IBM Shifts Focus To AI Business

International Business Machines Corporation IBM recently announced the addition of new functionalities to IBM Watson Assistant. This will enhance Artificial Intelligence (AI)-powered automation offerings and make it easier for businesses to create enhanced customer service experiences across multiple channels.

Among the announcement is an add-on for IntelePeer Atmosphere Communications Platform-as-a-Service. Users with a Watson Assistant Plus and Enterprise plan can set up voice capabilities and a new phone number for a virtual agent. IntelePeer can also connect Watson Assistant to the users’ existing phone systems.

Other new features for Watson Assistant include short-answer retrieval based on a question-answering system from IBM Research. The new feature allows the virtual agent to shorten longer sentences or passages and provide context on where answers came from.

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Also, IBM’s collaboration with IntelePeer includes a new agent app feature to provide human customer service agents a transcript made with IBM’s speech detection models.

(RPA) market is projected to witness a CAGR of 32.8% between 2021 and 2028, per a Grand View Research report. The demand for RPA is increasing as companies look to automate repetitive tasks as well as achieve cut costs and operational efficiency.

IBM’s AI platform runs on-premises and on private and public clouds. The platform  has use cases ranging from IT operations automation through a partnership between ServiceNow on Watson AIOps and creating multilingual chatbots through Watson Assistant, natural language processing as well as enterprise AI search capabilities.

The company’s endeavors to boost its AI-powered automation offerings are likely to help it attract more customers and drive the top line.

To help enterprises create reliable AI applications, IBM added new functionalities including data privacy management, new federated learning and time series capabilities to IBM Watson in April 2021.

The acquisition of myInvenio (a process mining software company) will help IBM offer its clientele a vast portfolio of AI-powered solutions for business automation. To advance its AI automation capabilities, IBM acquired Instana in November 2020 and WDG Automation in July 2020.

However, the alluring revenue potential attracted many players like Pegasystems PEGA Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism, thereby intensifying competition in the space.

Currently, IBM carries a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold).

Some better-ranked stocks in the broader technology sector include Apple AAPL and Silicon Motion Technology Corporation SIMO, each sporting a Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy) at present. You can see the complete list of today’s Zacks #1 Rank stocks here.

The long-term earnings growth rate for Apple and Silicon Motion Technology is currently pegged at 12.67% and 8%, respectively.

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