From Ibm an open source AI for flexible and tailor-made solutions

The Sevilla football club has adopted a scouting system based on artificial intelligence and now a Serie A team is also preparing to announce a programme that makes the process of identifying football talent more efficient for clubs with fewer resources. Barilla has set up a programme for mapping in-house skills and redeploying them to higher value-added positions. At WindTre, a chatbot has now almost completely replaced the call centre, whose operators have been diverted to an internal competence centre with the aim of training them on more motivating tasks.

These are three use cases developed by Ibm Consulting, the consulting arm of. Big Blue, to accompany clients along the path to scale AI in specific areas such as human resources and customer service, responding to the specific needs of individual companies. This is how Ibm aims to scale the AI of watsonx, its proprietary generative AI platform, to respond to the growing need for business model transformation and product and service innovation that jumped to the top of the list of priorities this year on the basis of the annual Ceo study in which the group maps the opinions of more than 3,000 business leaders from thirty countries. That sees Gen AI leap to the top of the list of technologies to be used for this purpose and traditional AI to fifth.

That imposed by these new technologies is "a cultural change, not only technological, that enables long-term paths that bring significant value to the system, which involves the entire company in a transversal manner across the various lines of business," emphasises Stefano Rebattoni, president and CEO of Ibm Italia. Big Blue aims to accompany companies along this path of adoption under the banner of an offer "under the banner of reliability and security" in a logic of open source innovation based on use cases that can exploit the skills and knowledge of the entire community. "For some time we have been working on large language models, as well as on diversified models specific to individual industries," explains Sebastian Krause, senior vice president and chief revenue officer of IBM. In this sense, the InstructLab platform developed together with Red Hat is an ideal tool for sharing experiences and developing highly customised data-based models'.

To address these challenges, Ibm is making several updates and enhancements to its watsonx family of assistants to help enterprises build their own AI assistants across all industries. In parallel, it is developing new AI-based automation capabilities that will enable CIs to move from proactively managing IT environments to predictive automation, which will become an essential tool for improving the speed, performance, scalability, security and cost-efficiency of enterprise infrastructure. At the same time, the strategy announced a few days ago at the Think annual conference in Boston includes a renewed focus on the partner ecosystem: from Aws to Meta, from Salesforce to Adobe, from Microsoft to Sap, watsonx opens up to third-party solutions to offer customers ready-made templates to integrate into their strategy.

On the other hand, companies are precisely looking for guidance on the road to adopting a technology that is not simple and immediate, and which in Italy, but not only there, creates a clear division between large and small/medium-sized companies: while seven out of ten large companies are now experimenting or are already at pilot level, the percentage drops to just over two out of ten among the smallest. With this in mind, Ibm has set up a competence centre available to customers who can find expertise and tools to create the necessary culture and, above all, to share use cases so that everyone can find models