Inside watsonx AI Lab: IBM seeks to navigate AI race with watsonx, AI consulting

The colored panels that introduce IBM products' use cases are displayed on a wall at IBM watsonx AI Lab at the company's Manhattan office in New York, Friday. Korea Times photo by Lee Gyu-lee

NEW YORK — IBM is stepping up its efforts in the rapidly evolving artificial intelligence (AI) industry, led by its watsonx platform and enterprise consulting services.

IBM’s latest strategy in AI is encapsulated by watsonx, a collection of products for generative AI, from building to deploying and governing AI models, with comprehensive enterprise consulting.

“[For companies to adopt AI in business], there must be platforms that allow their developers to build with AI and need to be able to use various models as well … In order for AI adoption to align with these processes, it needs a platform that connects to business workflows; hence, we introduce products like watsonx Orchestrate,” Kim Yeon-joo, IBM vice president of strategy, global offerings and growth, said during a press tour of AI Lab at the company’s office in Manhattan, Friday.

“It’s also crucial to strategize how to implement AI, pilot it and transition to full-scale operations. The consulting division works closely with clients on these aspects of AI adoption, providing both cutting-edge AI technology and comprehensive support through consulting to facilitate successful AI integration for our clients.”

Kim emphasized that IBM’s unique approach to becoming its own first experimental client helps provide its clients with proven real-world insights at scale, while strengthening the reliability of its consultations through hands-on experience.

“We started experimenting with how AI could be applied inside an enterprise about four or five years ago … We’ve been able to quantify the tangible returns from our AI adoption in that context, seeing around $3.5 billion in productivity gains,” she said.

“As we rolled it out, we learned what works well, what’s still challenging, which use cases generate strong impact and which ones need more work … And now we share those lessons, the technology, methodology and best practices with our clients.

A screen demonstrates IBM's data analysis program for Scuderia Ferrari Formula 1 at IBM watsonx AI Lab in Manhattan, N.Y., Friday. Korea Times photo by Lee Gyu-lee

The company, reinforced by the watsonx AI Lab, guides clients from ideation to implementation and the operation of AI systems.

“In this very fast-moving world of AI, sometimes it can be a little overwhelming to keep up with all the jargon, buzzwords and new technology that's coming out,” Sarah Nagy, the founder of Seek AI, said, which became a key foundation for watsonx AI Labs.

“This is where we can provide a lot of help to clients by sitting down with them, doing an ideation session which can last as short as an hour, or it could be, potentially, even over a week.”

The AI Labs also offers hands-on learning through university capstone projects, hackathons and startup accelerators to foster real-world AI solutions and talent development.

IBM pushes for openness and flexibility by emphasizing access to both its proprietary Granite language models, which specialize in small-scale, and third-party models, enabling organizations to tailor solutions to their specific needs.

The clients can choose or recommend the best suit from a whole catalog of open source models that are available.

“IBM has thrived for over a century by constantly reinventing its business models to stay ahead of technological trends and market shifts,” Kim said.

“In recent years, IBM has focused its business-to-business strategy to help enterprises implement advanced cloud and AI technologies, and is becoming a company that can provide those technologies and services.”