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IBM watsonx Orchestrate on AWS
Automate your processes and reclaim your valuable time
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This article provides an overview of IBM watsonx Orchestrate and highlights its features and benefits. You'll learn how watsonx Orchestrate and AWS services complement each other in solving challenges in the Talent Acquisition use case. You'll also find a demo video to fill in additional details and help you prepare to complete the watsonx Orchestrate on AWS talent acquisition tutorial.
The world is changing faster than ever, and the way we work has to keep up with the potential of new technologies. Companies that want to stay competitive need to help their employees quickly build new skill sets and adapt to changing market conditions.
The need to boost productivity with digital employees (automated software-based labor) is growing quickly. The available pool of employee talent continues to shrink, impacting business and economies around the world. The Global Talent Crunch, a study from Korn Ferry, estimated that a global talent crisis could be felt around the world. That talent shortage alone could result in $8.5 trillion in unrealized annual revenues, with 85 million jobs unfulfilled by 2030 due to lack of skilled workers.
Digital employees rely on the latest artificial intelligence (AI) and automation technologies to collaborate with knowledge workers, automate mundane tasks, and enhance their decision-making capabilities. Work that used to take hours can now be completed in minutes: sending email, scheduling meetings, filtering resumes, approving loans. Digital employees can act as an interface for working seamlessly with the apps and tools that knowledge workers use daily. And the more they work, the smarter they get.
IBM watsonx Orchestrate
IBM watsonx Orchestrate is a platform for digital labor. It provides teams with a digital employee that can quickly complete tasks and increase productivity.
Clients can automate everyday work using watsonx Orchestrate. It’s as simple as asking Orchestrate to automate a standard business process. It enables clients to connect to their most frequently used business applications, such as Salesforce, SAP, and Workday, to quickly access and act on required information. It can access business systems and combine an extensible library of skills to use for complex work. For example, the HR team at IBM (a company with over 200,000 employees across 177 countries) has successfully deployed watsonx Orchestrate across the enterprise, saving thousands of hours for workers each year.
The value of watsonx Orchestrate is the speed and ease with which a business can identify opportunities, create skills, and use and manage digital labor to help workers save up to half of their time.
Features
The main features of watsonx Orchestrate include:
Skills
Skills are the foundation for how watsonx Orchestrate completes work. Orchestrate uses AI to understand intent and select the best skills for the job at hand. Orchestrate also prompts users to take the next-best action and remembers recent inputs so there is no extra copying and pasting.
A skill in watsonx Orchestrate is a capability that can be used to accomplish an element of work. The complexity of a skill can vary: a skill can be as simple as a single action (like adding a row to a table) or as complex as needed to complete a task (for example, finding contacts, creating a table of those contacts, and then sending an email to each of those contacts).
Pre-built skills are provided by IBM and its partners to help clients get started more quickly on common use cases. Pre-built skills are also referred to as "out-of-the-box" skills because a client can simply connect and use them in minutes—no assistance or training needed!
Custom skills
Every client and business process comes with their own nuances that must be accounted for. Many clients have already invested in existing automations and workflows and want to get even more out of those investments. This is where custom skills come in. In watsonx Orchestrate, custom skills are automations or integrations designed and developed by a client to address their specific needs and use cases. These custom skills can also be published to watsonx Orchestrate and made available for use by knowledge workers.
Custom skills can leverage a variety of technologies, such as robotic process automation (RPA), application programming interfaces (APIs), and application integration tools, to automate work across the systems already used in the enterprise. Watsonx Orchestrate enables users to publish skills using its software development kit and pre-integrated tools such as IBM RPA. Clients can discover, import, and train new skills to meet their unique needs.
Skill flows
Skills are often more valuable when combined with other skills. You can create a skill flow to use two or more skills together to finish a task. These skills can be combined from different applications to create a linear sequence.
App connections
Watsonx Orchestrate connects to various apps and tools to work seamlessly across AWS services, Salesforce, Workday, SAP SuccessFactors, Microsoft Outlook, Gmail, and others. You can complete your tasks using a simple, no-code interface. For a detailed list of applications and tools you can connect to, see the watsonx Orchestrate documentation.
The following images show the apps and skills available on your watsonx Orchestrate dashboard:
You interact with watsonx Orchestrate through natural language. Orchestrate leverages intent recognition and entity extraction to understand a user's speech. But what's unique about Orchestrate is how it applies context to understand your intent.
Watsonx Orchestrate is different from rules-based automations and hard-coded dialogue trees. It dynamically sequences skills on the fly and applies memory and context to generate the best course of action by planning the work before executing it. Acting as a digital employee, Orchestrate’s planning algorithm evaluates all the skills it has been trained with and selects the best matching skill. It can also combine skills as it runs, using dynamic sequencing.
Personas
Watsonx Orchestrate involves three primary human roles or personas. Depending on your team member's role, they can find different supported tasks available to them:
- User: A knowledge worker or other user of Orchestrate who leverages the natural language interface to activate skills to help them perform work.
- Builder A developer who builds automations using development tools.
- Analyst An analyst who imports automations and trains watsonx Orchestrate to recognize natural language prompts to trigger those automations and publish skills to the Orchestrate skills catalog.
IBM watsonx Orchestrate on AWS
IBM watsonx Orchestrate and Amazon Web Services are two powerful platforms that cater to different aspects of cloud computing and AI. Watsonx Orchestrate, as described previously, is a robust AI-powered automation platform designed to streamline and simplify complex workflows. AWS offers a comprehensive suite of cloud services, providing scalable and reliable solutions for computing power, storage, databases, other technology requirements.
When combined, watsonx Orchestrate and AWS can help your organization harness the power of AI-driven automation within a scalable and reliable cloud infrastructure. This collaboration can lead to enhanced operational efficiency, improved decision-making processes, and the ability to innovate more rapidly in today's dynamic business environment.
Watsonx Orchestrate is a multi-tenant, cloud-native, fully managed SaaS solution that runs on AWS Cloud. Its skills catalog includes pre-built skills for Amazon S3, AWS Lambda, Amazon SQS, and Amazon SNS, and this list is growing fast.
Integration methods
There are two ways to integrate with AWS:
- IBM App Connect: IBM App Connect provides connectors to connect to various AWS services, such as Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon CloudWatch, and Amazon RDS. You can see the complete list in How-to guides for apps in the watsonx Orchestrate documentation. App Connect integration flows can be exported as OpenAPI specification documents, and the OpenAPI document can be used to build a custom skill in Orchestrate.
- Custom applications: Companies might have their own custom applications that use AWS services under the covers. They can expose APIs for these custom applications as OpenAPI specifications, which in turn can be used to build a custom skill in Orchestrate.
Benefits
The combination of watsonx Orchestrate and AWS can offer the following benefits to companies :
Integration and orchestration
Watsonx Orchestrate is designed for workflow automation and orchestration. It enables users to design and manage workflows that involve multiple tasks, applications, and data sources, all orchestrated in a structured manner.
AWS provides a wide range of cloud services and resources, which can be seamlessly integrated into watsonx Orchestrate workflows. This integration enables you to access AWS services like Amazon S3 for storage, Lambda for serverless computing, or Amazon RDS for databases as part of your orchestrated workflows, increasing efficiency, reducing costs, and improving agility and innovation.
Scalability
AWS is known for its scalability and flexibility. By leveraging AWS services within watsonx Orchestrate, you can easily scale workflows and associated infrastructure to meet changing demands. This elasticity is particularly valuable for businesses with variable workloads and growth patterns.
AI and machine learning
IBM watsonx offers advanced AI and machine learning capabilities, which you can use to enhance data processing and decision-making within orchestration workflows. For example, you can use watsonx to analyze data from AWS services to make informed decisions or automate certain actions based on AI-driven insights.
Security and compliance
AWS offers a robust set of security and compliance features, helping customers meet industry-specific regulatory requirements. By integrating AWS services securely with watsonx Orchestrate, you can maintain a high level of security and compliance in orchestrated workflows.
Use case: Addressing talent acquisition challenges with watsonx Orchestrate and AWS
The Talent Acquisition use case can help illustrate how watsonx Orchestrate can benefit recruiters in an organization.
A recruitment process involves numerous steps, such as creating accurate job descriptions in an application tracking system, posting them to job sites, screening hundreds of resumes, tagging candidates for job roles, communicating with candidates, scheduling interviews, and more.
Users with builder permission create the following skills in watsonx Orchestrate:
Workday skills
- Create a job requisition: Create a job requisition in Workday by adding necessary details to a form
- View a job requisition: View job requisition details by providing the job requisition ID
- Edit job description: Update a job description in Workday
- Post a job: Post a job on job sites such as LinkedIn
- Tag candidates to job requisition
AWS skills
- Extract information from resumes: Extracts relevant information from resumes by scanning all the resumes that are available on an Amazon S3 service instance, and stores resumes in Amazon S3 whenever a candidate applies for a job through various sources
- Map candidates to job role: Maps candidates to job roles using information extracted from resumes
Someone with appropriate user permission can then use these skills to perform the required tasks using the watsonx Orchestrate console.
The following architecture diagram shows a high-level view of the various components and how they interact to implement the use case.
- The recruiter creates a job description using the watsonx.ai skill and knowledge base stored in Amazon S3, and then uses a Workday skill to create a job requisition in Workday.
- The recruiter posts the job requisition on internal and external career sites, including LinkedIn, using watsonx Orchestrate’s available skill or custom skill (OpenAPI).
- When candidates apply for a job, all CVs are stored in Amazon S3. The recruiter runs the skill to extract the candidate’s PII information and their skills using the Amazon SQS skill, which internally uses Amazon Textract and Amazon Comprehend.
- The recruiter uses the AWS Lambda skill to map candidates based on job description and the candidate’s skills.
- The candidate’s sorted data is stored in an Amazon S3 bucket, and their details are also updated to Workday.
Use case demo
The following video walks you through the steps from the Talent Acquisition use case.
Video: Talent Acquisition use case demo (Note: There is no audio track in this demo. Video may take a few seconds to start.)
Summary and next steps
The combination of IBM watsonx Orchestrate and AWS creates a powerful set of tools to streamline and enhance various business processes. By seamlessly integrating watsonx Orchestrate's digital labor capabilities with AWS services like Amazon S3, AWS Lambda, and others, your organization can automate repetitive tasks, improve workflow efficiency, and address business challenges.
Watsonx Orchestrate's pre-built skills for AWS services, integration with IBM App Connect, and the ability to import existing automations provide flexibility and easy-to-use processes. This partnership enables you to tap into AWS's renowned flexibility, security, and compliance features while leveraging the power of watsonx's advanced AI and machine learning capabilities.
To learn more about watsonx Orchestrate and the IBM / AWS partnership, see the following resources:
- Tutorial: Automate the talent acquisition process with IBM watsonx Orchestrate on AWS
- watsonx Orchestrate page for the latest information.
- IBM Developer – AWS technology hub
- watsonx Orchestrate case studies: Avid Solutions | Sport Clips Haircuts | FloCareer
- Contact your IBM representative for a product overview, trial experience, demo, or deep dive
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.