait times and incident resolution.

The AI agent system is capable of understanding and managing complex requests, routing conversations to specialized virtual agents based on the topic to ensure more natural and efficient interactions. These virtual agents will reinforce the current human support system that Nedgia continues to provide.

“This new service model marks a turning point in the way that we engage with our clients. With this project, we are offering faster, more accurate, and personalized responses, which results in an improved customer experience, explains Raúl Suárez, CEO of Nedgia. “We are also reaffirming our commitment to innovation as a way to continue adding value to the energy sector, playing a leading role in the transition through our work as a driver of green gases.”

“Nedgia’s case exemplifies the value that IBM Consulting brings to digital transformation processes, combining industry experience, technological knowledge, and a customer-centric methodology,” explains Ana Gobernado, Managing Partner of IBM Consulting for Spain, Portugal, Greece, and Israel. “Our mission is to support organizations in their transformation, adapting to their needs and leveraging their infrastructure. Nedgia’s success underscores the enormous potential that AI agents, when properly designed and implemented, have in customer service.”

This project is part of a collaboration between Naturgy and IBM Consulting, two organizations that share the same vision of the potential of generative AI to revolutionize relationships with their customers.

Optimizing the customer experience

At the core of this transformation, Nedgia is integrating leading platforms that combine large language models (LLM) with cloud-based contact center solutions. The company has implemented this integration gradually, ensuring compatibility with Nedgia’s existing systems and enabling a model that leverages advanced technology without requiring major structural changes or complex investments.

Unlike traditional AI systems that require a constant level of supervision, these agents operate independently: they decide which tools to use, when to use them, and how. They continuously learn and adapt as they work, improving their performance to achieve specific goals and optimize interactions.

Virtual agents also enable a significant qualitative leap by maintaining non-deterministic conversations, understanding context, and managing multiple topics in real time. They provide a more personalized customer experience by detecting emotions and adjusting their responses, tone, and language accordingly.

This combined quantitative and qualitative advancement can help improve service quality, increase customer service capacity, and boost overall customer satisfaction. With this transformation, Nedgia is positioning itself at the forefront of innovation in customer service, reinforcing its commitment to operational excellence and user satisfaction.

About Nedgia

Nedgia, a gas distributor within the Naturgy group, is the leading gas distribution company in Spain, operating in 10 autonomous communities and 1,222 municipalities. It has more than 5.5 million supply points, representing 70% of the country’s gas consumers. Its main asset is the approximately 60,000 kilometers of networks that allow for the safe and efficient delivery of gas energy supplies, including green gas. Proximity and customer service are part of its reason for being, highlighting its high values of quality perceived by its customers.

About IBM

IBM is a leading provider of global hybrid cloud and AI, and consulting expertise. We help clients in more than 175 countries capitalize on insights from their data, streamline business processes, reduce costs and gain the competitive edge in their industries. Thousands of governments and corporate entities in critical infrastructure areas such as financial services, telecommunications and healthcare rely on IBM’s hybrid cloud platform and Red Hat OpenShift to affect their digital transformations quickly, efficiently and securely. IBM’s breakthrough innovations in AI, quantum computing, industry-specific cloud solutions and consulting deliver open and flexible options to our clients. All of this is backed by IBM’s long-standing commitment to trust, transparency, responsibility, inclusivity and service.

ARMONK, N.Y. and MUNICH, July 8, 2025 /PRNewswire/ — Today, IBM (NYSE: IBM) revealed IBM Power11, the next generation of IBM^® Power^® servers. Redesigned with innovations across its processor, hardware architecture, and virtualization software stack, Power11 is designed to deliver the availability, resiliency, performance, and scalability enterprises demand, for seamless hybrid deployment on-premises or in IBM Cloud.

Organizations across industries have long run their most mission-critical, data-intensive workloads on IBM Power, most notably those within the banking, healthcare, retail, and government spaces. Now, enterprises face an onslaught of new technologies and solutions as they transition into the age of AI. IDC found that one billion new logical applications are expected by 2028, and the proliferation of these systems poses new complexities for companies.¹ IBM built Power11 to deliver simplified, always-on operations with hybrid cloud flexibility for enterprises to maintain competitiveness in the AI era.

Power11 is designed to be the most resilient server in the history of the IBM Power platform, with 99.9999% of uptime.² Together with zero planned downtime for system maintenance³ and less than one-minute guaranteed ransomware threat detection with IBM Power Cyber Vault, ⁴ Power11 sets a new bar for business continuity, addressing both planned and cyber-incident-related downtime.

For the first time ever, the Power11 general availability will simultaneously include high-end, mid-range, and entry servers as well as IBM Power Virtual Server in IBM Cloud. IBM Power Virtual Server offers a fast path to the cloud for Power workloads, and is certified as a hyperscaler platform for RISE with SAP.  Power11 will also be the first IBM Power server to support the IBM Spyre Accelerator, IBM’s system-on-a-chip available Q4 2025 that is purpose-built for today’s AI-intensive inference workloads. Available across IBM’s enterprise systems portfolio, including Power11, IBM z17, and LinuxONE 5, Spyre will deliver advanced AI acceleration to help organizations scale AI across hybrid cloud environments.

With support for autonomous operations, Power11 delivers intelligent performance gains that reduce complexity and improve workload efficiency. Power11 offers up to 55% better core performance compared to Power9⁵ and has up to 45% more capacity with higher core counts in entry and mid-range systems compared to Power10.⁶  This upgraded performance means that with Power11, enterprises are positioned to achieve enhanced flexibility and security, to transform their enterprise processes through automation.

With Power11, customers can expect:

• Zero planned downtime for system maintenance. Power11 provides enterprises with a solution that can avoid costly planned downtime and help reduce operational risk. Through advanced technologies like autonomous patching and automated workload movement, planned system maintenance events can occur without ever taking critical applications offline. This feature can free IT professionals from spending time planning, testing, and executing upgrades to their systems, to focusing on higher-value work and innovation. Furthermore, IBM Power will interoperate with IBM Concert using generative AI to help identify operational risks, provide actionable insights, and automate remediation, starting with security patch management. IBM Technology Lifecycle Services (TLS), IBM’s global infrastructure support provider, complements this feature with premium, AI-powered services designed to help proactively monitor system health, reduce downtime, and optimize system reliability and performance.
• Less than one minute ransomware threat detection with IBM Power Cyber Vault. The Power Cyber Vault solution is an integrated cyber resiliency solution following NIST cybersecurity framework to help identify, protect, detect, and automatically respond to cyber threats. Cyber Vault provides protection against cyberattacks such as data corruption and encryption with proactive immutable snapshots that are automatically captured, stored, and tested on a custom-defined schedule. Power11 also uses NIST-approved built-in quantum-safe cryptography designed to help protect systems from harvest-now, decrypt-later attacks as well as firmware integrity attacks.
• Transformed business processes with AI integration. Power11 delivers AI-ready infrastructure with built-in, on-chip acceleration for inferencing and will be able to scale to support mission-critical AI workloads through the IBM Spyre Accelerator. Combined with Red Hat OpenShift AI and a broad ecosystem of open-source software and toolkits, Power11 is built to provide the flexibility and performance needed to operationalize AI across hybrid environments. To further modernize application development, IBM watsonx Code Assistant for i will help developers extend critical RPG applications for greater ease and productivity. IBM will also make watsonx.data, its hybrid, open data lakehouse, available on Power11 by the end of 2025.
• Efficient IT that saves time and money. Beyond the autonomous processes that support zero planned downtime and IBM Power Cyber Vault, Power11 delivers meaningful efficiency gains across the IT stack. Separately, in terms of energy efficiency, Power11 offers twice the performance per watt versus comparable x86 servers⁷ and up to 28 percent better server efficiency with the new Energy Efficient Mode compared to Maximum Performance Mode on Power11. ⁸

“IBM Power11 changes the game for enterprise computing,” said Tom McPherson, GM, Power Systems at IBM. “With Power11, clients can accelerate into the AI era with innovations tailored to their most pressing business needs. We are taking advantage of the full IBM stack to deliver hybrid cloud, AI, and automation capabilities while building on our decades-long reputation as a trustworthy hybrid infrastructure for essential workloads.”

“With just 20 minutes and the help of watsonx Code Assistant for i on Power, I was able to investigate a report, trace the field logic, understand the calculation, and document the issue,” said Jasmine Kaczmarek, VP of Technology at MR Williams. “What had taken a senior developer six hours the day before, I was able to accomplish 18 times faster. That’s truly remarkable when you think about it. This kind of productivity gain is exactly what Power11 is designed for. By empowering developers to modernize core business applications faster and more confidently, AI-augmented tools built into the platform can help increase long-lasting business value.”

“We’re committed to helping the people of Florida receive the quality health care they can afford,” said William Allarey, Sr. IT Manager at GuideWell. “With the new IBM Power11 automation capabilities, we are very interested in faster and more frequent maintenance updates with no planned downtime to keep the servers secure, stable, and current, so our team can focus on delivering benefits and services for better health. In addition, the native AI capabilities and significant system performance gains of the Power11 will allow our company to leverage AI for a clearer and faster claims experience.”

“Temenos’ collaboration with IBM has already proven the value of running mission-critical workloads on IBM Power,” said William Moroney, Chief Revenue Officer at Temenos. “With the launch of Power11, that potential grows even further by bringing an AI-ready infrastructure, zero-downtime resilience, and even greater performance to the financial services industry. We look forward to our continued partnership to help clients modernize their core banking on this built for hybrid cloud platform.”

IBM Power11 will be generally available July 25, 2025. The IBM Spyre™ Accelerator is expected to be available in Q4 2025.

Statements regarding IBM’s future direction and intent are subject to change or withdrawal without notice, and represent goals and objectives only.