22 November 2024
We are entering a new age of AI led by agentic capabilities. Over the past decade, businesses have made huge strides to adopt traditional and new generative AI technology, edging closer to perfecting the art of collaboration between AI and employees to transform the way work is done. In this world we’ve seen AI assistants designed to deliver sophisticated answers while driving automation to optimize end-to-end processes, reducing workload and delivering exceptional user experiences.
Now, businesses are adopting a new form of technology designed to accelerate time to value: AI agents. Introducing these new agentic capabilities to work with your AI assistants can help users streamline processes, improve decision-making, and deliver personalized user experiences at scale.
While both AI agents and assistants are powered by large language models (LLMs), AI agents are empowered to work autonomously with minimal human supervision, operating through various levels of complexity. Some use cases expected to have the biggest immediate impact for businesses delivering high ROI include human resources (HR), procurement, sales and customer service. Agents can be deployed to handle simple tasks on the user’s behalf, while others operate in complex environments powered by the ability to reason and adapt to complete multi-step processes and highly sophisticated goals.
As assistants and agents flourish across domains, applications and cloud vendors, enterprises will need to orchestrate these autonomous systems to deliver a unified experience to employees and customers. To help enterprises embark on this journey, we are excited to introduce new cutting-edge innovations and partnerships in this space.
Today, we are very excited to introduce a new orchestrator agent feature to IBM watsonx™ Orchestrate® that uses fine-tuned foundation models, including IBM Granite™, within an agentic architecture to provide advanced reasoning capabilities and autonomous decision-making to quickly address employee needs. The AI agent orchestrates each turn of a multi-turn conversation to the right tool, assistant or human, streamlining complex processes into a single chat experience.
Think of the orchestrator agent as a supervisor of how work gets done—knowing how to leverage agents, assistants and skills to fast-track users through complex tasks. Using the low-code studio in IBM watsonx Orchestrate, enterprise teams can configure which of these AI systems the orchestrator agent should manage and infuse business logic to ensure these autonomous systems remain grounded in business rules.
From a user perspective, the orchestrator agent delivers a seamless conversational experience helping users to quickly and easily get work done. The agent powering the chat dynamically asks the user different questions, analyzes the tools at its disposal, explores AI assistants and agents that are designed to help on that specific topic, finds information in internal documents, and guides the user through each step of the process.
Based on the user responses, it will determine if it can resolve the query itself, allow the user to self-serve, or pass it to a human. Reduced decision-making and enhanced discoverability of the right tool leads users to a state of increased productivity and simplified work experience.
IBM is also releasing a new set of AI agents, combining domain-driven design, business logic and sophisticated generative AI and automation capabilities to enhance operational efficiency and drive productivity for your teams. Bringing years of first hand user experience from IBM as Client Zero and powered by pre-built skills, templates and integrations, these AI agents are custom-designed for enterprise use cases to help businesses accelerate AI agent deployment and maximize business impact across functions. We are excited to announce that AI agents for HR are now available in the IBM watsonx Orchestrate catalog for beta users. Visit the AI agents for HR webpage for more information and join the waitlist to get early access.
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