The Story “Generated” So Far….
The Planning Analytics Assistant has delivers generative AI functionality to promote ease of use, explainability and content creation in Planning Analytics. Up to now, the Planning Analytics Assistant was a fully IBM-managed offering. This means that customers would connect to an included instance of watsonx on IBM Cloud where we have the appropriate Granite models and watsonx software preconfigured. With this paradigm, customers did not need to operate additional software to get access to our generative AI roadmap with the PA Assistant, but it did come at the cost of customizability where customers could not bring their own AI agents, knowledge and more into Planning Analytics alongside our AI capabilities.
Introducing the Planning Analytics Assistant integration with watsonx Orchestrate!
With the July release of Planning Analytics Workspace, we’ve expanded the Planning Analytics assistant to support further integrations with watsonx Orchestrate. For the same 30$ per user per month PA license that exists today, you now can choose your flavor of the PA Assistant – IBM-managed, or customer-managed. The customer-managed approach requires you to bring your own watsonx Orchestrate and watsonx.ai solutions to integrate with your instance of Planning Analytics. This allows you to utilize Planning Analytics alongside watsonx Orchestrate through pre-built, as well as custom-built tools and AI agents.
This integration with watsonx Orchestrate and Planning Analytics Assistant not only expands the art of the possible by bringing Planning Analytics features, data and data security to watsonx Orchestrate through AI agents and watsonx Orchestrate Tools, but also enables additional deployment strategies that allow you, for example, to create an air-gapped implementation utilizing Planning Analytics Local and watsonx on Software Hub.
Once purchased, you can configure your instance of watsonx Orchestrate and watsonx.ai through the Planning Analytics Administration user interface. You can also use this interface to cycle between the IBM-managed and customer-managed flavors of the PA Assistant.
For more information on watsonx Orchestrate please visit this link.
What’s Next?
We will be investing in both generative AI with PA assistant features like Forecast Insights, Driver-based Variance Analysis and more! These features can be leveraged by both flavors of the PA Assistant.
In addition, we will be investing in improving the ease of orchestrating agentic AI with Planning Analytics by providing Planning Analytics-specific pre-built tools on the watsonx Orchestrate catalog and pre-packaged AI planning agents to help accelerate time to value for key planning workflows like forecasting and scenario analysis. Stay tuned!