BI-focused watsonx assistant makes its debut – SiliconANGLE

Artificial intelligence should be a huge boon to the business intelligence software market, but according to IBM Corp., companies are struggling to use decision-making tools because they are too complex.

IBM recently previewed its watsonx BI Assistant, which employs AI to help users make decisions about their business and simplifies the process of analyzing data systems to obtain insights.

“Only 30% of users that actually need business insights to make business decisions are actually leveraging these BI tools,” said Alvin Francis (pictured, left), vice president of product management, business analytics, at IBM Corp. “Watsonx BI Assistant is targeted at addressing this adoption issue to ensure that BI is available for the decision-makers when they need it, how they need it, in a way that is easily consumable.”

Francis and Tony Baer (pictured right), principal at dbinsight LLC, spoke with theCUBE Research’s Dave Vellante at IBM Think, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed how the BI software field has developed and IBM’s hopes for the future of watsonx. (* Disclosure below.)

AI clears up BI bottleneck

It’s not news that AI has been transformative for the entire tech industry, including BI. Advancing the BI market has previously been difficult because business leaders have to rely on data analysts to create dashboards with which they can interact.

“The data analyst organization becomes a bottleneck in that entire process,” Francis said. “With BI Assistant … our goal is to ensure that the decision-makers can easily access the business insights they need when they need it without having the dependency of a data analyst.”

IBM hopes to integrate watsonx BI Assistant with watsonx Orchestrate, an AI-powered automation tool, and use it to boost its AI co-pilot, Cognos Analytics. Implementing AI will automate a lot of the BI process, while giving company decision-makers a more intuitive interface, allowing them to gain insights faster.

“What we’re seeing today now with natural language  and generative AI is that we expect to have the same experience that Captain James T. Kirk did on the Starship Enterprise back in 1968,” Baer said. “Which is essentially to figuratively talk to our computers and maybe literally talk to our computers and ask questions in our conversational language.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE Research’s coverage of IBM Think: 

(* Disclosure: IBM Corp. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither IBM nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE