THINK 2021 showcased a sequence of AI innovations and the latest developments from the house of IBM. Big Blue’s latest product, Watson Orchestrate, allows organisations and individuals to integrate interactive AI into their applications.
Watson Orchestrate works in perfect sync–planning and coordinating tasks for professionals–and requires no IT skills for deployment. It improves productivity and performance across domains like sales, human resources and more. The new interactive AI capability is designed to increase the productivity of business professionals in a work environment and perform tasks more humanly through the utilisation of collaborative tools like Slack and emails in natural language. It also gives professionals the ease to quickly access the information they need by connecting with popular business applications like Salesforce, SAP, and Workday.
On the go
Functionality on the go is part and parcel of Watson Orchestrate. Since automation is all about making people more productive, IBM developed it to understand and maintain organisational knowledge and prior interactions to act on a user’s preference. For example, suppose a user wants to send an email to a specific person but has multiple contacts with the same name. In that case, Watson Orchestrate can quickly identify which contact the user wants to send an email to, based on their prior conversation and where it needs to access the data. It has tremendous potential in accelerating productivity by acting on the information required across various business applications of the user’s choice, whether it’s Salesforce, SAP, or Workday.
The crux
Watson Orchestrate is built with a powerful AI engine that can perform on the go. It automatically selects and sequences the pre-packaged skills needed to complete a task and connects with applications, tools, data, and history. With Watson Orchestrate, business professionals can automate their routinely mundane tasks like sending emails, scheduling meetings, procuring approvals and other critical tasks. It can be employed to access business systems to prepare business plans and help professionals customise their roles in sales, operations, HR and more. Its extensive library allows to perform complex tasks quickly.
IBM’s Watson Orchestrate was created as part of a single portfolio for business and IT automation. Instead of focusing on a single entity, IBM designed a single portfolio built on Red Hat OpenShift that comprises both sets of capabilities that can run from anywhere. This gives IBM an edge over other companies that tend to focus on either one of them. IBM achieved this possibility through its acquisition of WDG Automation, myInvenio, Instana and Turbonomic. The recently acquired Turbonomic enhanced IBM’s AI power capabilities and complemented IBM acquired Instana, especially for application performance monitoring (APM) and observability. It also made IBM the only company to provide customers with AI-powered automation capabilities that run across any hybrid cloud environment ranging from AIOps to application and infrastructure observability, including Cloud Pak for Watson AIOps.
According to Forrester, IBM’s automation technologies can help in reducing manual processes of business by 80 percent. More than 30 companies have already decided to join IBM’s automation ecosystem. It would be interesting to see how IBM’s Watson Orchestrate performs in the coming future. Currently, Watson Orchestra is available for preview as part of the IBM Automation Cloud Paks. It is expected to be available commercially later this year.
