It has been a long time since IBM has actively attempted to sell Watson. Watson was originally created to beat humans at the ‘Jeopardy’ game show. Watson marked IBM’s early signs in the artificial intelligence space, but it never led to a profitable offering.
Around 15 months ago, IBM sold its Watson Health unit to private equity firm Francisco Partners.
Watson has recently created WatsonX, and IBM is aiming to ride the latest boom in AI. IBM is billing WatsonX as a development studio for firms to train, tune and deploy machine-learning models. The platform of WatsonX includes a feature for AI-generated code, an AI governance toolkit, and a library of lots of large-scale AI models, trained on language, geospatial data, IT events, and code.
The new offering is part of a larger strategy shift as IBM is trying to take the lead on user-friendly platforms for firms looking to introduce AI into their respective business models.
IBM is partnering with HuggingFace, the buzzy AI startup as well as an open-source platform that reached a $2 billion worth last year.
IBM CEO Arvind Krishna said, “Companies can come in with a model they want to build and then let WatsonX get to work. We allow an enterprise to use their code to adapt the model to how they want to run their playbooks and their code. Then they can deploy it for themselves without any danger of their code leaking.”
Krishna expects these new AI tools to be integrated very easily into areas like customer care, cybersecurity, procurement, and elements of the supply chain and IT operations.
