IBM launches new AI and data platform watsonx

Today, on the first day of the Think 2023 annual event by IBM, the company announced the launch of its new artificial intelligence and data platform called IBM watsonx. The platform will offer customers access to toolsets, infrastructure, and other resources to create their own AI models or fine-tune available models on their own data. 

With watsonx, IBM claims that users will be able to automate business workflows, internal processes, and IT processes, while protecting against threats.

“With the development of foundation models, AI for business is more powerful than ever,” said Arvind Krishna, IBM Chairman and CEO. “Foundation models make deploying AI significantly more scalable, affordable, and efficient. We built IBM watsonx for the needs of enterprises, so that clients can be more than just users, they can become AI advantaged. With IBM watsonx, clients can quickly train and deploy custom AI capabilities across their entire business, all while retaining full control of their data.” 

The IBM watsonx offers three different product sets.

IBM watsonx.ai is a next-generation enterprise studio which offers a range of foundational models which are trained on language, code, time-series data, tabular data, geospatial data, and IT events data, among other modalities. Examples of model categories include fm.code, fm.NLP, and fm.geospatial.  IBM watsonx.ai will be available in July 2023.

IBM watsonx.data is a data store built on open lakehouse architecture optimised for governed data and AI workloads. This solution will allow users to access the data through a single point of entry and apply multiple fit-for-purpose query engines to draw insights. It can manage on-prem and multicloud environments and is expected to be available from July 2023.

The third product set is watsonx.governance to build trusted AI workflows to mitigate risks, time, and costs associated with manual processes and provide the necessary documentation.

IBM announced that watsonx.ai foundation models will be integrated in all its major software products like Watson Code Assistant, AIOps Insights, Watson Assistant and Watson Orchestrate, and Environment Intelligence Suite.