While on location at IBM Think, Acceleration Economy’s Toni Witt hosts IBM’s Raj Datta, VP of ISV and AI partnerships, for a conversation on partnerships, IBM’s latest innovations, and co-creation.
Highlights
Partner Strategy Evolution (00:30)
The evolution of IBM’s AI offerings continues to grow and get stronger. At Think, IBM showcased new areas it’s venturing into with AI as well as how it’s opening its LLM models. “What I’m loving right now is — every single week, month — we’re continuing to update our technology and continue to grow,” Datta reports with excitement.
Think was full of examples of how IBM’s partner strategy has led to technology evolutions. For the first time, IBM now has its own ISV launcher. It has a handful of partners showcasing their technology built on top of watsonx.
IBM’s partners ecosystem has expanded. To get an idea of the spectrum of partners, a keynote at Think featured a representative from the Saudi Arabian government and the CEO of Adobe. IBM works with hundreds of startups using IBM’s AI as their foundation.
watsonx Additions (05:38)
IBM announced several advancements to watsonx during Think. Datta acknowledges that “the assistants have completely taken off,” as IBM has been seeing new use cases “pop up everywhere” as customers continue using it.
InstructLab has opened up for companies of any size to leverage. “I think [the small language model] is what’s going to be coming next because that’s becoming very popular and it helps with the cost of computing,” Datta notes.
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Co-Creation Success (07:50)
Over the past few quarters, IBM has seen a tremendous amount of growth with its partners. “What’s really interesting is we’re seeing that a lot of partners are trying out different AI technologies,” Datta says. Additionally, they’ve seen much excitement about IBM’s offerings. IBM has teams to help companies deploy and build out with its technology to further support customers in selling their offerings and continuing to grow.
“A lot of our partners are growing exponentially because they’re leveraging AI capabilities and taking it to a different level,” he highlights.
What’s Next? (11:24)
IBM has been growing its partnership business, especially with the adoption of watsonx. “As we continue to grow, I think you’re gonna see a large adoption of AI assistants, so that digital labor is becoming very interesting as well where people are able to leverage for their internal use cases,” Datta says.
HR is one area that IBM applies its own technology. “We’ve been working on this for over seven years so we have hundreds of integrations there.” It integrates it into Workday and SAP, and plans to integrate its technology into every platform and continue expanding use cases.
