We've completed a POC of the IBM Watsonx Assistant for Z (WA4Z) which used IBM Cloud for the AI.

First off, because we used IBM Cloud this was very fast to get started and the LLM was trained in z/TPF (my favourite operating system), z/VM and of course z/OS. This means it was immediately useable to us and after a few tries we had IBM use the governance tooling to alter the weighting in favour of z/TPF for us over z/OS.

At this stage novices in z/TPF were able to ask questions and get SME level explanations, I am a z/TPF SME and asked it some questions about things I did not know the answer to which generated good responses which included the source decument that was used as part of the response. I found the odd glitch in some answers which appeared to be due to the original document ingestion when building the LLM and these were addressed and corrected.

Next step was to import some company and 3rd party application documents into our instance of the LLM so we could then ask application specific questions too at which point we connected the POC to our applications tooling and encouraged developers to use it.

Overall this ws a very worthwhile POC and I thank our IBM account team for arranging it and the IBM WA4Z team for supporting the POC so well.

I'm happy to answer any questions on this!

Stephen #IBMChampion

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Stephen Spence Fellow
Fellow, Architecture
Travelport
Slough
+447740638397
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I second Steve's thoughts.  We had a successful POC that gave an opportunity to see the capability Watsonx assistant for Z can provide, as well as gave us food for thought on what it can be.  We have started building some of those features with IBM to take this product to a place where it can help modernize and transform legacy code and processes to a modern technology stack.  I think the product had huge potential with leveraging the TPF unique way of working around data store and processing.  Looking forward to help mature this technology and apply on real critical workload.

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Saurabh Gupta
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Original Message:
Sent: Thu October 23, 2025 12:48 PM
From: Stephen Spence
Subject: POC of IBM Watsonx Assistant for Z (WA4Z)

We've completed a POC of the IBM Watsonx Assistant for Z (WA4Z) which used IBM Cloud for the AI.

First off, because we used IBM Cloud this was very fast to get started and the LLM was trained in z/TPF (my favourite operating system), z/VM and of course z/OS. This means it was immediately useable to us and after a few tries we had IBM use the governance tooling to alter the weighting in favour of z/TPF for us over z/OS.

At this stage novices in z/TPF were able to ask questions and get SME level explanations, I am a z/TPF SME and asked it some questions about things I did not know the answer to which generated good responses which included the source decument that was used as part of the response. I found the odd glitch in some answers which appeared to be due to the original document ingestion when building the LLM and these were addressed and corrected.

Next step was to import some company and 3rd party application documents into our instance of the LLM so we could then ask application specific questions too at which point we connected the POC to our applications tooling and encouraged developers to use it.

Overall this ws a very worthwhile POC and I thank our IBM account team for arranging it and the IBM WA4Z team for supporting the POC so well.

I'm happy to answer any questions on this!

Stephen #IBMChampion

------------------------------
Stephen Spence Fellow
Fellow, Architecture
Travelport
Slough
+447740638397
------------------------------