The US tech giant is jumping into the generative AI market promising to “power next generation foundation models” for businesses.
This week IBM announced the impending arrival of IBM watsonx, a new AI and data platform that will enable enterprises to scale and accelerate the impact of the most advanced AI with trusted data.
The announcement was made at at Big Blue’s annual Think conference, where IBM promised that the release of the new “enterprise-ready” AI platform was “upcoming”.
Based on “three powerful components”
The platform comprises three powerful components, according to IBM. First, the platform’s AI development studio will offer access to IBM-curated and trained foundation models and open-source large language models (LLMs) for “specific or industry-specific domains that utilize curated data where bias can be mitigated more easily and can be quickly customized using client data”.
In addition, the watsonx toolkit for governance of AI promises to “provide a seamless end-to-end AI workflow that will make AI easier to adapt and scale”.
Finally, there is the watsonx data store, which is built on open lakehouse architecture that is optimized for governed data and AI workloads.
Adding AI to all aspects of the enterprise
IBM also plans to infuse watsonx.ai foundation models throughout all its major software products going forward. For example, the Watson Code Assistant will allow developers to generate code with a straightforward English language command. In addition, AIOps Insights will deliver AI Operations capabilities enhanced with foundation models to provide “greater visibility into performance across IT environments”.
The US tech giant is also promising to add watsonx to partner platforms such as SAP.
IBM says watsonx will help companies meet their goals in the following areas: interacting and conversing with customers and employees; automating business workflows and internal processes; automating IT processes; protecting against threats; and tackling sustainability goals.
Arvind Krishna, IBM Chairman and CEO, summed up the new offering: “With IBM watsonx, clients can quickly train and deploy custom AI capabilities across their entire business, all while retaining full control of their data.”