Get started with watsonx

Here’s some help to get you on a path to success with:

• Simple steps to register for your trial
• Trial highlights detailing what you can expect 
• Resources you may need as you're navigating the trial experience 

Bookmark this page for help with signing up for the trial and for accessing key links, including documentation, support, tutorials and more. 

Get started for free with IBM® watsonx.ai™ to build with our new studio for foundation models, generative AI and machine learning.

Step 1: Select a region

Once you arrive to the registration page, select a location between Dallas, Frankfurt or Tokyo—whichever is closest to you or where you plan on hosting your data and services.

Step 2: Log in or sign up

If you have an existing IBM Cloud account, log in with your information. If you do not already have a cloud account, you can simply sign up for a free 30 day trial. 

Step 3: Start exploring

Take a quick product tour and get started with:

• Prompt engineering in the Prompt Lab  
• Work with different foundation models for your desired generative AI use case
• Create visual data pipelines and flows
• Build machine learning models with AutoAI capabilities
• Generate synthetic tabular data sets  
• Run predictive, prescriptive optimization models   

One of the crucial early steps in the AI development process involves trying out different models to determine which best fits a specific use case. To support this exploration, the new, free watsonx.ai demo offers an entry point for users to chat with a large-language model, ask it questions and see how it responds. Users can choose to interact with an IBM-trained Granite foundation model, Meta Llama 3 models, or mixtral 8x7b-instruct model.

The demo previews the watsonx.ai Prompt Lab and is a great introduction for those AI builders beginning their AI journey. Users receive access for 30 days and 20,000 free tokens to power their queries. Only an IBM, Google or LinkedIn account is required to get started.

Need some inspiration for how to use the demo? We asked granite-13b-chat-v2 for you, and it recommended asking...

• "Can you provide a pre-built model for fraud detection in financial transactions, and how does it compare to traditional rule-based systems?"
• "How can I customize the pre-built speech recognition model to recognize and transcribe speech in my specific accent or dialect?"
• "What are the most common use cases for watsonx.ai in healthcare, and how can I apply it to improve patient outcomes and streamline clinical workflows?"

This demo does not include agents, simultaneous chat with multiple models, multi-modal models or other functionality to enhance results. Models might not have knowledge of recent events.

Get started for free with IBM® watsonx.data™ on IBM Cloud or AWS. In your free watsonx.data trial, you'll receive USD 1,500 to test drive a watsonx.data open data lakehouse instance on IBM Cloud. 

For a successful trial experience, we recommended that you are comfortable writing Structured Query Language (SQL) and are familiar with open data and table formats and data management and data engineering concepts. 

Step 1: Log in or sign up

• Create or log in to an IBM Cloud account with a payment method which is added for the automated billing that occurs after the promo credit is consumed (unless you cancel by deleting the instance before the promo credit is consumed)
• Add the promo code enabling free trial of watsonx.data for 7 to 12 days and verify  
• Read and accept the terms

Follow the tutorial to learn how to claim your free promo code, apply it, monitor the usage of the credit, get started and size your starter instance of watsonx.data.  

Step 2: Deploy your instance of watsonx.data 

Open your watsonx.data web console and follow the quickstart guided wizard to help configure your open data lakehouse infrastructure.

Step 3: Start exploring

You'll be able to try out watsonx.data's core capabilities, including:

• Elastic scaling and pause of (optional) multiple query engines—see the getting started with your query engine tutorial for additional guidance
• Support for open data and table formats to share a single copy of data across engines
• A simple, integrated console with built in governance, security and automation 

Get started with your governance strategy to direct, manage and monitor your organization’s AI activities with a free trial of IBM® watsonx.governance™. 

Step 1: Log in or sign up

• Once you arrive to the registration page, if you have an existing IBM Cloud account, log in with your information. If you do not already have a cloud account, you will be prompted to create one.

Step 2: Provision and launch 

• You can provision and launch your watsonx.governance service instance to start monitoring your model assets.

Step 3: Explore watsonx.governance capabilities

Start engaging with watsonx.governance capabilities with a sample project where you can practice:

• Evaluating prompt templates
• Tracking the prompt template throughout its lifecycle in an AI use case
• Reviewing the details that are captured in a factsheet associated with an AI use case