Marketers can now employ Watson in any cloud or location

IBM’s Watson, a celebrity among AI systems following his champion-winning stint on the TV show Jeopardy!, is now coming to a cloud near you.

On Tuesday, the company announced that Watson software will now be made available to any cloud, vendor or other business.

Any environment. Previously, Watson was primarily running on IBM’s cloud services. Now the Watson services can run in any environment — any cloud, multiple clouds, on-premises or hybrid combo.

The capabilities include IBM Watson Studio for building and training machine learning, Watson OpenScale platform for managing multiple instances of AI regardless of where they originated, Watson Assistant for building conversational interfaces and Watson Assistant Discovery Extension for recognizing patterns in unstructured data.

Watson is made available outside of IBM’s cloud through the IBM Cloud Private for Data, an open architecture for AI that includes application-building capabilities.

Business Automation Intelligence. “The flexibility this affords,” IBM said in its announcement, “can remove one of the major obstacles to scaling AI, since businesses can now leave data in secure or preferred environments and take Watson to that data.”

In addition to this new Watson everywhere, the company is announcing the IBM Business Automation Intelligence with Watson. Available later this year, it allows AI to be applied to business applications, to measure the effects of AI on business outcomes and to automate workflows.

Why you should care. This new announcement means that Watson, already one of the most diversely employed AI-for-hire services, is now available for deployment wherever a brand’s data is hosted.

Previously, brands have been employing Watson via API for a variety of uses, including analysis of social audiences, creating intelligent ads, editing movie trailers, explaining tax preparation, powering marketing portals and more.

Now, Watson can be integrated on-site or in private clouds, which may speed up processes and allow for better security of user data. This is one more step in the march of advanced artificial intelligence to become a standard feature of every part of a marketer’s portfolio.

About The Author

Barry Levine covers marketing technology for Third Door Media. Previously, he covered this space as a Senior Writer for VentureBeat, and he has written about these and other tech subjects for such publications as CMSWire and NewsFactor. He founded and led the web site/unit at PBS station Thirteen/WNET; worked as an online Senior Producer/writer for Viacom; created a successful interactive game, PLAY IT BY EAR: The First CD Game; founded and led an independent film showcase, CENTER SCREEN, based at Harvard and M.I.T.; and served over five years as a consultant to the M.I.T. Media Lab. You can find him at LinkedIn, and on Twitter at xBarryLevine.