During their World of Watson (WoW) event last week in Las Vegas, IBM showcased the evolving maturity of their artificial intelligence technologies. There were many announcements of new tools for the enterprise, including robust and easily accessible analytics services, AI for iOS apps, and Slack chatbots.

The overarching theme of WoW seemed to be that the decades of empty promises about AI for the enterprise have finally panned out. AI is here and IBM is striving to make it accessible, dare we even say “easy,” for professionals to leverage.

To get a sense for the excitement of what’s going on not only in the world of artificial intelligence, but in digital business in general, watch SiliconANGLE’s interview with Faisal Masud, Chief Digital Officer at Staples. Masud is enthusiastic about all the tools at his disposal to make the Staples digital first strategy a reality. The perfect case study for IBM’s Watson ambitions is their partnership with Staples in an audacious effort to transform the disconnected and “pretend” Staples “Easy Button” into something very real.

The aim of Staples in giving life to their iconic Easy Button goes well beyond what Amazon was attempting with their Dash Buttons. Yes, the next generation Easy Button will be an engine for e-commerce, enabling one step ordering for customers. But by leveraging the IBM Watson suite of analytics and predictive capabilities, Staples envisioning an Easy Button service that supports natural language conversations, order analytics for both the customer and Staples, and integration with backend supply chain systems.

Continuing the theme of “easy,” IBM also showcased their new Watson Virtual Agent. Several weeks ago, the Opus Research team had an opportunity to preview this new solution. In a market for intelligent assistants that is becoming crowded, several features set the IBM Watson Virtual Agent apart. The solution’s primary differentiators stem from IBM’s aim to streamline both the implementation and on-going maintenance of the solution, providing a simplified experience to enterprise users.

The Virtual Agent is offered as a Software as a Service (SaaS) only. IBM runs the service and maintains an ever-expanding set of pre-trained conversations. The aim is to start every company off with a full suite of conversations already geared towards their industry and then give them the benefit of new conversations as the communal library is expanded. The idea of everyone in an industry, such as telecommunications, “sharing” customer service conversations is a novel one.

IBM’s Virtual Agent comes with a toolset designed to be used by business professionals, not programmers or engineers. Adding new questions and answers is straightforward. There’s also a preconfigured chat window that can be tweaked to match the brand’s online presence and then quickly launched on the corporate website.

As IBM World of Watson showed, the age of artificial intelligence in the enterprise is definitely here. Now it’s up to all of us to seek out and deploy the tools that let us cash in on the decades-long promise. The easier those tools are, the better.

Categories: Conversational Intelligence, Intelligent Assistants, Articles

Tags: IBM, AI, Watson, intelligent Assistants, World of Watson, Staples