IBM will expand access to its upcoming artificial intelligence-powered automation offering, the Watson Orchestrate, beyond the preview on June 30 with several partners already exploring the possibilities of digital assistant integration technology in their business.
IBM will begin inviting clients to use Watson Orchestrate on June 30, but the software is not yet generally available, according to the company.
Dinesh Nirmal, general manager of IBM Automation, told CRN in an interview that the Watson Orchestrate and digital employees are an opportunity for partners of Armonk, NY-based tech giant as employers continue to suffer not only to find highly skilled employees, but to pay them as well, resulting in the need to automate complex IT skills around cloud computing and 5G.
“I would say partners play the biggest role in Watson Orchestrate because they are the people who can really multiply the impact of Watson Orchestrate on businesses or small businesses or individuals,” Nirmal said.
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Watson Orchestrate works by automating emails, scheduling meetings, getting approvals and other common business processes, according to IBM. It connects to Salesforce, SAP, Workday and other business applications.
The tool has become industry leaders, including earning a 2022 CES Innovation Award Honoree designation. Watson Orchestrate users are able to assign work to the system using natural language abilities. Orchestrate uses an AI engine to combine skills on the fly and in context based on previous interactions.
Angela Hood, CEO and founder of Austin, Texas-based IBM partner ThisWay Global, told CRN in an interview that her company uses IBM automation software to integrate the company’s human resources recruitment technology into current customers.
ThisWay, which offers a recruitment process automation platform called AI4Jobs that aims to remove biases from job candidate recruiting, has expanded its IBM partnership since 2019. The company has also partnered with Google, Amazon Web Services and Salesforce , said Hood.
IBM’s automation technology can help employee morale by eliminating the mundane, complex tasks they repeat every day, Hood says. He thinks employees will say, “I love this part of my job. I love this other part. But this third part I really hate about my job – oh, but I can just do my digital assistant to do that? I will not leave this company because I have a digital assistant that allows me to do this work. ”
Hood continued: “I think that’s the part that was missed in the conversation about AI. There’s the whole argument of, ‘will AI replace people?’ No. But if you’re someone who doesn’t use technology to do a better job and to stay in the company, you can only be replaced by someone who does it. ”
While the Watson Orchestrate will have many use cases in the largest businesses, Nirmal believes that smaller businesses can also benefit from an advanced digital assistant such as the Watson Orchestrate to help them modernize IT operations, regardless of the industry they serve.
If “I’m a mom-and-pop shop, I want to have a digital assistant to do all the mundane work I do but I don’t have the resources to hire someone,” she said. “It’s great for me to have as a printing shop or a bagel shop to use what a business has the ability and the resources to do so.”
He continued: “Whether I’m going to take HR (human resources) as a discipline or finance as a discipline, how do I develop those skills and then I’m going to use the Watson Orchestrate to actually orchestrate, sequence and deliver those that skill so that I can really make a digital employee for your business? I think, the future is already there. All of this will be digitization of the labor force. And that doesn’t mean we’re going to eliminate employees. We’re going to grow. [them] so that they can do work of great value. ”
IBM’s investments in automation include the recent acquisition of Boston-based application resource management (ARM) and network performance management (NPM) software provider Turbonomic.
IBM is hardly alone in exploring new ways for automation to improve work. In March, Microsoft and Chicago-based AWS partner Asperitas Consulting made available its proprietary application modernization accelerator framework for large and mid-market businesses to accelerate cloud infrastructure adoption.
That same month, ServiceNow released the first of its two major upgrades in two years to its Now platform featuring a significantly improved graphical user interface for enhanced productivity as well as new robotic process automation that ability.
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