IBM's enterprise AI vision for customization, collaboration
IBM focuses on the enterprise by making its WatsonX platform customizable for different cloud environments and applications.
In the age of agentic AI, legacy AI vendor IBM seeks to continually position itself as an enterprise AI partner with products that work both on the cloud and on-premises.
In the last couple of years, the vendor rolled products that have transformed its WatsonX platform into something more open and customizable, including its inclusion of small language models and strong governance features.
The platform currently has 150 prebuilt agents across enterprise departments including HR, sales, procurement, IT and customer service. It can also be integrated with more than 80 enterprise applications and systems such as Salesforce, SAP, Oracle, Adobe and Microsoft.
"Our focus is really around enterprise AI and enterprise AI adoption," said Bruno Aziza, group vice president of Data, BI and AI at IBM, on the latest Targeting AI podcast. "What we're focused on is enabling some of the best organizations in the world that want to innovate to build their applications."
He added that IBM has found most customers will use its application stack to build their own applications.
Indeed, when working with enterprises, IBM attempts to be a vendor that enables customers to build and collaborate on their AI agents and tools across multiple clouds and applications.
"The reality of the enterprise is it's a fairly complex environment, primarily due to the complexity of their business and the sophistication of their needs," Aziza said. "So instead of trying just to lock them into one silo, we want to just take advantage of the best practices that they've taken and then get them to the next level by giving them optionality."
Esther Shittu is an Informa TechTarget news writer and podcast host covering artificial intelligence software and systems. Shaun Sutner is senior news director for Informa TechTarget's information management team, driving coverage of artificial intelligence, analytics and data management technologies, and big tech and federal regulation. He is a veteran journalist with more than 30 years of news experience. Together, they host the Targeting AI podcast.
