IBM Advances 'Watson Anywhere' for Indian clients to scale AI on cloud

International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) on Tuesday announced new innovations to further advance its Artificial Intelligence (AI) driven intelligent cognitive approach -- 'Watson Anywhere' -- that will help several Indian enterprises scale their AI across any Cloud and wherever the data reside.

Rob Thomas, General Manager, IBM Data and AI, said: "We collaborate with clients every day and around the world on their data and AI challenges, and this year we tackled one of the big drawbacks to scaling AI throughout the enterprise - vendor lock-in."

"When we introduced the ability to run Watson on any cloud, we opened up AI for clients in ways never imagined. Today, we pushed that even further adding even more capabilities to our Watson products running on Cloud Pak for Data," added Rob.

The American multinational information technology company also unveiled updates to key Watson tools and applications that are designed to give clients new capabilities and greater confidence in their AI projects.

"We have been collaborating with Indian organizations across sectors to help them a fast track to Chapter 2 of their digital reinvention, which is characterized by AI being embedded everywhere in the business," said Anil Bhasker, Business Unit Leader, Analytics Platform, IBM India-South Asia.

"With -- Watson Anywhere -- organisations are able to innovate and scale AI on any cloud instead of being locked into a single vendor, thus enabling them to maximize the value delivered by AI," Bhasker added.

With rising data privacy regulation and growing concern for bias detections in its AP platform, IBM announced a new capability called 'Drift Detection' which detects when and how far a model 'drifts' from its original parameters.

Between 2018 and 2019, organisations that have deployed AI grew from 4 per cent to 14 per cent, according to Gartner's 2019 CIO Agenda survey.

Adding to growing enterprise complexities, a 2018 IBM Institute for Business Value study said that 76 per cent of organisations surveyed reported that they are already using at least two to 15 hybrid clouds, and 98 per cent forecast they will be using multiple hybrid clouds within three years.

The innovations announced today are designed to help organizations overcome the barriers to AI. From detecting 'drift' in AI models to recognising nuances in the human voice, these new capabilities can be run across any cloud via IBM's Cloud Pak for Data platform to begin easily connecting their vast data stores to AI.