ARMONK, N.Y., Oct.
21, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Recognizing that organizations
are slow to adopt AI, due in part to rising data complexities, IBM
(NYSE: IBM) today announced
new innovations that further advance its Watson Anywhere approach
to scaling AI across any cloud, and a host of clients who are
leveraging the strategy to bring AI to their data, wherever it
resides.
"We collaborate with clients every day and around the world on
their data and AI challenges, and this year we tackled one of the
big drawbacks to scaling AI throughout the enterprise – vendor
lock-in," said Rob Thomas, General
Manager, IBM Data and AI. "When we introduced the ability to run
Watson on any cloud, we opened up
AI for clients in ways never imagined. Today, we pushed that even
further adding even more capabilities to our Watson products running on Cloud Pak for
Data."
Increasing data complexity, as well as data preparation, skills
shortages, and a lack of data culture are combining to slow AI
adoption at a time when interest in AI continues to climb. Between
2018 and 2019, organizations that have deployed artificial
intelligence (AI) grew from 4% to 14%, according
to Gartner's 2019 CIO Agenda survey.1
Those figures contrast with the rising awareness of the value of
AI. According to the 2019 MIT Sloan Management Review and Boston
Consulting Group study, Winning with AI, 9 out of 10
respondents agree that AI represents a business opportunity for
their company. Adding to growing enterprise complexities, a 2018
IBM Institute for Business Value study said that 76% of
organizations surveyed reported that they are already using at
least two to 15 hybrid clouds, and 98 percent forecast they will be
using multiple hybrid clouds within three years.
The innovations announced today 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 IBM's Cloud Pak for
Data platform to begin easily connecting their vast data stores to
AI.
As evidence of the growing appeal of this approach to enable AI
to run on any cloud, IBM today announced a number of clients that
are leveraging Watson across their
enterprises to unearth hidden insights, automate mundane tasks and
help improve overall business performance. Companies like
multinational professional services firm KPMG, and Air France-KLM,
are leveraging Watson apps, or
building their own AI with Watson
tools, to facilitate their AI journeys.
"IBM's strategy for developing AI tools that enable clients to
run AI wherever their data is, is exactly the reason we turned to
OpenScale – we needed multicloud scalability in order to give
clients the kind of transparency and explainability we were talking
about," said Steve Hill, Global and
US Head of Innovation at KPMG. "Supporting the client's
environment, whatever it may be, reflects the understanding that
IBM has not only about AI, but about the expanding enterprise."
KPMG, the multinational professional services network and
long-time IBM alliance partner, for years has integrated the latest
cognitive and automation capabilities into services across its
businesses from governance, risk, and compliance to taxes and
accounting. Earlier this year KPMG turned to IBM to collaborate on
a new service that would provide KPMG clients greater governance
and explainability of their AI, no matter where that data resides,
no matter what cloud and no matter what AI platform the company was
using. KPMG developed the KPMG AI in Control solution leveraging
the Watson OpenScale platform, to give clients the ability to
continuously evaluate their machine learning and AI algorithms,
models and data for greater confidence in the outcomes. Last
month, KPMG teamed with IBM to release a joint offering of this
solution to clients called KPMG AI in Control with Watson
OpenScale.
And to help accelerate customer service and improve the
passenger experience, Air France-KLM and its customer service team
developed a voice assistant called MIA (My Interactive Assistant),
which uses IBM Watson Assistant with Voice Interaction. Air
France-KLM collaborated with IBM to develop the voice assistant to
improve the customer experience by reducing file processing time.
Since the beginning of the pilot in July in a single country, MIA
has responded to 4,500 calls from people needing additional
information about their flights or their travel plans.
MIA asks the customer for his reservation reference number (PNR)
and extracts from this PNR all information relating to the
passenger, including name, flight number and telephone number. If
needed, the voice assistant can quickly pass the call to a human
agent who can take over. The agent will already have all the
necessary information on the screen in the background and will
therefore be positioned to resolve the request. By design, the
higher the number of requests handled by MIA, the more intelligent
it will be over time. Other use cases are also under study.
New Capabilities Come to Watson Apps and Tools
IBM rolled out an array of new features and functionality to
several of its key products today, including the following:
Watson OpenScale – With rising data privacy
regulation and growing concern for how AI algorithms are reaching
their results, bias detections and explainability are becoming
critical. Last year, IBM 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, clients can gain
greater confidence in their AI and in their results. Today we
announced 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 IBM's leading
position in enterprise AI assistants, IBM today announced 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 clients easily
integrate an AI-powered assistant into their IVR systems. With this
capability customers are able to 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. Clients can also blend texting and voice at the same time,
allowing instantaneous information exchange. IBM also announced
that 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 – IBM announced several key
updates to Watson Discovery, the company's premier AI search
product that leverages machine learning and natural language
processing to help clients find data from across their enterprises.
New to the platform is Content Miner, which allows for the
searching of vast datasets 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 – IBM advances its
first-of-a-kind, integrated data analytics platform, with key new
features and support. The platform, which has supported Red Hat
OpenShift, one of the leading Kubernetes-based container
orchestration platforms, since its launch 18 months ago, is now
certified on OpenShift. With full certification brings added
confidence to clients 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.
In addition to certification, this latest version now comes with
a host of capabilities standard as part of the base platform. Among
the new capabilities is Db2 Event Store, for storing and analyzing
more than 250 billion events per day, in real-time, and Watson
Machine Learning, equipped with AutoAI. AuoAI is IBM's 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 multicloud
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.
To empower developers to take advantage of the IBM Cloud Pak for
Data platform, IBM also announced the Cloud Pak for Data Developer
Hub. Here, developers have step-by-step tutorials, code
patterns, ongoing support and information on in person workshops
taking place in their area for hands-on labs.
OpenPages with Watson – IBM today also
announced new features and capabilities to OpenPages with
Watson in version 8.1. This
governance, risk and compliance (GRC) platform, helps clients as
they 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, advance workflow features, and a
personalized workspace, all of which is designed to enable users to
be more productive and effective in managing their risk. One result
of the additional engagement and automation features is a more
risk-aware culture that empowers more people to participate in
managing important risk and compliance activities.
About
For more on these solutions visit IBM.
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.
Contact
Michael
Zimmerman
IBM Media Relations
mrzimmerman@us.ibm.com
1 Smarter with Gartner, Top Trends on the Gartner
Hype Cycle for Artificial Intelligence, 2019, September 2019
View original content to download
multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/ibm-advances-watson-anywhere-with-new-clients-and-innovations-designed-to-make-it-even-easier-to-scale-ai-across-any-cloud-300941725.html
SOURCE IBM