IBM: Remember Watson? It’s Still Around, Ready to Give Your Business an AI Upgrade

IBM has a new AI and data platform called Watsonx(Opens in a new window) aimed at making it easy for enterprises to take advantage of artificial intelligence.

The name Watson first appeared when IBM developed a question-answering computer system to beat human players at the quiz show Jeopardy. Since then, Watson has been re-imagined in various forms to cater to different business sectors. Now Watson is set to compete with chatbots.

With the near overnight success and popularity of ChatGPT, IBM decided to turn Watson into an AI platform any company can integrate into their existing workflows, as well as having the ability to quickly train and deploy their own AI models.

“Foundation models make deploying AI significantly more scalable, affordable, and efficient,” says(Opens in a new window) Arvind Krishna, IBM Chairman and CEO. “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.”

Watsonx comprises three distinct products: Watsonx.ai, Watsonx.data, and Watsonx.governance. Watsonx.ai(Opens in a new window) allows AI models to be trained and tuned using foundation models and enterprise data provided by IBM. A collaboration with American company Hugging Face also offers access to thousands of open-source AI models and datasets.

Watsonx.data(Opens in a new window) is a data storage solution optimized for AI that can be used for workloads either stored on-premise or across multi-cloud environments. Watsonx.governance(Opens in a new window) is an “AI governance toolkit to enable trusted AI workflows,” which is intended to make it easy for companies to protect customer privacy while at the same time detecting model bias and reducing risk significantly.

Both Watsonx.ai and Watsonx.data are expected to be available to customers starting in July. Watsonx. governance is expected to come online before the end of 2023. IBM also created a Center of Excellence for generative AI consisting of over 1,000 generative AI experts to help clients build and deploy Watsonx.