Unlocking the next layer of AI adoption in the UK

Red Hat has formed a collaboration with Great Wave AI to make AI more usable for organisations of all sizes.

Red Hat has a bold vision to help enterprises bridge their existing world and the new world of AI: supporting any model, on any accelerator, on any cloud, powered by open source. At this year’s Red Hat Summit, we made dozens of announcements extending our AI portfolio and ecosystem partnerships. Since then, we are excited to have formed a collaboration with Great Wave AI, a UK-based provider of an agentic generative AI (gen AI) platform. Together we aim to combine the scale, security features and flexibility of Red Hat AI with Great Wave’s “consumption layer” for multi-agent orchestration, making AI more usable for organisations of all sizes.

This collaboration provides Red Hat customers with the ability to add an agentic layer on top of our enterprise-ready open source AI platforms, making it easier for them to tailor AI capabilities to their organization. 

Why AI orchestration?

I recently had the opportunity to catch up with Jack Perschke, co-founder and chief executive officer of Great Wave AI, and discuss some of the trends shaping AI at the moment and what the collaboration means for both our companies.

According to Jack, large language models (LLMs) are “like crude oil” in that they’re valuable, but need refinement to become usable products. Great Wave acts as the refinery turning raw model capability into fit-for-purpose tools, using their choice of hosting provider or LLM vendor.

Jack explains, “Our platform makes it easier to switch between models, test applications with new models and host your own to meet specific security needs. In an era where prompts and responses can’t be encrypted inside the model itself, the safest option is often running it in your own environment. Red Hat makes this possible.”

With Great Wave’s orchestration on top of Red Hat AI, organisations can host open source models in diverse environments – including Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS (ROSA) and Azure Red Hat OpenShift (ARO). The result is a flexible, sovereign AI capability where sensitive data never leaves their perimeter, even when running in the cloud.

What organisations need for AI adoption

While AI is making headlines daily, Jack believes UK adoption is still in its early stages. He frames the market in three layers. The top layer is gen AI built into enterprise systems, such as Salesforce adding AI into CRM. The bottom layer is individual productivity tools like Copilot or sector-specific assistants such as Harvey for legal work. And the middle layer is bespoke, organisation-specific, multi-agent data transformation. This middle layer is the least mature but most valuable opportunity. “I see the adoption of this middle layer at a fraction of 1%. If you’re not building it yourself, Great Wave is providing a way to do it,” he says.

To unlock the potential of this middle layer, the next wave of adoption will require agent orchestration and management platforms. Without them, organisations risk creating ungoverned “AI sprawl” with agents built on inconsistent standards, communicating with each other in uncontrolled ways.

Jack notes that the cost of building this middle layer from scratch is significant. “The UK Home Office has a £3 million tender just for year-one discovery and design,” he says. Great Wave’s platform offers a ready-made alternative, one that’s proven, maintained and aligned with emerging regulation.

From our perspective at Red Hat, the parallels with early cloud adoption are striking. In the same way that shadow IT created long-term complexity, shadow AI, where individuals are using unapproved tools for work, is already creating risk. Without the right governance, organisations will spend years unpicking the mess.

Security, sovereignty and cost control

Open source is proving vital to scaling enterprise AI, not least because it drives rapid innovation, increases standardization and provides greater transparency, helping enterprises retain control over AI and data decision-making. With Great Wave AI deployed on Red Hat’s open source foundation, organisations can choose tactical, smaller-scale models optimised for their needs, and run them in their own environments, including managed clouds, where only authorised personnel can access the data.

There’s also a cost benefit. Beyond a certain number of interactions per month, running your own model can become cheaper than pay-as-you-go access to proprietary models, with the added bonus of greater stability and control. This control matters. If you’ve spent a year building workflows around one model, and the provider updates it overnight, you risk having to rebuild everything. Running your own model on your own platform helps to prevent this kind of disruption.

The case for doing something now

“For some of our clients, doing nothing is riskier than doing something with a small amount of risk,” notes Jack. Warwickshire Police is using Great Wave AI to harness gen AI to speed up access to information for officers and staff, automate manual processes and build trust and control in AI adoption as part of its effort to transform frontline operations. Another UK government service is seeing a 74% reduction in time to respond to customer queries and a 42% reduction in HR team workload. “Other clients, from telecoms to social care charities, are reporting time savings within weeks, we would estimate 3-4x on average,” he says.

The clear lesson here is that real benefits come when organisations move beyond the hype and start using AI, but with the right safeguards in place.

For organisations unsure where to start, Jack’s advice is simple: “Bring all AI initiatives under one working group. Order them by complexity, start with the easy wins, then progress to harder use cases, building capability along the way. And recognise that agent orchestration is inevitable, decide early whether to build or buy it.”

And from my perspective, don’t underestimate the importance of openness and flexibility. Being able to move at will between models, providers or deployment patterns keeps you agile and adaptable. By combining enterprise open source platforms built with production security needs in mind, like Red Hat AI, with an orchestration solution like Great Wave AI’s, you can keep your AI future in your hands.

The Red Hat–Great Wave AI collaboration is about making AI adoption more practical, sovereign and scalable for UK organisations. We’re enabling organisations to move past pilots and into production, while maintaining control of their data, their costs, and their future.