IBM today continued to remake itself as a cloud-centric company with a series of advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) designed to widen the scope of services it sells to enterprises.

“Two key technologies that will determine the success of organizations are hybrid cloud and AI,” IBM CEO Arvind Krishna said during his keynote at the vendor’s digital Think 2021 conference.

The 110-year-old company released new capabilities in Cloud Pak for Data and revealed a new chatbot tool called Watson Orchestrate that uses AI to perform sales, human resources, and operations tasks. Watson Orchestrate, which connects to Salesforce, SAP, and Workday, is slated for commercial release later this year. 

IBM also released updates to Maximo, an asset management tool, to provide field technicians with access to Watson AI and relevant operational data. The company’s WebSphere Hybrid Edition has also been updated to allow enterprises to use AI to analyze large applications and get recommendations on how to adapt those apps for use in the cloud.

Reinforcing that AI push, IBM released Project CodeNet, an open source database with 500 million lines of code and 55 programming languages, designed to better understand and translate code with the aid of AI. The vendor claims it's the largest dataset of its kind in the world for translating legacy codebases to modern languages.

“IBM is all-in on hybrid cloud because we understand that businesses need a clear and critical path to modernize their mission-critical systems with advanced cloud services,” Krishna said. “A hybrid-cloud strategy is about meeting you where you are in your journey. It's about giving you the ability to leverage the capabilities and benefits of the cloud, across a whole spectrum of environments, including the edge.”

Hybrid cloud, according to Krishna, is about extending data centers to the cloud, building and deploying cloud-native apps to any location, and connecting an enterprise’s back office to the front office.

“What I'm really thrilled about is the fact that most of the opportunity is still ahead of us. Cloud computing is one of the most exciting technologies shaping the future of business, and for good reason,” he said. 

Despite all the hype and unabated interest in cloud computing, only 25% of workloads have moved to the cloud thus far and “that’s unusual,” Krishna explained. “Generally, when technology becomes popular, it quickly becomes widespread. A hybrid cloud approach helps overcome the challenges that prevent companies from moving to the cloud.”

Krishna said he believes “hybrid cloud will define the technology strategy of businesses over the next decade,” adding that IBM is currently working with thousands of companies to make use of its hybrid cloud and AI services.

Finally, Krishna shared some perspective on IBM’s 2-nanometer chip design that it announced last week. “While we no longer manufacture chips, we are heavily involved in advancing chip technology,” he said, describing the 2-nanometer process as a global first.

“This new wafer contains the smallest process of architecture released to date. The chip could house 50 billion transistors,” he said. “This new frontier will accelerate advancements in many areas: 5G, maybe 6G, edge computing, autonomous systems, quantum computing, and of course AI.”