Watson Anywhere

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A recent PwC study indicated that AI has the potential to add close to $16 trillion to the global economy by 2030, yet the technology has had an adoption rate of only 4%, according to other research reports. There seems to be no debate on the strategic value of AI to a business, so how does one reconcile the hype and the opportunity with the slow adoption?

In my conversations with clients, the pace of adoption is limited primarily by three things:

• Increasing data complexity and silos.
• Limited AI expertise across the Fortune 2000, to build, run, and manage AI.
• AI portability that enables businesses to bring AI to data, wherever it resides.

Organizations are modernizing their data architecture, embracing different rungs of the AI Ladder, to collect, organize, and analyze data, and ultimately infuse it with AI. But even those organizations who have climbed the AI ladder face an environment in which their data is spread across a variety of environments: public clouds (with many providers), private clouds, and traditional on-premises deployments. At the moment, if an organization is deploying and running AI in these environments, they are forced to use the AI from that cloud provider. This is modern day “vendor lock-in,” which can stifle innovation and prevent businesses from scaling AI across their enterprises.

Today, at our global technology conference, Think 2019, we are announcing a bold new way to engage and adopt IBM’s industry-leading AI platform by making Watson available Anywhere – on any cloud, be it private, public or hybrid-multicloud. With this announcement we are enabling our Watson capabilities to run across any public cloud or private cloud, in addition to being optimized for IBM Cloud.

With this move, we are enabling clients to bring AI to their data – wherever it resides – and providing a simpler, faster way to build, run, and manage AI models and applications across any cloud.

To do it, we have built and integrated a series of new Watson microservices on IBM Cloud Private for Data, our open, cloud-native information architecture for AI. This platform comes integrated with advanced data science, data engineering and application-building capabilities, and is designed to help companies uncover previously unobtainable insights from their data. Through IBM Cloud Private for Data, Watson microservices can be run on IBM Cloud, or any public, hybrid or multi-cloud environment, enabling businesses to infuse AI into their apps, wherever they reside.

In addition to democratizing access to AI technology, we are doing the same with education, in our mission to make AI broadly available, to organizations of all skill levels.  We are announcing the IBM AI Learning and Certification program, which offers in-lab training workshops, a catalog of online courses, and will ultimately certify a new generation of AI developers. You can see the early progress at https://community.ibm.com/AISkills.

Expediting the pace of adoption is no trivial task. It requires an open approach to technology, a philosophy of bringing the best AI to the data, and a commitment to educating the world in this 21^st century skill. In this one announcement, we are freeing clients from AI vendor lock-in and helping them begin to unlock insights from their data – wherever it resides, taking one big step towards AI everywhere.
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Learn more about what Watson Anywhere can do for you and your business. Watch a replay of our March 6th webinar to get started.