Mantel eyes managed AI opps, announces OpenAI partnership

Mantel has joined the OpenAI Services Partner program while it eyes opportunities to provide managed services supporting customers’ enterprise AI tooling.

The Melbourne-based consultancy, which boasts more than 850 employees, positioned the partnership as a validation of its existing AI work and a way to deepen its access to OpenAI technical resources.

It will get early access to OpenAI technology and access to OpenAI resources including solutions architects and technical support.

Key focus areas for the partnership will include API integration; enterprise security, supporting AI deployments managed in secure cloud environments; and sector-specific solutions for industries including banking, healthcare and retail.

"Australia is an important market for us,” stated Kevin Park, Partnership Director, Aus & NZ at OpenAI, “and we are excited to work with Mantel as they implement our capabilities for business customers,"

"This collaboration highlights our commitment to working with firms that have the technical depth to help organisations use our models effectively."

Emma Bromet, data and AI partner at Mantel, said also saw opportunities to provide managed services supporting enterprise AI clients.  

“Mantel actually has a managed service team. It's not our core business, and it historically came from cloud – so, we had an AWS cloud managed service - but we now work in data and we're increasingly seeing an opportunity to support AI.”

“And when I say AI, I'm talking specifically enterprise tooling - so, like a Gemini enterprise, for example - where if an organisation either doesn't have the operating model or the budget to operate their own kind of center of excellence for AI, to sort of maintain some of those tools. We're seeing an opportunity to play in that space.”

“Now every organisation is adopting AI and not every organisation has the budget to support deep AI expertise. Also, let's face it, there's not enough skills in the Australian market at the moment for every business to have the best AI talent in the market.”

“So that's a real opportunity to support once a company invests in a tool. So, let's again use Gemini enterprise as an example, or Chatgpt enterprise – there's an initial phase in setting that up, but then that ongoing maintenance and support actually lends itself very nicely to a managed service.”