Reporting on location at IBM Think, Acceleration Economy’s Toni Witt hosts David Tan, CTO of CrushBank, for a conversation on the company’s innovations and partnership with IBM.
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Highlights
CrushBank Overview (00:54)
When IBM launched watsonx, Tan became fascinated with determining how to leverage that technology for IT support. After applying, his team became the 12th company accepted in IBM’s partners ecosystem, leading to the launch of CrushBank.
CrushBank is a platform to ingest siloed data. It takes in everything from documentation to user guides to manuals to support tickets. Then, the platform puts it inside a data lake, making it available in real-time. With watsonx, CrushBank has expanded its offering, morphing into a data lake with AI capabilities. The company built the proprietary ingestion process and users can leverage the power of watsonx through that.
Relationship with IBM (02:45)
When Tan was looking to build an AI solution, “IBM had the best end-to-end offering.” While CrushBank could have built on open-source or from scratch, Tan reports that IBM’s platform enabled them to “accelerate really quickly through the development process.” Because IBM continues to update the product, especially when AI became more mainstream, CrushBank was able to leverage more capabilities.
“The combination of the capabilities and the resources they bring to bear and the way they stay ahead of the market — they’ve just been a great partner for the journey,” Tan says.
Applications of IBM Tech (03:58)
Tan identifies a couple key areas in which IBM has helped CrushBank:
- Go-to-market strategy: IBM has provided the company with marketing and co-sell support. With CrushBank’s offerings on the IBM marketplace, the company has been able to reach more industries than it could on its own.
- IBM Build Labs: IBM gives CrushBank technical resources to aid with everything from proof of concept to production developments and more. “We really get the IBM-level expertise working alongside myself and my team which helps us accelerate our solutions much quicker,” he notes.
The Ingestion Process (05:00)
Many other offerings aren’t anchored in real enterprise data, which can lead to outputs of bad information and hallucinations, for instance. CrushBank focuses on the ingestion process. It first unlocks corporate data then gets it into Watson Discovery so users can get the most out of their data.
What’s Next? (09:35)
CrushBank plans to evolve its platform; two investment areas that Tan is particularly excited about: digital labor and governance. Applying IBM’s automation to digital labor will increase efficiency. Building Centers of Excellence internally to help clients execute on governance in AI will be useful in monitoring for hallucinations, bias, and other negative factors.
