'Watson x.' platform, one-stop solution for deploying and managing AI for enterprises
Providing AI lifecycle governance, risk management, and regulatory compliance

“In order to overcome the risks that may arise when companies apply AI to their business, ‘AI governance’ that secures reliability in the process of AI data, AI models, and AI introduction and expansion should be considered from the beginning of introduction.”

Kim Hyun-jung, CEO of IBM Consulting Korea, explained this at the press conference for the launch of 'IBM Watson x.Governance' held by IBM Korea in Yeouido on the 14th. IBM announced that 'Watson x.Governance' helps companies comply with regulations and policies in their AI-based businesses safely and transparently.

According to IBM Korea, many companies are reviewing the development of various generative AI and foundation models, including the Large Language Model (LLM), but the actual return on investment (ROI) is only 8.3% as of 2022.

At the same time, companies are experiencing difficulties due to AI's risk factors, such as 'hallucination', where AI presents lies as if they are true, and from a legal perspective, copyright issues, data security, personal information leaks, hacking, and regulations are becoming issues.

“For companies to successfully introduce AI into their business, it is very important to be prepared to utilize the technology as well as the technology itself,” said CEO Kim Hyun-jung.

IBM Korea proposes governance as a way to solve this. The recently released 'Watson x. Governance' is one of the elements of the 'Watson x' platform, an AI and data platform released last May. IBM's 'Watson x' platform is an integrated platform that provides companies with the ability to build, execute, and deploy AI, and consists of △Watson x.ai △Watson x.data △Watson x.governance.

'IBM Watson x.Governance' is a toolkit that provides solutions that organizations need to manage AI risks and comply with AI regulations across the enterprise. In particular, Watson x.Governance is built on explainability, fairness, robustness, transparency, and privacy, and can provide solutions to security and reliability, which are the biggest concerns for enterprises when introducing AI.

“AI governance is an AI guardrail. It enables companies to develop AI well and use it safely and ethically,” said Lee Ji-eun, executive vice president and chief technology officer (CTO) of IBM Korea.

IBM's strategy is different from the global big techs' fierce focus on developing LLM models. IBM has focused on providing a platform specialized for business from the corporate perspective from the beginning. Companies need various models when utilizing AI for business, and IBM chose to build an 'open source alliance' so that they can utilize various data and open sources without relying on a specific company's technology.

Companies using IBM's integrated platform 'Watson x' can freely utilize open source on the platform to secure sovereignty and add to existing ones. Watson x. Governance supports all environments, including cloud and on-premise, and can detect bias and check errors for any model.

IBM Watson x.Governance provides technologies for three areas: AI lifecycle governance, AI risk management, and regulatory compliance.

'AI Lifecycle Governance' manages the entire lifecycle from the process of companies acquiring data to front-end development and fine-tuning, monitoring, classifying, managing, and automating models. 'AI Risk Management' is a dashboard that provides control through the platform while using AI models from various open sources. It includes both LLM and traditional AI/ML.

For example, the 'AI factsheet' provided to manage AI risk factors implements explainable AI by transparently displaying the composition of AI, like a nutritional information label on food, thereby enabling advance detection and prevention of risks such as hallucinations.

“IBM has expertise in AI governance based on its long-standing interest in AI governance, including its AI Ethics Board and IBM Policy Research Institute,” the executive said.

Watson x. Governance is now available in full version worldwide, including Korea. IBM Korea said, "This year, we are in the verification phase with customers and a dedicated team based on the Watson x. platform."

“In 2024, generative AI is expected to provide diverse values beyond LLM based on diverse data,” said the executive director. “In particular, IBM will begin to seriously consider multi-modal AI.”