IBM is placing a big bet on artificial intelligence (AI) with its launch of three new Watsonx offerings targeted at generative AI model development, data storage and governance.

Big Blue touts the Watsonx portfolio as an end-to-end generative AI platform that supports IBM's existing AI services while democratizing AI technology "for business, both small and large, to ensure accuracy, scalability and adaptability," IBM Distinguished Engineer and VP of Data and AI Product Management Jay Limburn told SDxCentral.

"There’s huge [potential] with foundation models – which are reusable and require minimal training – in helping leaders implement AI to radically change how businesses operate," he said.

The portfolio's three main pieces (Watsonx.ai, Watsonx.data and Watsonx.governance) run on Red Hat OpenShift and represent the entire AI and data lifecycle from data prep to model development, deployment and monitoring. OpenShift's "flexibility of hybrid, multi-cloud deployment," Limburn noted, allows enterprises to take advantage of open-source AI foundation models from third parties like Hugging Face or prebuilt foundation models in the Watsonx environment, "all while retaining full control of their data."

Limburn explained that generative AI is only scalable when it pulls from foundation models, and business success and differentiation in this area comes from the ability to customize and adapt a foundation model to specific client needs and priorities. "The promise of foundation models is rooted in their ability to be tuned to an enterprise’s unique data and domain knowledge with specificity that was previously impossible," he noted.

Watsonx, he claimed, is differentiated "in its ability to do this for businesses while offering trusted models, performance, portability and the ability to leverage enterprise data effectively and securely."

To that point, the Watsonx portfolio offers businesses control over the AI models and data they bring to the platform through specialization, deployment, management and governance, which allows them to "completely own the value they create," Limburn added.

IBM's Watsonx.ai offering applies pretrained AI models to a range of use cases, including text and sentiment analysis, identification of insights from documents and the generation of code or other content. According to IBM, this presents "huge potential for increasing productivity and time to value," Limburn said.

He highlighted talent, customer and employee servicing, and updating and modernizing applications as three areas well-suited to benefit from Watsonx.ai. For example, businesses can train models using company-specific HR data or use AI to generate job postings, summarize groups of submitted resumes, and improve employee understanding of company documents.

In terms of customer service, companies can use generative AI trained on customer data to develop personalized experiences at scale via digital assistants or chatbots. AI also offers capabilities like summarization in handling call center transactions, which improves service and allows human agents to spend time on more complex tasks.

Limburn also noted Watsonx.ai can help software developers create and improve upon "starter code and playbooks," which shortens the application modernization cycle.

"We’re going after areas where we see quick gains in productivity and time to value – augmenting and automating HR, customer service and finance processes. We focus on use cases that are scalable and relevant to every industry – every company has employees, most companies have a supply chain, and so on," Limburn said.

The executive acknowledged this launch represents "a big bet on AI," and he's convinced Watsonx "is poised to capture market share" considering CEOs are increasingly focused on using generative AI to make strategic decisions and are requiring that AI improve productivity, innovation and risk management while following ethical standards.

Watsonx.ai and Watsonx.data are available now, while Watsonx.governance is slated for availability later this year.