Red Hat announced its latest foray into the generative artificial intelligence (AI) market with the next phase of Project Wisdom – an open beta of Ansible Lightspeed with IBM Watson Code Assistant. Leading up to Red Hat Summit, Ansible VP and GM Thomas Anderson told reporters the service will substantially impact the efficiency of existing automation efforts while also expanding automation throughout the enterprise.

The last five years have seen plenty of what Anderson described as AI-washing – "just like we had in the cloud days." But "this is actually using generative AI," he clarified.

The new Ansible service uses natural language processing (NLP) to integrate with Watson Code Assistant and gain access to IBM's large language model (LLM) built on OpenShift. This enables the acceleration of automation code development, according to the vendor.

Subject matter experts in IBM's IT organizations reported productivity gains from using the Ansible Lightspeed pre-release. Anderson touted a 60% improvement in productivity for experts creating automation tools at Big Blue. Lightspeed is "making existing subject matter experts far more efficient by doing a lot of the work for them," he explained.

To that point, Anderson highlighted the strength of collaboration between IBM and Red Hat. "We bring the domain expertise. They brought the expertise around the large language models and AI."

Ansible Lightspeed also seeks to establish a layer of trusted expertise for enterprises that might be wary of jumping into AI and automation. "Using general purpose AI tools to automate or to code stuff that's going in your infrastructure is a non-starter for a lot of enterprises, for two reasons," Anderson said.

First, enterprises may not know where general purpose AI recommendations are coming from or on what ideas they were trained. "The second thing is just by tracking the questions that are submitted to a publicly available general purpose AI system, people can identify what areas of a network that an enterprise is actually working on," he said.

Even though "enterprises are very cognizant" of those potential issues, they do "want to take advantage of AI," as long as certain enterprise protections are in place. To that point, Ansible Lightspeed "enforces a priority of policies [where] this is the recommendation that makes sense for my financial institution, or my government agency or my manufacturing facility," he explained.

While it will be important for enterprises to apply their own internal policies and training atop IBM's LLM, Red Hat's "ability to deliver with that domain expertise, specifically around Ansible, will really be a significant differentiator between using publicly available generative AI tools and using an enterprise version of Ansible Lightspeed," Anderson touted.

The open beta will be available in June 2023.