IBM’s Watson, which was originally designed to beat human contestants on the “Jeopardy!” game show, has not been actively promoted by the company in a long time. Despite being an early leader in the field of artificial intelligence, Watson failed to generate substantial profits for IBM. In the past year and a half, IBM sold its Watson Health unit to private equity firm Francisco Partners for an undisclosed amount.
IBM has launched a new platform called WatsonX, replacing its previous Watson offering, as the company aims to capitalize on the latest artificial intelligence boom. WatsonX is positioned as a development studio for companies to train, fine-tune, and deploy machine-learning models. The platform offers various features such as an AI governance toolkit, a library of thousands of large-scale AI models, and a tool for generating AI code. These models are trained on various data sets such as language, geospatial data, IT events, and code.
As there is a significant shortage of human talent in the AI market, IBM is seeking to lead the way in user-friendly platforms for businesses that want to incorporate AI into their business models. This is part of a broader strategy shift, and the new offering is an important step towards achieving that goal.
IBM has teamed up with HuggingFace, a popular AI startup and open source platform that was valued at $2 billion last year. During a Q&A session with reporters on Monday, IBM CEO Arvind Krishna stated that businesses can provide WatsonX with a model they want to develop and let the platform handle the rest.
Krishna said, “We enable enterprises to customize the model according to their playbook and code. They can then deploy it securely without any risk of code leakage.”
IBM has announced that its new WatsonX platform has already gained interest from clients and collaborators such as NASA, SAP, PyTorch, and Wix. The platform is set to be available in the third quarter, according to a statement from the company to CNBC. However, IBM has not disclosed the cost and development time of the new platform. IBM’s recent quarterly earnings exceeded analyst expectations, but revenue did not meet estimates.
Krishna anticipates that these new AI tools will be most easily integrated into areas such as customer service, procurement, cybersecurity, and some aspects of supply chain and IT operations. He specifically noted that they will replace “more repetitive, back-office processes.”
Krishna anticipates that these new AI tools will seamlessly integrate into fields like customer service, procurement, cybersecurity, and certain aspects of supply chain and IT operations. He emphasized that they will replace “more repetitive, back-office processes”. “We envision that this can easily take on 30 to 50% of the task volume, and do them with as much or even better proficiency than people,” said Krishna. He expects this development to be readily embraced this year and reach full realization in the next three to five years.
