titiIBM announces advances in artificial intelligence (AI), hybrid cloud, and quantum computing at the company’s Think conference at 12:00 p.m. ET today. The innovations highlight IBM’s role in helping its clients and partners accelerate their digital transformations, return to work smarter, and build strategic ecosystems that can drive better business outcomes.
A new IBM study on the adoption of AI for business reveals that the imperative to embed AI into business processes became more urgent during the pandemic. Of IT professionals surveyed, 43 percent said that their companies had accelerated their rollout of AI. And nearly half of global IT professionals surveyed said they evaluate AI providers in large part on their ability to automate processes. That is why IBM has invested heavily in building rich and powerful AI capabilities for business.
The following innovations are designed to equip businesses for the next stage of their digital journeys. New capabilities bring Data and AI together.
AI to Help Automate How Customers Access, Unify and Manage Data Anywhere with Cloud Pak for Data: A breakthrough capability in Cloud Pak for Data that uses AI to help customers get answers to distributed queries as much as 8x faster than previously and at nearly half the cost of other compared data warehouses. AutoSQL (Structured Query Language) automates howlo customers access, integrate and manage data without ever having to move it, regardless of where the data resides or how it is stored. AutoSQL solves one of the most critical pain points customers are facing as they look to reduce the complexity of curating data for AI and eliminate the high cost of moving data, while also uncovering hidden insights to make more accurate AI-driven predictions. With the launch of AutoSQL, IBM Cloud Pak for Data now includes the highest-performing cloud data warehouse on the market (based on our benchmarking study) that can run seamlessly across any hybrid multi-cloud environment – including private clouds, on-premises and any public cloud. AutoSQL will be one of several new technologies woven into a new data fabric in the Cloud Pak for Data. The new intelligent data fabric will automate complex data management tasks by using AI to discover, understand, access and protect distributed data across multiple environments, while unifying disparate data sources across a common data foundation.
Watson Orchestrate Helps Professionals Automate Work to Increase Productivity: Watson Orchestrate is a new interactive AI capability designed to increase the personal productivity of business professionals across sales, human resources, operations and more. Requiring no IT skills to use, Watson Orchestrate enables professionals to initiate work in a very human way, using collaboration tools such as Slack and email in natural language. It also connects to popular business applications like Salesforce, SAP and Workday. Watson Orchestrate uses a powerful AI engine that automatically selects and sequences the pre-packaged skills needed to perform a task, and connects with applications, tools, data and history on-the-fly. This can help workers more quickly perform routine tasks, such as scheduling meetings or procuring approvals, or more mission-critical tasks, like preparing proposals or business plans. Watson Orchestrate is the latest AI-powered automation capability from IBM designed to help people reclaim a significant amount of their time to focus on more strategic tasks. It was developed by IBM Research and is now available in preview as part of the IBM Automation Cloud Paks and is expected to be generally available later this year.
Maximo Mobile Transforms the Work of Field Technicians: IBM has launched Maximo Mobile, an easy-to-deploy mobile platform with IBM’s leading Maximo asset management solution at the core. Maximo Mobile is designed to transform the work of field technicians who maintain physical assets such as roads, bridges, production lines, power plants, refineries and more. A new, intuitive interface provides technicians with the right asset operational data at the right time. Even in the most remote locations, users can access Watson AI and in-depth organizational knowledge to easily solve complex issues. This powerful combination of AI, intelligent workflows, remote human assistance and access to digital twins puts decades of industry experience directly into the hands of technicians for safer, more efficient operations.
New AI Transforms How Companies Develop, Deploy and Operate IT and Modernize Applications
Project CodeNet Dataset Advances AI’s Understanding and Translation of Code: IBM Research is releasing Project CodeNet, a large-scale, opensource dataset comprised of 14 million code samples, 500 million lines of code and 55 programming languages, to enable AI’s understanding and translation of code. Project CodeNet is currently the largest, most differentiated dataset in its class and addresses three main use cases in coding today: code search (automatically translating one code into another, including legacy languages like COBOL); code similarity (identifying overlaps and similarities among different codes); and code constraints (customizing constraints based on a developer’s specific needs and parameters). IBM believes Project CodeNet will serve as a valuable benchmark dataset for source-to-source translation and transitioning legacy codebases to modern code languages, helping businesses speed up their application of AI.
Mono2Micro Helps Take the Pain Out of Cloud Migration: IBM has added a new capability into WebSphere Hybrid Edition that enables enterprises to optimize and modernize their applications for hybrid cloud. IBM Mono2Micro uses AI developed by IBM Research to analyze large enterprise applications and provide recommendations on how to best adapt them for the move to cloud. It can simplify and speed up an error-prone process, which can reduce costs and maximize ROI. IBM Mono2Micro is one of IBM’s suite of AI-powered products and services that can make it faster to migrate to the cloud.