IBM's Watsonx to help leverage AI for businesses

IBM has introduced its AI foundation model, Watsonx, to help companies leverage the benefits of AI by providing solutions and services tailored for enterprises.

IBM KOREA CEO Lee Eun-joo speaks at the IBM Tech Summit Seoul 2023 conference held in western Seoul on Tuesday. [IBM KOREA]

Many companies want to utilize AI in their business but a lot of them have difficulties leveraging the benefits of the technology, not knowing how or where to deploy it.

That is where IBM comes in with its recently launched AI foundation model Watsonx tailored for enterprises.

“Rather than focusing on which foundation models we can provide to our enterprise clients, we are focusing on helping them utilize the model well to realize the real value of AI with solutions and services,” said Lee Eun-joo, IBM Korea CEO, at the IBM Tech Summit Seoul 2023 conference held on Tuesday in western Seoul.

The foundation model is a large-scale AI model that is trained on a massive amount of unlabeled data using self-supervision, that can perform various tasks deployed on different applications. GPT, for example, is a representative foundation model that powers the chatbot platform ChatGPT.

“A lot of businesses are deploying AI but there are a lot of failures as well,” Lee said. “IBM possesses insights about examples of correct usage and methods of deploying AI in the right way.”

In order to cater to various applications of AI by enterprises, IBM offers its AI and data platform Watsonx in three variations: Watsonx.ai, Watsonx.data and Watsonx.governance.

Watsonx.ai allows enterprises to train, validate, tune and deploy AI models while Watsonx.data lets businesses store and manage data. Watsonx.governance manages and monitors enterprises' AI activities against the risk of ethical and hallucination concerns.

IBM Korea said one of its clients experienced a 40 percent improvement in human resources management when using IBM's AI solutions by deploying them in talent acquisition, performance management and employee communication. Another client also experienced a 30 percent productivity gain in application modernization backed by automated code generation and customizable standards, among others.

IBM Korea emphasized having an “AI-first” mentality to get a head start in the industry where AI deployment is considered a prerequisite rather than an option.

“An AI-first mentality is needed from now on and in that sense, demand for AI will grow explosively in the future and there will be a massive opportunity generated from it,” said Lee Ji-eun, IBM Korea CTO, at the Tuesday event.

"[IBM Korea] imagines a world where anything can be typed into a search box and a result comes out,” CTO Lee said. “It is not far away. It will become available based on our foundation models.”

BY JIN EUN-SOO [jin.eunsoo@joongang.co.kr]