The company announced the advances at its 2021 Think Conference.

IBM (NYSE: IBM) has designed innovations around its hybrid cloud and AI platform aimed at helping businesses manage their digital transformation, particularly after the pandemic.

“IBM is all-in on hybrid cloud and AI because we understand that businesses need a clear and credible path to modernizing their mission-critical systems,” IBM said in a statement. “The innovations highlight IBM’s role in helping its clients and partners accelerate their digital transformations, return to work smarter, and build strategic ecosystems that can drive better business outcomes.”

Watson Orchestrate

Business users can deploy an AI engine, dubbed Watson Orchestrate, that can streamline their work across disparate tools and applications. For instance, they can connect from inside the engine to Slack and email in natural language as well as to business applications such as Salesforce, SAP, and Workday.

Orchestrate selection sequences the prepackaged skills necessary to perform the task at hand. Routine tasks such as scheduling meetings or obtaining approvals become simpler because the AI engine quickly connects up the relevant apps, data, and the user’s work history.

“Watson Orchestrate is the latest AI-powered automation capability from IBM designed to help people reclaim a significant amount of their time to focus on more strategic tasks,” the company said.

AutoSQL

IBM also announced a new technology, AutoSQL, for its Cloud Pak For Data.

Introduced three years ago, IBM Cloud Pak for Data gives enterprises the capabilities to apply AI to data across any hybrid cloud environment.

AutoSQL automates how customers access, integrate and manage data without ever having to move it, regardless of whether the data decides how it is stored.

This breakthrough capability “uses AI to help customers get answers to distributed queries as much as 8x faster than previously and at nearly half the cost of other compared data warehouses.”

CodeNet

IBM also announced the release of Project CodeNet, a large-scale open-source dataset comprising 14 million code samples, 500 million lines of code, and 55 programming languages to enable AI to understand and translate code.

“We will look back on this year and last as the moment the world entered the digital century in full force,” said IBM Chairman and CEO Arvind Krishna. “In the same way that we electrified factories and machines in the past century, we will use hybrid cloud to infuse AI into software and systems in the 21st century.”

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