IBM advances “Watson Anywhere” with new clients and innovations

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 Innovations Make it Even Easier to Scale IBM Watson  Across Any Cloud

Recognizing that organizations are slow to adopt AI for many practical reasons, not least due in part to rising data complexities, we this week announced several new innovations that further advance our Watson Anywhere approach to scaling AI across any cloud. Already today a host of clients are leveraging the strategy to bring AI to their data, wherever it resides.

Companies like multinational professional services firm KPMG, Associated Bank, and the global digital agency, Wunderman Thompson are either using our Watson apps, or building their own AI with our Watson tools, to facilitate their AI journeys. 

The innovations announced are designed to help organizations overcome the barriers to AI. From detecting ‘drift’ in AI models to recognizing nuances in the human voice, these new capabilities can be run across any cloud via our Cloud Pak for Data platform to begin easily connecting their vast data stores to AI.

New Capabilities Come to Watson Apps and Tools

 Watson OpenScale – With rising data privacy regulation and growing concern for how AI algorithms are reaching their results, bias detection’s and explain-ability are becoming critical. Last year, we launched OpenScale, the first AI platform of its kind to do just that – provide organizations the ability to look for bias and govern their AI and query it to understand how it arrived at its results. With such insights, you can gain greater confidence in your AI and in their results. A new capability called Drift Detection which detects when and how far a model “drifts” from its original parameters. It does this by comparing production and training data and the resulting predictions it creates. When a user-defined drift threshold is exceeded, an alert is generated. Drift Detection not only provides greater information about the accuracy of models, but it simplifies, and hence, speeds model re-training.

Watson Assistant – Building on our leading position in enterprise AI assistants, we now introduce several new key features to the conversational AI product that allow users to deploy, train and continuously improve their virtual assistants quickly on the cloud of their choice. For example, the new Watson Assistant for Voice Interaction is designed to help you easily integrate an AI-powered assistant into their IVR systems. With this capability, customers can ask questions in natural language. Watson Assistant now can recognize the nuances of the way people speak and will fast-track the caller to the most appropriate answer. You can also blend texting and voice at the same time, allowing instantaneous information exchange. And the Watson Assistant is now integrated with IBM Cloud Pak for Data which enables companies to run an assistant in any environment – on premises, or on any private, public, hybrid, or multi-cloud.

Watson Discovery – We have made several key updates to Watson Discovery, our  premier AI search product that leverages machine learning and natural language processing to help you find data from across the enterprises. New to the platform is Content Miner, which allows for the searching of vast data sets for specific content types, such as text and images. A new simplified setup format helps non-technical users to can get up and running quickly, while a new “guided experience” dynamically recommends next steps in configuring projects. All of which results in a more agile data discovery process.

Cloud Pak for Data – We now advances our first-of-a-kind, integrated data analytics platform, with key new features and support. The platform, which has supported Red Hat Open-shift, one of the leading Kubernetes-based container orchestration platforms, since its launch 18 months ago, is now certified on Open-shift. With full certification brings added confidence to you knowing that all the components came from a supported source, container images contain no known vulnerabilities and most importantly that the containers running throughout are compatible across Red Hat Enterprise Linux environments, regardless of the cloud, and whether private, public or hybrid.

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In addition to certification, this latest version now comes with a.o. Watson Machine Learning, equipped with AutoAI. AutoAI is an innovative automated model building program that enables data scientists and non-data scientists alike to build machine learning (ML) models with ease. As its name suggests, AutoAI automates such tedious and complicated tasks of ML, including data prep, model selection, feature engineering and hyperparameter optimization, to truly speed clients’ adoption of AI. Now, these tools come standard with Cloud Pak for Data to be used and scaled across any hybrid multi-cloud environment.

In addition, Cloud Pak for Data now features open source governance in the base platform, enabling users for the first time to set policy for, and govern the use of open source tools and programs within the enterprise to enable more efficient model building, testing, and deployment.

OpenPages with Watson New features and capabilities to OpenPages with Watson in version 8.1. This governance, risk and compliance (GRC) platform, helps you as you set and manage operational risk, policy and compliance, financial controls management, IT governance, and internal audits. Version 8.1 comes integrated with a new rules engine, new intuitive views, visualizations, advanced workflow features, and a personalized workspace, all of which are designed to enable users to be more productive and effective in managing their risk. One result of the additional engagement and automation features are a more risk-aware culture that empowers more people to participate in managing important risk and compliance activities.

If you like to know more about these new, innovative solutions and capabilities, feel free to contact me at andersq@dk.ibm.com or check out the link below

 Related Information

For more on IBM Watson and its future, check out the This is Watson blog series by Rob Thomas. For more on the advances to Cloud Pak for Data, read The Big Data Hub. For more on the great new capabilities within Watson Assistant, read The Watson Blog.