IBM watsonx is now available to help meet the business needs of enterprise AI

IBM watsonx is now available to help meet the business needs of enterprise AI

By Kareem Yusuf, Ph.D | Senior Vice President of Product Management and Growth, IBM Software

July 11, 2023

Today we’re announcing that we’ve begun implementing IBM watsonx, our enterprise-ready AI and data platform. Previewed at IBM THINK in May, watsonx includes three products to help organizations accelerate and scale AI: watsonx.ai study for new foundational models, generative AI and machine learning (available now); the fit-for-purpose data store watsonx.data, built on an open Lakehouse architecture (now available); and the watsonx.governance toolkit to enable building AI workflows with accountability, transparency, and accountability (coming later this year).

Innovate with customers and partners

Watsonx enables customers and partners to specialize and implement models for various business use cases or create their own. To date, the platform has been shaped by more than 150 users from all industries, from telecommunications to banking, who have participated in the technology preview and beta programs. See more than 40 logos and some early testimonials shared here.

Companies are excited by the prospect of leveraging underlying models and machine learning in one place, with their data, to accelerate generative AI workloads.

“IBM’s launch of watsonx was a wake-up call,” said Sean Im, Samsung SDS America, “and inspired us to explore the immense potential of watsonx.ai’s generative AI capabilities to deliver unprecedented innovations.” to our customers”.

“In an environment where integration with our systems and seamless interconnection with various software is critical, watsonx.ai emerges as a compelling solution,” said Atsushi Hasegawa, Chief Engineer, Honda R&D. “Its inherent flexibility and agile deployment capabilities, coupled with a strong commitment to information security, accentuate its appeal.”

Citi, a leading global bank serving over 200 million customers, is excited to explore the possibilities of generative AI and foundational modeling within watsonx.

“We are looking into the potential use of large language models,” said Marc Sabino, Chief Auditor – AI Innovation. City. “There are huge possibilities, including linking your controls to your internal policies.”

IBM is also working with an expanding ecosystem of partners to co-create and innovate across industries and use cases, from space to sports, including working with NASA to build the first basic model for geospatial data and Wimbledon, where watsonx was used to produce tennis commentary.

Enabling AI builders

Today at watsonx.ai, AI builders can leverage models from IBM and the Hugging Face community for a variety of AI development tasks. Models are pre-trained to support a range of Natural Language Processing (NLP)-like tasks, including answering questions, generating and summarizing content, classifying and text mining. Future releases will provide access to a greater variety of proprietary IBM-trained base models for efficient domain and task specialization.

Responding to the global need for baseline models, IBM announced new GPU offerings on the IBM Cloud, an AI-focused infrastructure designed to support compute-intensive enterprise workloads. Later this year, IBM is expected to offer high-performance, flexible, and AI-optimized full-stack infrastructure delivered as a service on the IBM Cloud, for both education and core models.

Up to the data

Designed to help customers overcome pervasive data volume, complexity, cost, and governance challenges while scaling AI workloads, watsonx.data enables users to access their data across cloud and on-premises environments through a single access point.

And it’s not just data scientists and engineers anymore – watsonx.data gives non-technical users self-service access to their high-quality and trusted business data in one collaborative platform, while helping to enable their own processes security and compliance through centralized governance and automated local policy enforcement.

Later this year, watsonx.data will leverage the watsonx.ai foundation models to simplify and accelerate the way users interact with data, giving them the ability to use natural language to discover, augment, refine and visualize data and metadata in a conversational user experience.

What’s next? Keep an eye out for watsonx

Over the next year, watsonx will continue to evolve and we expect to make significant releases. We will focus on expanding enterprise base model use cases beyond NLP and operationalizing over 100 billion parameter models for custom and targeted use cases, opening the door to broader enterprise adoption.

We will also leverage the strength of our AI governance capabilities, helping organizations implement end-to-end lifecycle governance, mitigate risk, and manage compliance with growing AI and industry regulations. Governance of AI should never be an afterthought, so we encourage our clients to start governance of their ML models and core models from the beginning.

IBM Consulting’s watsonx practice brings expertise in the generative AI technology stack, as well as domain and industry experience that can help accelerate clients’ business transformations. In the same way that we established our successful hybrid cloud services business based on the Red Hat® OpenShift® platform, IBM Consulting intends to be the premier consulting services provider for watsonx.

Businesses require AI that produces accurate and reliable results, can scale across clouds, and can be easily adapted to business domains and use cases. Watsonx is designed to help them meet those needs. Let’s put artificial intelligence to work and make the world work better together.

Explore ibm.com/watsonx.

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