IBM Introduces Watsonx AI Platform For Enterprises

IBM on Tuesday unveiled watsonx, a new artificial intelligence (AI) and data platform to enable enterprises scale and accelerate their impact with AI.

The platform comes roughly a decade after its AI-backed Watson supercomputer made a stellar appearance in TV show ‘Jeopardy!’. While the technology was promising, its cost made it a challenge for companies to leverage.

This time, the lower cost of implementing the large language AI models means the chances of success are high, IBM CEO Arvind Krishna told Reuters.

With watsonx, IBM is offering an AI development studio with access to IBM-curated and trained foundation models and open-source models, access to a data store to enable the gathering and cleansing of training and tuning data, and a toolkit for governance of AI into the hands of businesses that will provide a seamless end-to-end AI workflow that will make AI easier to adapt and scale.

In a statement, Krishan said, “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.” 

IBM’s watsonx clients will have access to the toolset, technology, infrastructure and consulting expertise to build their own or fine-tune and adapt available AI models.