This week, we’re thrilled to bring together thousands of IBM clients, partners, business leaders and stakeholders at our annual Think® Conference being held in Orlando, Florida. For IBM, Think is all about how we support organizations in their digital transformation and help them compete in their markets via the use of technological innovation. There’s a great deal of uncertainty throughout the business world, but we believe IBM Think offers a moment for our collective industries to come together and discuss solutions.

As you’ve heard IBM CEO Arvind Krishna share many times, IBM is a hybrid cloud and artificial intelligence company. Today, we are witness to one of those rare moments in history—the rise of an innovative technology with the potential to radically transform business and society forever. That technology, of course, is artificial intelligence. So, how do we at IBM continue to provide technological solutions that tap into the power of artificial intelligence and leverage intelligent automation, all while bolstering human ambition for collaboration, creativity and innovation?

Ultimately, we believe the answer lies in the power of augmenting our own human intelligence. Empowering the desire for efficiency with the spirit of innovation and employing the technology to help organizations maximize their potential—all while applying AI ethics, which is a field of methods and practices that determines how we create and use AI and AI systems.

Today, you’re seeing business and IT leaders turning to automation to improve operational efficiency, employee productivity, customer satisfaction and, ultimately, business performance. But getting the most out of your automation initiatives requires the right focus, with a comprehensive vision and an experienced team to drive continuous value creation throughout your organization to help achieve your goal—more engaged, productive people focused on work that truly matters.

By working together to achieve new levels of performance, a client experienced a 70% reduction in the time required to open a new account. Another client saw a 250% increase in transactions lending volume over three years. The potential to realize up to 470% ROI over three years is possible.

As we enjoy IBM Think 2023, I’m excited to share a litany of new updates to our business, products and solutions that we believe will help organizations better identify and execute high-impact automations across business and IT to arrive at stronger business outcomes.

Putting events to work with IBM Event Automation

With today’s relentless work pace and constantly shifting customer needs and market dynamics, thousands of business events flow through your organization every day. These events can provide valuable information about what’s happening across your business; however, they may remain siloed and locked away in various data sources.

Imagine if your business tapped into these ongoing streams of information, connected the dots between disparate events and could detect new trends, customer issues or competitive threats. This could enable your business to offer new products or services, increase customer satisfaction or simply improve today’s operations.

Introducing IBM Event Automation, a solution designed to put events to work by enabling both business and IT users to detect situations in real time, act on them and trigger automations. With event distribution, discovery and processing in an intuitive, easy-to-use interface, IBM Event Automation provides a composable approach to accelerate your event-driven journey.

Whether your organization operates in retail, banking and financial services, travel and transportation, or healthcare, IBM Event Automation offers you the ability to remain aware of what’s happening across your business, so you can become more responsive to customers and resilient in the face of shifting market dynamics.

Digital labor: A new approach to work

With employees cycling through many apps multiple times per day, organizations continue to seek ways in which they can boost employee productivity while still fostering a climate of innovation and creativity. At IBM, we believe organizations can boost productivity by embracing digital labor solutions. There are three entry points for using AI and automation to help individuals free up time to focus on higher-value work:

1. Employee productivity: Automate processes and individual tasks, and create space to work on more complex problems.
2. Customer care: Empower businesses to create personalized, unified and outcome-oriented experiences for their customers.
3. Employee empowerment: Give employees the information and insights that they need to deliver fast outcomes and more informed decisions.

The question now becomes how do we move from how much we work to how well we work with the help of digital labor? 

Introducing IBM watsonx Orchestrate Enterprise Edition, a cloud-based enterprise platform that helps organizations empower their workforce to streamline repetitive tasks.

With the goal of freeing up an employee’s time to focus on higher-value projects, watsonx Orchestrate doesn’t require you to become an expert in enterprise business processes, policies and application logins to do your job. IBM watsonx Orchestrate will work alongside you, understand you, guide you and learn from you as you do your work.

Customers can now use over 30 new pre-built/pre-trained skills for SAP SuccessFactors, Oracle HCM and Workday. Where more are needed, foundation models within Watson Orchestrate can be used to import existing automations and turn them into skills in minutes. The software’s new digression capability gives Watson the ability to multi-task, allowing users to make multiple requests at the same time.

Additionally, we’ve expanded our partnership with clients to further embed AI and hybrid cloud solutions into their HR transformation services through a new set of Orchestrate skills. In the future, with Watson’s generative models, our vision is for users to be able to create personalized automations using natural language.

I’m also excited to share that later this year we’ll be unveiling IBM watsonx Code Assistant*, an innovative solution that helps developers write code with AI-generated recommendations. Powered by IBM watsonx.ai foundation models, Code Assistant is designed to help developers of all experience levels scale the learning curve by providing recommended code based on natural language inputs. I’m excited about this solution because it will help address the growing IT automation skills gap by making hybrid cloud code development more accessible to IT professionals and help those experienced with automation code to be more productive.

Accelerating IT operations with AIOps

Businesses need to support continuous availability, functionality and performance across their IT environments. Traditional approaches to managing IT often can’t keep up with the demands of modern business. IT operations teams must stay one step ahead of end-user issues, moving from being reactive to predictive and proactive. 

That’s why I am delighted to announce the upcoming release of IBM AIOps Insights this quarter—a robust, AI-powered solution that aims to streamline IT operations, increase uptime, improve efficiency and reduce costs. 

This cloud-native event and incident management solution will offer central IT operations teams a comprehensive view of their managed IT environment in a single pane of glass. AIOps Insights uses intelligent automation and AI to aggregate data from various sources, correlate related incidents and help teams to effectively detect and remediate incidents. 

While streamlining incident management with the aggregation and consolidation of multiple tools, AIOps Insights is also designed to foster collaboration across teams and accelerate the incident resolution process by eliminating war rooms and addressing silos across tools and processes.

For IBM, this represents another way that we’re empowering organizations to tap into the power of intelligent automation solutions and streamline IT operations.

Let’s continue the conversation

In today’s business landscape, we have a digital workforce that’s constantly evolving, and the need to optimize IT and business operations is imperative. IBM is committed to being the catalyst to help organizations accelerate their adoption of intelligent automation solutions.

We hope you enjoy the programming and continued innovation coming out of IBM Think this week and look forward to continuing the conversation.

*IBM’s plans, directions and intentions may change or be withdrawn at any time at IBM’s discretion, without notice. Information about potential future products and improvements is provided to give a general idea of IBM’s goals and objectives and should not be used in making a purchase decision. IBM is not obligated to provide any materials, code or functionality based on this information. This statement replaces all prior statements on this topic.