IBM launches new AI, hybrid cloud services in a bid to help clients automate business

By Amirtha P S, Desk Reporter
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The American multinational technology company, International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) is launching innovations in artificial intelligence (AI), hybrid cloud operations and quantum computing to help businesses to automate tasks and make a smarter rebound in the post-pandemic era.

The tool, called Watson Orchestrate, uses AI to select and sequence the prepackaged skills needed to perform a task across sales, human resources, or operations functions and helps to save up to 50 percent of time to focus on more strategic work.

“Requiring no IT skills to use, professionals, initiate work using Watson Orchestrate in a very human way, using collaboration tools such as Slack and email in natural language. It also connects to popular business applications such as Salesforce, SAP and Workday,” IBM said.

The US company made the announcements to coincide with its annual Think Conference as it builds momentum following its $34 billion takeovers of open-source software company Red Hat two years ago.

IBM, which last month reported its strongest quarterly sales growth in two years, has been restructuring since Arvind Krishna became chief executive a year ago to focus on cloud computing and AI. Last October, the US firm announced its legacy IT infrastructure business would shift into a separate firm.

Mr. Krishna declined to comment about the projected revenue from the new offerings but stated that he still expects overall sales to grow slightly in 2021 and by the mid-single digits percentage-wise over the medium term.

IBM will also unveil Project CodeNet, a large-scale open-source dataset comprising 14 million code samples, 500 million lines of code and 55 programming languages to enable AI to understand and translate code.

The innovations follow IBM’s recent announcement of its own platform for 2-nanometer computer chips that are up to 45 percent faster and 75 percent more power-efficient than the 7 nm chips that run most smartphones.

Related: Saudi Payments brings out ‘Sarie’ by joining with IBM, Mastercard

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