"You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems." 

- James Clear, Atomic Habits

Hello, I’m Maryam Sajid!

A Business Technology Management student at the University of Ottawa and I will be interning at IBM for this next year! I’m passionate about digital spaces where people can interact and I’m so excited to go to know the community here at IBM. 

During onboarding week, we were able to watch THINK 2025 and all the keynotes play out. The first keynote, by Arvind Krishna, was very interesting to me because it discussed the integration and scaling of AI into the business framework, which is a bridge the business world is currently attempting to cross. 

For the past few years, the world has been focused on AI experimentation. Models have been trained, and pilots launched, tested, and relaunched, and ROI on a productive level is still rare and exclusive. At THINK 2025, CEO Arvind Krishna stated that this era of experimentation was over. Now it’s all about tangible results through fully operational AI that you can trust, and I couldn’t agree more. 

Operational AI is essential

“The era of AI experimentation is over. Success will be defined by integration and business outcomes.”

In the past few years, companies have been at a loss as to how to approach AI and utilize it to its fullest capabilities. AI experimentation has been continuous and ongoing, and the results have been inconsequential at best. Models being stuck in POC purgatory, unending compliance headaches, and the overall lack of explainability have not given much foresight into what AI is truly capable of. It’s imperative that companies use an AI structure they can trust and rely on. That is where I believe watsonx comes in.

Making AI usable, scalable, and responsible at the enterprise level

Watsonx is IBM's answer to this question. This platform is how businesses can begin to embed AI into the core of their business infrastructure and take their company to the next level.

Businesses have their own expectations regarding AI. They need a way to build and deploy AI models faster, use their own data without compromising on security, and monitor those models across the organization. These businesses want to take an AI database and integrate it into their already existing systems rather than make a new one. Watsonx is advantageous because it is equipped to handle these challenges.

• Watsonx.ai engineers’ task-specific model and deploy them at an increasingly quick rate. This is especially important as Arvind emphasized the need for smaller, more efficient models such as Granite. This makes the process both faster and more efficient at their tasks rather than general, as seen with other LLM giants.
• Watsonx.data allows AI to take in real, contextual data from both inside and outside the business in question and helps vector databases for retrieval augmentation generation. This is very important, as nearly 99% of all data is left untouched by AI and, if used correctly, can change everything.
• Watsonx.governance ensures AI compliance and mentors models following their launch. This level of watsonx. emphasizes control and reliability.  

All these pillars ensure that watsonx. transforms AI into a real, usable infrastructure. Above all, it is a pathway for companies to truly embed AI into their already existing framework and scale their business while ensuring reliability, responsibility, and rigour.

“The winners in this era of AI will not be those who experiment the most, but those who operationalize best."

Watsonx is a reminder that AI is a tool with infinite possibilities and needs a system to be utilized to its fullest extent.

Those were my thoughts on the keynote by CEO Arvind Krishna for THINK 2025. If you’re interested in discussing this more or have any special insight, feel free to reach out at: Maryam.Sajid@ibm.com

THINK 2025 - Unlock the full value of enterprise AI

Realize the promise of AI - watsonx

Toodles:)