Tech behemoth IBM has announced the first IBM Watson-based services platform that augments human intelligence to help service providers improve their operations via cognitive technologies.
Simply called ?IBM Services Platform with Watson?, the technology already is being used by early adopter Danske Bank of Denmark as part of a new 10-year IT infrastructure service contract with IBM.
The US firm said the platform provides companies with artificial intelligence capabilities by bringing together human intelligence and insight from its cognitive technology.
The Watson-powered system, the company said, is designed to predict and identify potential problems and self-heal, helping reduce business disruption.
Martin Jetter, IBM senior vice president of global technology services, said the platform will redefine service delivery and quality and provide significant competitive advantages to clients.
He said Watson?s cognitive capability can both predict problems and proactively direct automation to improve quality, as well as provide IT staffs with critical information to help them make faster, data-driven decisions.
The launch of the Watson-based platform comes at a time when every industry will face an explosion of data as more and more digitization happens with adoption of mobile and IoT (Internet of Things).
A recent IBM survey found that approximately 50 percent of CEOs plan to adopt cognitive computing by 2019, and they expect a 15-percent return on their investment.
With the platform, IBM said automation tools can do more than execute simple instructions as they can now run diagnostics and execute actions to address the root causes of issues and unstructured e-mails.
Moreover, chats can be read in natural language and resulting insights used to resolve problems without manual intervention, it added.
?Technical requirements can be understood quickly, gaps in current operations identified and tailored solutions designed and implemented. With vast knowledge bases able to be mined, the best answers are available for technical experts to use to enable them to find faster issue resolution,? IBM said in a statement.
The platform supports the entire managed services life-cycle, from designing to building, integrating and running services, with autonomic operations and augmented subject matter expertise, according to IBM.
In the case of Danske Bank, it utilizes the IBM Services Platform with Watson to develop and implement a first-of-a-kind cognitive delivery system.
?After successfully testing the cognitive monitoring solution (IBM Operations Analytics Predictive Insights) that is part of the new platform, we saw a significant reduction of server incidents,? said Jan Steen Olsen, executive vice president and CTO at Danske Bank.
“That is why the new agreement elevates our partnership with IBM. Thanks to it we will have a platform that can help us act before an incident occurs and move us closer to an integrated, automated and always-on environment.?
