Imagine your mainframe users having accurate, curated responses to all their questions instantly at their fingertips. What if your system programmers and operators could perform both routine and complex tasks correctly every time, with minimal reliance on subject matter experts? That’s the transformation IBM watsonx™ Assistant for Z aims to deliver.
IBM watsonx Assistant for Z is a generative AI assistant launched at Think 2024 earlier this year. This AI assistant uniquely combines conversational artificial intelligence (AI) and IT automation to revolutionize how your Z users engage with and manage the mainframe. It helps organizations reduce the learning curve for early-tenure professionals, boosts productivity, autonomy and confidence for all Z users, and accelerates knowledge transfer by enabling experts to codify their Z knowledge.
Building on this momentum, today we are excited to announce new product capabilities and enhancements to IBM watsonx Assistant for Z, including:
- Ingest your own enterprise documentation, making it easier to find answers for internal applications and processes.
- Prebuilt skills (automations) provided for common IBM® z/OS® tasks, accelerating time to value.
- Simplified architecture for ease of deployment and cost effectiveness.
Ingest you own enterprise documentation
Every organization operates differently, with unique processes, applications, technologies and workflows. Many of these processes have been refined over the years, with a few experts constantly being interrupted for the most basic questions.
With IBM watsonx Assistant for Z, you now have the flexibility to customize the Z RAG, ingesting your own documentation and best practices. Personalizing your Z RAG offers greater autonomy for your Z users, who can now get curated answers tailored specifically to your organization’s environment, processes and internal knowledge.
Builders can use a command-line interface (CLI) to ingest proprietary and third-party documentation such as PDF, DOCX, HTML and text at scale into the retrieval augmented generation (RAG). Because the RAG is on-premises and behind the firewall, there is no concern that your proprietary content can be compromised.
What is RAG and its relevance in IBM watsonx Assistant for Z?
IBM watsonx Assistant for Z uses a chat-focused granite.13b.labrador model and a Z domain-specific RAG that can be enhanced with your enterprise data. Using the RAG with the large language model (LLM) brings added value in the form of accurate and context-rich responses to complex queries, leading to answers that include references to sources and significantly reducing the opportunity for hallucinations for both IBM Z® products and your internal applications, processes and procedures.
Learn more on RAGPrebuilt skills for faster time to value
Organizations can use prebuilt skills available for common z/OS tasks. This means you can seamlessly integrate automations, such as display all subsystems, checking the installation date of a program temporary fix (PTF) or verifying a product release level running on a system, into an AI assistant without specialized expertise, enabling your Z users to use them easily.
Also, your IBM Z experts can build complex automations and skill flows for unique use cases faster by using prebuilt skills, accelerating time to value.
Simplified architecture for deployment ease and cost effectiveness
Organizations are no longer required to use IBM watsonx™ Discovery, previously necessary for supporting elastic search. Instead, they can take advantage of the built-in OpenSearch, which merges keyword and semantic searches to access the Z RAG. This enhancement not only improves response quality but also significantly lowers the cost of owning IBM watsonx Assistant for Z and simplifies the deployment.
Get started with IBM watsonx Assistant for Z
IBM watsonx Assistant for Z is designed to help your Z users with accurate and up-to-date answers to their Z queries and simplifies the execution of repeated tasks by codifying knowledge into a trusted set of automations. To discover more about how it can help your organization, schedule a live demo with an IBM expert.
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