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IBM watsonx on AWS

Scale and accelerate the impact of AI on your trusted data with IBM and Amazon Web Services

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Judah Bernstein, AWS CTO, IBM

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In this article, you'll learn how IBM can enable you to unleash the transformative value of artificial intelligence (AI) into your business, operating with greater speed, scale, and trust on AWS. We will show you how IBM can augment human intelligence by stepping through the stages of the AI ladder.

We'll start by providing an overview of IBM watsonx, take a look at our existing portfolio on AWS, provide insights into our AWS roadmap, and highlight technical resources that will help you dive deeper into our IBM watsonx products on AWS from a developer and architecture point of view.

The generative AI market opportunity

Artificial intelligence has enabled businesses to forecast and react to new challenges, disrupt their competitors or industry segment, release innovative products and services, better meet customer expectations, and drive revenue growth. According to The business value of AI, from the IBM Institute of Business Value, AI adoption has more than doubled since 2017 (20% to 50%, or 2.5 times). AI is no longer a choice, and to realize maximum business value, organizations are looking to unleash the transformative value of generative AI into their businesses. They want to do so with speed, scale, and trust. These disruptive companies are moving from integrating AI into their business processes and applications, to becoming AI first. From "plus AI", to "AI plus".

According to the McKinsey report, The economic potential of generative AI: The next productivity frontier, generative AI is projected to add $2.6 to $4.4 trillion to the world economy annually. McKinsey further anticipates that AI will automate 50% of today’s work activities between 2030 and 2060, with a midpoint in 2045, roughly a decade earlier than in their previous estimates. Generative AI may transform every industry and market segment over time; however, McKinsey is projecting approximately 75% of total annual value of use cases to come from customer operations, marketing and sales, software engineering, and R&D.

While the AI-for-business market opportunity is tremendous, successful AI adoption is not guaranteed, and it doesn't always come easily. To realize maximum business value from generative AI, it's important for enterprises to provide users with next-generation data and AI platforms, as well as AI assistants, programs intended to perform tasks and enhance productivity for business users through AI.

Over the last few years, we've been listening to our clients and monitoring industry market trends within generative AI. Our clients want to put AI to work. They want the ability to select multiple models from IBM, our partner ecosystem, and the open source community. They want to prompt these foundation models anywhere, including AWS and hybrid cloud environments. They want AI explainability, fairness, robustness, transparency, and privacy. They want to secure, integrate, combine, stream, and persist all their data across environments, including public cloud providers or IBM data sources. And they want access to leading public cloud infrastructure and application-specific integrated circuits (ASIC) and a diverse selection of hybrid cloud environments and infrastructure providers.

Four core principles to tailor generative AI for the enterprise

Earlier this year at IBM Think 2023, IBM announced IBM watsonx.

IBM watsonx home page

IBM watsonx

Watsonx is IBM's portfolio of AI products that enable customers to scale and accelerate the impact of generative AI with trusted data on AWS. It provides a broad set of portfolio capabilities, including:

  • watsonx.ai | An enterprise studio for AI builders to train, validate, tune, and deploy both traditional machine learning and new generative AI capabilities.
  • watsonx.data | A fit-for-purpose data store, built on an open lakehouse architecture, supported by querying, governance, and open data formats to access and share data.
  • watsonx.governance | An end-to-end toolkit for AI governance across the entire model lifecycle to enable responsible, transparent, and explainable AI workflows.

IBM watsonx AI Assistants

  • watsonx Orchestrate | Harness the power of AI and automation to free up individuals from tedious tasks.
  • watsonx Assistant | Build better virtual agents to deliver consistent and intelligent customer care.
  • watsonx Code Assistant | Enable hybrid cloud developers to write code with AI-generated recommendations.

IBM generative AI technology and expertise

Strategic partnership point of view

Today, at AWS re:Invent 2023, we are excited to showcase the next stages of our strategic partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS), focused on generative AI and powered by IBM watsonx on AWS. IBM watsonx enables customers to scale and accelerate the impact of generative AI with trusted data on AWS.

IBM’s focus is on artificial intelligence for business. We have built IBM watsonx to help companies create value with AI that is open, trusted, targeted, and empowering. We enable customers and partners to bring together data, governance, and multiple AI models across AWS and hybrid cloud environments. With IBM, AWS, and our vibrant ecosystem of partners, companies can unleash the transformative value of generative AI on their existing cloud environments with greater speed, scale, and trust.

IBM’s integration with AWS enables you to multiply the impact of AI and seize new opportunities for growth. IBM Consulting has plans to train 10,000 consultants on AWS generative AI services, growing our knowledge in areas like Amazon Bedrock, Amazon Sagemaker, and Amazon CodeWhisperer. We are working alongside AWS to deliver joint solutions and services upgraded with generative AI capabilities to help clients across supply chains, contact centers, and platform services. Our mix of capabilities enables companies to quickly and responsibly scale AI workloads using a comprehensive generative AI stack composed of Amazon Bedrock and IBM watsonx running on AWS Cloud and across hybrid cloud environments.

Clients are looking to use generative AI to forecast and react to new challenges, disrupt their competitors or industry segment, release innovative products and services, better meet customer expectations, and drive revenue growth. IBM and AWS have been strategically collaborating to bring the watsonx platform to AWS as software-as-a-service (SaaS) or as a customer-managed deployment, powered by Red Hat OpenShift. Our clients have asked us to deepen this partnership.

IBM watsonx on Amazon Web Services

This week at AWS re:Invent 2023, we're showcasing the broad set of products, features, and capabilities IBM has to support AWS clients. To make it easier for you to stay current with those capabilities, we're capturing the highlights here. We will continue to add links to this collection throughout AWS re:Invent 2023. Be sure to check back for a growing set of technical articles, tutorials, architectures, use cases, and demos for you to get started with watsonx on AWS.

watsonx.ai | At AWS re:Invent 2023, we are excited to inform our customers that IBM watsonx.ai is certified to run on Amazon Web Services (AWS). Watsonx.ai is available today to purchase through IBM and our Business Partners as Customer-Managed Software on Red Hat OpenShift Cloud Platform (OCP) on AWS. In 2024, we have planned availability for watsonx.ai on Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS (ROSA) and the AWS Marketplace.*

watsonx.data | At AWS New York City Summit 2023, we announced IBM watsonx.data on Amazon Web Services (AWS). Watsonx.data is available as 1) IBM Fully Managed SaaS on AWS, 2) Customer-Managed Software on Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS (ROSA), and 3) Customer-Managed Software on Red Hat OpenShift Cloud Platform (OCP) on AWS. Watsonx.data is available for purchase as SaaS directly through AWS Marketplace in USA, UK, Germany, Denmark, and France, and is available for purchase as SaaS or Customer-Managed directly through IBM and our Business Partners. Customers can leverage an array of IBM’s integrated data and AI capabilities on AWS for trusted AI, including Amazon RDS for Db2 and IBM's entire portfolio of commercial databases, data fabric solutions, and watsonx, data, AI, and AI governance capabilities. Customers will now be able to unify, transform and seamlessly share Db2 transactional data for AI using native Amazon RDS for Db2 integrations with Db2 Warehouse and watsonx.data open data lakehouse on AWS, as well as AWS components such as Amazon S3 and more.

watsonx.governance | At AWS re:Invent, we are delighted to share that the watsonx.governance toolkit will be available on Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS (ROSA) in 2024. Today, AWS customers can access one of these select capabilities, IBM OpenPages as a Service on AWS.

watsonx Orchestrate | At AWS re:Invent, we're showcasing some valuable new features and AWS integrations for IBM watsonx Orchestrate.

Use cases and applications

It is incredibly exciting to see the enthusiasm from our customer and partner community around IBM watsonx on AWS. Strategically partnering with AWS, IBM sees three proven, high impact use cases as starting points, including talent, customer service, and app modernization.

In talent, we are seeing organizations realizing up to 40% improvement in HR productivity with watsonx. Customers can train and tune relevant foundation models using company-specific HR data spanning hybrid environments to improve talent acquisition, performance management, employee data management, employee communications, and learning and event management.

For customer service, we provide AI technology that can shift customer service to AI-first, enabling over 90% of customer inquiries to be handled through AI assistants. Using retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), summarization, and classification, we have clients who can train and tune relevant foundation models using specific data sets to improve customer satisfaction. These clients can establish customer self-service, deflect cases, improve agent intent efficacy, assist agents through AI, and establish mobile FAQ with answers to help improve agent precision.

In app modernization, we see accelerated adoption of generative AI software development content and code, up to 60%. Through summarization and content generation, developers can automate code generation and reduce cycle time for modernizing applications, based on requirements and business rules. Generative AI and content generation is transforming developer activities, including automated code generation, application discovery and analysis, code refactoring, code conversion, and code attribution.

Getting started with IBM watsonx on AWS

In this article, we've reviewed the considerable value that businesses are extracting from generative AI. We walked through the watsonx products that we're showcasing this week at AWS re:Invent 2023. We presented our strategic partnership point of view and highlighted key aspects of our strategic product roadmap for IBM watsonx on AWS.

To help you dive deeper, we've gathered a set of articles, tutorials, demos, and reference architectures on watsonx products available for our clients on AWS. Access these resources to learn more about the products and strategies that are appropriate for your business.

In the spotlight at AWS re:Invent 2023:

For more information on products, capabilities, and the IBM / AWS partnership:

IBM | AWS partnership

With Amazon Web Services (AWS) and IBM, unleash the transformative value of generative AI in your business with greater speed, scale and trust. The IBM, AWS, and Red Hat partnership brings a unique combination of leading enterprise AI, cloud, infrastructure, and open source technologies delivered with deep IBM consulting expertise. This enables companies to quickly and responsibly scale AI workloads using a comprehensive stack of generative AI, composed of Amazon Bedrock and IBM watsonx running on AWS Cloud and across hybrid cloud environments.

Learn more about the IBM / AWS partnership.

*IBM’s statements regarding its plans, directions, and intent are subject to change or withdrawal without notice at IBM’s sole discretion.


27 November 2023
Time to read: 11 minutes

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