IBM Launches New Watson Capabilities to Help Businesses Build Trustworthy AI

By Michael Dabaie

International Business Machines Corp. unveiled new capabilities for its IBM Watson Artificial intelligence technology designed to help businesses build trustworthy AI.

The new capabilities include new data privacy management capabilities to help businesses meet evolving data privacy challenges and enhanced explainability for planning forecasts. IBM Planning Analytics with Watson will include a new statistical details page designed to provide more transparent and easy-to-understand facts about how a forecasting prediction was generated.

IBM Watson Studio now includes new learning capabilities as a tech preview to help businesses apply machine learning techniques to situations where data cannot or should not be moved due to reasons such as data privacy, secrecy, regulatory compliance, or the size of data involved.

IBM Watson Studio also now includes capabilities in beta designed to tackle the challenges of automating, analyzing, and forecasting time series data commonly seen in many industries like finance, manufacturing, and retail.

IBM shares were up 2% to $141.29 in morning trading.

"AI is only as useful as your trust in it. Especially in business and when the stakes are high," said Daniel Hernandez, general manager of Data and AI at IBM.

The company said an IBM-commissioned survey found that trust, transparency and explainability are top-of-mind concerns for businesses, with 84% of AI professionals surveyed agreeing that consumers are more likely to choose services from a company that offers transparency and an ethical framework on how its data and AI models are built, managed and used.

IBM said 82% of AI professionals surveyed said their organization has been negatively impacted by problems, like bias, with data or AI models.

Write to Michael Dabaie at [e-mail]

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

April 21, 2021 11:21 ET (15:21 GMT)

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