What's new and changed in watsonx.governance

IBM® watsonx™ Version 2.1.2

A new version of watsonx.governance was released in March 2025.

This release includes the following changes:

New features

This release of watsonx.governance includes the following features:

Comparing AI assets with Evaluation Studio

With Evaluation Studio, you can evaluate and compare your generative AI assets with quantitative metrics and customizable criteria that fit your use cases. Evaluate the performance of multiple assets simultaneously and view comparative analyses of results to identify the best solutions.

Improved navigation for inventories

Inventories are now listed under AI governance in the main navigation, making it easier to find and work with inventories of AI use cases.

Customer-reported issues fixed in this release

For a list of customer-reported issues that were fixed in this release, see the Fix List for IBM Cloud Pak® for Data on the IBM Support website.

IBM watsonx Version 2.1.1

A new version of watsonx.governance was released in February 2025.

This release includes the following changes:

New features

This release of watsonx.governance includes the following features:

Enhancements to the watsonx.governance Model Risk Governance solution

This release includes the following enhancements:

• The new AI Model Onboarding Risk Identification questionnaire template is used during the model onboarding process to help identify the risks that are associated with a model. This questionnaire template is used in the Foundation Model Onboarding workflow.
• The new AI Use Case Risk Identification questionnaire template is used to help identify the risks associated with AI use cases. This questionnaire template is used in the Use Case Review workflow. This new questionnaire is intended to replace the AI Risk Identification Questionnaire
• The new AI Use Case and Model Risk Identification questionnaire template is used to help identify the risks that are associated with the combination of an AI use case and a model. This questionnaire template is used in the Use Case Development and Documentation workflow.
• The AI Assessment Workflow is now disabled by default. It is replaced by the Questionnaire Assessment Workflow. You can now set questionnaire templates directly in the Use Case workflow.
• The workflows, views, and dashboards were updated.

Enhancements to Governance Console

Add comments to objects

Users can now add comments to objects. For example, a user can add a comment to an Issue object to ask questions, share observations, or express thoughts. An administrator must enable the object commenting feature and also give users permission to start adding comments.

For details, see Adding comments to objects in the IBM OpenPages documentation.

Search for object types from the Primary menu

You can now search for object types in OpenPages by using the Primary menu's Search object type field..

For details, see Using the Primary menu in the IBM OpenPages documentation.

Delete objects by using a workflow

Administrators can now define workflows to delete objects in two key ways:

• Specify an operation to delete the object being processed at the end stage of the workflow. For more information, see Deleting objects on an end stage in the IBM OpenPages documentation.
• Specify an operation to delete the children or descendants of the processing object during a workflow action. For more information, see Defining a workflow action that deletes objects in the IBM OpenPages documentation.

Scan imported files with antivirus software

You can now use ClamAV to scan files for viruses and malware before importing them into OpenPages.

For details, see Configure anti-virus scanning for imported files in the IBM OpenPages documentation.

For information about these new features and other updates in Governance Console, see New features in Version 9.0.0.5 in the OpenPages documentation.

Customer-reported issues fixed in this release

For a list of customer-reported issues that were fixed in this release, see the Fix List for IBM Cloud Pak for Data on the IBM Support website.

IBM watsonx Version 2.1.0

A new version of watsonx.governance was released in December 2024.

This release includes the following changes:

New features

This release of watsonx.governance includes the following features:

Enhancements for governance management

These features extend the way you can extend and manage governance activity.

Track governance activity for custom models and tuned models

You can now extend governance to include tracking prompt templates for custom foundation models and tuned models. You can capture the data for the prompt templates, including evaluation results, in a factsheet as part of an AI use case.

For details, see Tracking prompt templates.

Enhancements for asset evaluation

Use these features to improve the quality of your asset evaluations and drive decision-making.

Run quality evaluations with historical data

You can now use an API to evaluate historical feedback data records for online deployments and prompt templates to analyze your model performance over time with a wider scope.

For details, see Quality evaluations.

Configure generative AI quality evaluations with LLM-as-a-judge

When you configure generative AI quality evaluations, you can now configure settings to calculate metrics with LLM-as-a-judge models. LLM-as-a-judge models are LLM models that you can use to evaluate the performance of other models.

For details, see Generative AI quality evaluations.

Import model deployment configuration settings

When you’re adding deployments to configure evaluations for machine learning models in production, you can import settings from your pre-production model deployment to provide model details for evaluations.

For details, see Provide model details.

Configure global explanations with LIME

You can now use the LIME (Local Interpretable Model-Agnostic explanations) algorithm to configure global explanations for machine learning models. To use LIME to configure global explanations, you must enable the global explanation parameter when you configure explainability.

For details, see Configuring explainability.

Enable GPU metrics computation

You can use detectors on GPUs to increase the speed of data safety, answer quality, and retrieval quality metric computations.

Enhancements for the governance console

Use these features to better manage your use cases in the Governance console.

Add custom tabs to the governance console dashboard

You can now add up to three custom tabs to the dashboard. For example, you might want to use custom tabs to group related panels and widgets in separate places on the Home page.

For details, see Adding a report or custom tab.

Create stacked bar charts in the governance console

You can now configure a stacked bar chart on the dashboard and in the View Designer panel. Use a stacked bar chart to compare the proportional contributions of each item to the total within a category. For example, for the Model object type, you might create a stacked bar chart that shows risks grouped by Model Category and stacked by Computed Tier.

For details, see Chart diagram examples.

Use expressions to set field values based on a respondent's questionnaire answers

When you create response actions in governance console, you can now enter an expression for the value of a field. For example, you can enter the following values:

• [$TODAY$] for the current date
• [$END_USER$] for the name of the signed on user
• [$System Fields:Description$] to set the field to the value of the Description field of the object

For details, see Setting an object's field values based on a respondent's answers.

Enhancements to the watsonx.governance Model Risk Governance solution

This release includes the following enhancements:

New Model Group object type

Groups similar models together. For example, versions of a model that use a similar approach to solve a business problem might be grouped under a Model Group object.

New Use Case Risk Scoring calculation

Aggregates metrics by breach status into risk scores to give an overall view into how the underlying models of a use case are performing.

New Discovered AI library business entity

Provides a default place to store any AI deployments that are not following sanctioned governance practices within an organization (also known as “shadow AI”).

Customer-reported issues fixed in this release

For a list of customer-reported issues that were fixed in this release, see the Fix List for IBM Cloud Pak for Data on the IBM Support website.