Empowering clients to tell their own AI story

What will your AI story be?

Storytelling is a powerful tool. It’s how humans have passed down knowledge since we sat around the very first fire. For companies, effective storytelling is how you cultivate deeper connections with your customers to foster lasting relationships. There are numerous examples of companies who excel at this, but here are a few of my favorites:

Nike emphasizes the spirit of perseverance and triumph through its “just do it” slogan.

Apple presents its products as tools for personal empowerment and creativity.

Airbnb positions itself as more than just a booking platform, but a facilitator of unique and memorable travel experiences.

Patagonia has woven its commitment to environmental sustainability into the fabric of its products and company mission.

The recent advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) is poised to open seemingly endless possibilities for companies to advance a new story — their AI story.

From recognition to reasoning

Today, AI is a wonderful memorizer. It’s great at pattern recognition. That’s because the majority of AI in production today is based on machine learning models. In the machine learning world, you go from “data to model,” meaning you train a model on a large dataset to learn patterns and make predictions based on that data. As I mentioned in a previous blog, this type of AI is incredibly useful to help companies free up their employees for higher-value tasks, but it’s also costly. You have to prep the dataset and then get a team to go in and train the model based on that data. At the end of this process, you’ll get to an important outcome, but if you want to use that model for another task, you have to restart the process all over again. It’s why, right now, we’re seeing AI mostly applied to problems where there’s a significant return on investment.

One of the reasons generative AI is so transformative is because it uses a subset of machine learning called “generative modeling,” where a model is trained to generate new data that is similar to a given dataset. At a high level, generative models encode a simplified representation of their training data and draw from it to create a new work that’s similar, but not identical, to the original data. This means, with generative AI, instead of going from “data to model,” you can go from “model to model.” So, while the initial work of creating a model can still be cumbersome and costly, once you have that initial model built, you can create smaller models much faster and easier. With this new technology, companies will be able to apply generative AI to more projects. They’ll be able to go beyond recognition to reasoning.

And that’s where IBM comes into help.

watsonx: a new AI and data platform from IBM

We recently announced watsonx, a new AI and data platform designed to help companies scale and accelerate the impact of the most advanced AI with trusted data. The platform consists of three unique product sets: watsonx.ai, watson.governance, and watson.data.

To give companies the upmost flexibility, we’ve designed watsonx.ai so you can start to craft your own story with either building your own models, using open-source models, using IBM foundation models, or a combination thereof. Regardless of the approach you select, we will help you build, evaluate, tune, and deploy on any cloud. Not only does the watsonx platform give you the ability to seamlessly bring your data sources associated with models into watsonx.data, and facilitate the narration of your own story with your own data which is a must. Your data is your unique advantage and is the secret differentiatng ingredient to effectively compete in market place. Through watsonx.governance, you can add authenticity to your AI story through effective monitoring of run time behaviors looking for biases, drifts, and adherence to the prescribed corporate governance policies.

With the platform in place, the next question is — where do you start? An effective AI story lies in the core of your business — the essential activities and capabilities that are fundamental to who you are and who you serve. That’s what makes companies like Nike, Apple, Airbnb, and Patagonia such effective storytellers. Everything they do compliments who they are and who they serve. With that in mind, let’s take a look at some of the common starting points we’re seeing based on the work with our clients:

• Digital Labor: Empower individuals to make better decisions and deliver faster outcomes with AI and automation.
• IT Automation: Achieve new levels of efficiency and resiliency by intelligently automating your most essential systems.
• Security: Bring intelligence to security to dramatically expand visibility and accelerate response times.
• Sustainability: Capture new efficiencies by embedding sustainability into daily operations.
• Application Modernization: Build and modernize applications that are composable, API-based, and event-driven.

Many are calling the promise of generative AI an evolution, but I’d argue it’s more like a revolution. It will change the way people work, how enterprises operate, and how entire industries transform.

As you look to invest in AI within your business, the thing you need to ask yourself is: how can you use the power of AI to tell your own story? Because, at the end of the day, your story is what gets passed down to the next generations.

If you’re interested in learning more about watsonx, click here.