IBM is adopting a „Client Zero” approach in its business proposal for agentic AI, after implementing the strategy for 270,000 employees worldwide. Lee Ji-eun, IBM Korea's Chief Technology Officer, provided clarifications on the presented results.
Companies are intrigued by AI's promise to introduce new efficiencies into business processes, but questions around costs, return on investment, employee experience and expectations, and change management remain significant concerns, according to CIO.com.
To address its clients„ concerns, IBM is adopting a ”Client Zero„ approach after introducing AI directly into over 70 of its business domains to solve real-world problems, and through this effort, it suggests use cases that client companies can utilize based on IBM's own experience, said Lee Ji-eun, IBM Korea's chief technology officer, during a press conference held at the IFC office in Yeouido, Seoul, where she presented IBM's differentiated ”Agentic AI" strategy.
Conclusion? „We achieved $3.5 billion in productivity improvements over the past two years by applying artificial intelligence in over 70 business areas,” explained CTO Lee Ji-eun.
According to Lee Ji-eun, IBM uses AI-powered digital agents in areas such as human resources, finance, sales, and IT. Within IBM’s human resources department, its AskHR agent has been used to automate 94% of simple tasks, such as leave requests and pay stubs. In IT, AskIT reduced the number of calls and chats for the IT support team by 70%, she said.
Furthermore, IBM has integrated AI agents from each domain into a single platform. Defining an ecosystem that connects AI agents, assistants, and business applications from each domain into a single integrated environment as „agentic AI,” CTO Lee Ji-eun explained that AI agents that perform tasks autonomously can focus on their own areas of expertise while being organically connected to each other, like a network, to efficiently execute complex workflows. This integrated approach allows IBM to manage work across various departments and functions from a single interface.
Kim Ji-kwan, Executive Director of the Customer Engineering Department, who participated in the demonstration, presented Watsonx Orchestrate as a central platform for developing generative AI. According to Executive Director Kim Ji-kwan, Watsonx Orchestrate integrates multiple business applications and AI agents into a single interface to intelligently analyze user requests and connect them to the appropriate path.
„It goes beyond question and answer and flexibly extends to include the execution of specific tasks, knowledge base searches, and human intervention, processing tasks that previously took minutes or hours in seconds or minutes,” he said.
In addition to providing an integrated platform, CTO Lee Ji-eun stated that IBM's AI strategy emphasizes openness, cost-effectiveness, hybrid technology, and expertise as key differentiators.
Regarding openness, IBM provides an environment where companies can flexibly use open source technologies and various partner technologies, so that they are not locked into specific technologies, she said, explaining that this approach also helps reduce costs by providing optimized language models for the scale of work.
The company's hybrid approach offers additional flexibility, allowing organizations to run AI-based workloads across diverse environments, from public cloud to on-premises. Regarding expertise, CTO Lee Ji-eun stated that the platform supports the formulation of corporate strategy by incorporating industry-specific AI.