IBM watsonx is changing the game for enterprises of all shapes and sizes, making it easy for them to embed generative AI into their operations. This week, the CEO of WellnessWits, an IBM Business Partner, announced they embedded watsonx in their app to help patients ask questions about chronic disease and more easily schedule appointments with physicians.

Watsonx comprises of three components that empower businesses to customize their AI solutions: watsonx.ai offers intuitive tooling for powerful foundation models; watsonx.data enables compute-efficient, scalable workloads wherever data resides; and the third component, watsonx.governance, provides guardrails essential to responsible implementation. Watsonx gives organizations the ability to refine foundation models with their own domain-specific data to gain competitive advantage and ensure factual grounding to external sources of knowledge.

These features—along with a broad range of traditional machine learning and AI functions—are now available to independent software vendors (ISVs) and managed service providers (MSPs) as part of IBM’s embeddable software portfolio, supported by the IBM Ecosystem Engineering Build Lab and partner ecosystem.

The watsonx platform, along with other IBM AI applications, libraries and APIs help partners more quickly bring AI-powered commercial software to market, reducing the need for specialized talent and developer resources.

A platform prioritized for enterprise AI

IBM is focused on helping organizations create business value by embedding generative AI. Watsonx provides the functionality enterprise developers need most, including summarization of domain-specific text; classification of inputs based on sentiment analysis, threat levels or customer segmentation; text content generation; analysis and extraction (or redaction) of essential information; and question-answering functions. The most common use cases from partners often combine several of these AI tasks.

ISVs need the flexibility to choose models appropriate to their industry, domain and use case. Watsonx provides access to open-source models (through the Hugging Face catalog), third-party models (such as Meta’s Llama 2) and IBM’s own Granite models. IBM provides an IP indemnity (contractual protection) for its foundation models, enabling partners to be more confident AI creators. With watsonx, ISVs can further differentiate their offering and gain competitive advantage by harnessing proprietary data and tuning the models to domain-specific tasks. These capabilities allow ISVs to better address their clients’ industry-specific needs.

Let’s explore a few AI use cases that span different industries. 

Exceptional customer care through AI solutions

Today, customers expect seamless experiences and fast answers to their questions, and companies that fail to meet these expectations risk falling behind. Customer service has leapfrogged other functions to become CEOs’ top generative AI priority. Given this trend, companies should be looking for ways to embed generative AI into their customer care portals. To accelerate this process, companies can implement AI-infused customer care commercial solutions. IBM’s embeddable AI technology, such as IBM watsonx Assistant and watsonx.ai, allows ISVs to quickly and easily build AI into their solutions, which in turn helps them to reduce time to market and reach their customers sooner.

Watsonx allows enterprises to effortlessly generate conversation transcripts with live agents or automate Q&A sessions. With watsonx.ai, they can obtain concise conversation summaries, extract key information and classify interactions, such as conducting sentiment analysis to gauge customer satisfaction. This information will further refine and improve the information available to the agents.

Streamline your procurement process using watsonx

By embedding AI technology in enterprise solutions, organizational leaders can connect disparate, broken processes and data into integrated end-to-end solutions.

For example, supply chain management can be a challenge for companies. The process of changing suppliers can be a time-consuming and complex task, as it requires intensive research and collaboration across the organization. Instead of spending cycles and resources on creating an in-house solution that streamlines this process, companies can implement an AI-infused supply chain management solution developed by ISVs. ISVs are experts in their domain and build their solution with enterprise-grade AI–such as watsonx Assistant, watsonx.ai, and watsonx.data–so companies can feel confident in their selection.

Watsonx Assistant can serve as a user-friendly, natural-language Q&A interface for your supplier database. In the background, watsonx.ai generates database queries and content like Requests for Proposals (RFPs) or Requests for Information (RFIs), while Watson Discovery analyzes supplier financial reports. Watsonx.data acts as a front end for the company’s ERP system, with up-to-date attributes about inventory items, ratings of suppliers, quantities available and so on, along with a third-party data warehouse providing further decision criteria. Thus, teams can work smarter and move toward better, more integrated business outcomes. 

Watch the demo of these use cases, or explore interactive demos in the IBM Digital Self-Serve Co-Create Experience.

Partner success stories

WellnessWits is using watsonx Assistant to create a virtual care solution that connects patients to chronic disease specialists–from anywhere. The platform features an AI-powered chat functionality that can help patients gather information and answers about their chronic disease and facilitates personalized, high-quality care from physicians that specialize in their condition.

Ubotica is leveraging IBM Cloud and watsonx.ai in its CogniSAT platform, enabling developers deploy AI models to satellites for a wide variety of observational use cases such as detecting forest fires or space junk. CogniSAT improves the efficiency with which data is stored and processed, providing edge-based analysis onboard satellites.

IBM solution provider Krista Software helped its client Zimperium build a mobile-first security platform using embedded AI solutions. The platform accelerates mobile threat defense response by automating ticket creation, routing and software deployment, reducing a 4-hour process to minutes.

Benefits of building with IBM

ISVs who partner with IBM get more than just functionality. Our team will help you create a solution architecture that helps you embed our AI technology, explore how to monetize your solution set, provide technical resources and even help sell it through our seller network.

IBM Partner Plus, our partner program, provides business partners with a plethora of resources and benefits to help them embed technology. We find the following resonate especially well with partners looking to start their journey of building with IBM: the IBM Digital Self-Serve Co-Create Experience (DSCE), the IBM Ecosystem Engineering Build Lab and the IBM Sales Partner Advocacy Program.

DCSE helps data scientists, application developers and MLOps engineers discover and try IBM’s embeddable AI portfolio across watsonx, IBM Watson libraries, IBM Watson APIs and IBM AI applications. The IBM Ecosystem Engineering Build Lab provides partners with technical resources, experts and support to accelerate co-creation of their solution with embedded IBM technology. The IBM Sales Partner Advocacy Program is a co-sell benefit that encourages collaboration with IBM sales teams when partners sell their solution with embedded IBM technology to IBM clients.

Explore how your company can partner with IBM to build AI-powered commercial solutions today.