Watsonx is IBM’s newest platform for “foundation models and generative AI”, offering a studio, data store, and governance toolkit, to be launched for code, AIOps, digital labor, security, and sustainability – all so IBM can help clients implement their business transformations with its enterprise-grade AI.
At its annual Think conference for 2023, IBM announced IBM watsonx, which it describes as a new AI and data platform that “brings together new generative AI capabilities, powered by foundation models, and traditional machine learning into a powerful platform spanning the AI lifecycle.”
IBM explains that enterprises turning to AI today need access to a full technology stack that enables them to train, tune and deploy AI models, including foundation models and machine learning capabilities, across their organisation with trusted data, speed, and governance – all in one place and to run across any cloud environment.
General availability is expected in July. At that point, we’re enterprises will be able to scale and accelerate the impact of the most advanced AI with trusted data. Indeed, with the whole world turning to AI, or at least incredibly fascinated by its incredible consumer-facing evolution over the past few months, enterprises have already been using various forms of AI for years, but we’re clearly at an inflection point.
Here is a video from Bloomberg, which interviews Rob Thomas, IBM Chief Commercial Officer & SVP of Software on the watsonx launch:
However, let’s get back to watsonx for a moment. IBM explains it is offering an AI development studio with access to IBM-curated and trained foundation models and open-source models, access to a data store to enable the gathering and cleansing of training and tuning data, and a toolkit for governance of AI into the hands of businesses that will provide a seamless end-to-end AI workflow that will make AI easier to adapt and scale.
Arvind Krishna, IBM Chairman and CEO, said: “With the development of foundation models, AI for business is more powerful than ever. Foundation models make deploying AI significantly more scalable, affordable, and efficient. We built IBM watsonx for the needs of enterprises, so that clients can be more than just users, they can become AI advantaged.
“With IBM watsonx, clients can quickly train and deploy custom AI capabilities across their entire business, all while retaining full control of their data,” Krishna continued.
Meanwhile, Kitman Cheung, Director of Technical Sales – APAC, IBM Technology – Software, who in another life could have been perfectly named as the kit man for Ted Lasso’s AFC Richmond team, said: “When it comes to AI for business you cannot replace accuracy and trustworthiness, they are paramount when it comes to running a business.
“We are trying to solve business problems, so it is important that this platform helps our customers roll out models in an accurate, scalable and adaptable manner and that is why we feel it is the right time to roll out watsonx.”
This was augmented by Kieran Hagan, Data, AI & Automation Technical Sales Leader, ASEANZK said: “AI is at a momentum point the advent of generative AI and the potential it has on interacting with information is huge.
“After COVID we the ASEAN region have digitally accelerated a lot of our infrastructure faster than the rest of the world – if anything we are more ready for AI adoption for the convenience and returns it can deliver.”
IBM notes clients will have access to the toolset, technology, infrastructure, and consulting expertise to build their own — or fine-tune and adapt available AI models — on their own data and deploy them at scale in a more trustworthy and open environment to drive business success. Competitive differentiation and unique business value will be able to be increasingly derived from how adaptable an AI model can be to an enterprise’s unique data and domain knowledge.
Obviously, this was not the only announcement at IBM’s major conference, with the company announcing further planned advancements, including a GPU-as-a-service infrastructure offering designed to support AI-intensive workloads, an AI-powered dashboard to measure, track, manage, and help report on cloud carbon emissions, and a new practice for watsonx and generative AI from IBM Consulting that will support client deployment of AI.
You can find plenty more information at this article titled “Introducing watsonx: the future of AI for business“, at the official IBM watsonx.ai site, where there is a short video I haven’t been found anywhere else that explains watsonx well.
You can also watch the Think 2023 keynotes in Orlando here.
