In his keynote presentation at IBM’s Think Digital event, held this week, IBM CEO Arvind Krishna unveiled Artificial Intelligence (AI) offerings focused on automating IT infrastructures.
One of the offerings is the IBM Watson AIOps, which uses AI to self-detect, diagnose and respond to IT anomalies in real time. Unforeseen IT incidents and outages can cost businesses in both revenue and reputation.
Watson AIOps enables organizations to introduce automation at the infrastructure level and is designed to help CIOs better predict and shape future outcomes, focus resources on higher-value work and build more responsive and intelligent networks that can stay up and running longer.
The new solution is built on the latest release of Red Hat OpenShift to run across hybrid cloud environments and works in concert with technologies at the center of today’s distributed work environment, such as Slack and Box. It also works with providers of traditional IT monitoring solutions, such as Mattermost and ServiceNow.
As part of the rollout, IBM also launched the Accelerator for Application Modernization with AI, within the IBM’s Cloud Modernization service. This new capability is designed to help clients reduce the overall effort and costs associated with application modernization.
This tool provides a series of tools designed to optimize the end to end modernization journey, accelerating the analysis and recommendations for various architectural and microservices options, according to IBM.
The accelerator leverages continuous learning and interpretable AI models to adapt to the client’s preferred software engineering practices and stays up-to-date with the evolution of technology and platforms.
In addition to automating IT operations, IBM also announced a series of new and updated capabilities designed to “give CIOs a playbook for operating in this new environment.” The new capabilities are designed to help automate business planning and operations as well as call centers.
To automate business planning, IBM Cloud Pak for Data, IBM’s fully-integrated data and AI platform, has been updated with a host of new capabilities designed to help business leaders automate the access to critical business-ready data.
For example, added to the platform as extensions are IBM Planning Analytics, designed to enable users to automate planning, budgeting and forecasting for business; and DataOps capabilities such as IBM InfoSphere Master Data Connect, which enables users to access MDM deployments in on-premises environments.
When it comes to business operations automation, a new update to the IBM Cloud Pak for Automation, software to design, build, and run automation applications that allows customers to easily create automation solutions for business, was released at Think Digital 2020. the AI “digital workers”. It should be noted that digital workers automate routine work and collaborate with human colleagues.
When it comes to business operations automation, a major new update to IBM Cloud Pak for Automation, software for designing, building and running automation apps, was released at Think Digital 2020. The update
enables clients to more easily create AI “digital worker” automation solutions. Digital workers automate routine work and collaborate with human counterparts.
The new capabilities can help simplify how organizations digitize automation skills, such as data capture, task automation and business routing.
With regards to call center automation, it was announced that IBM Watson Assistant, the company’s AI-based conversation platform has also been updated to help intelligently automate the most complex and knowledge-intensive interactions and drive improved customer satisfaction while reducing operating costs.
Assistant now has a pre-built user interface that requires no development effort to deploy and is designed with user experience-based best practices. Also, new integrations to some of the leading customer service platforms preserve clients’ existing investments in those services and allows users to reach live agents with ease.
Finally, a new feature called “autolearning,” currently in development and due in the product this summer, will learn from prior customer behavior to provide the best, most relevant answers to new questions on the same topic.
Just as human agents improve over time by learning from customer interactions, autolearning will now offer similar capabilities for the virtual assistant, according to IBM.
At Think Digital, which took place on May 5 and 6, IBM discussed the state of business and the role of critical technologies, such as AI and Cloud, as clients accelerate recovery and digital transformation in the wake of COVID-19.