Item: IBM watsonx Assistant
Rating: 7
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I was building a tool (Cloudbot) to manage company's cloud spend. The primary use-case was to do analysis on data from multiple data sources, with recommendations, and create dashboards to be consumed by Business Group Engineering teams. To provide assistant from the tool itself, we wanted to build a chatbot. IBM Watson Assistant helped us build one which was very accurate with all its AI capabilities. We did had to add few data points around QnA but a lot of stuff, it was able to do on its own. For a lean FinOps teams like us, handling cost optimisation or cost related queries/questions from approximately 10k engineers would have been a nightmare without Watson Assistant.

Pros and Cons

No code, very easy documentation and with OOTB intergrations
The intent recommendation and adaptive recommendation/reasoning system made it very useful
API features are awesome!

Definitely need capability to do updates of existing ML models.
Documentation is limited. Had to do training on Coursera for getting team to learn dialog skills. Learning curve was definitely there which impacted our GTM.
There was no feature to upload or capture responses from users in the artifact form.

Return on Investment

Handling of large no. of customers (Our RnD Engineers) cost queries
Cost saving as with more maturity in our FinOps practices, overall cloud spend has decreased.
No code, hence even our Finance people are able to operate and make small changes as intended.

Usability

I think it's a solid tool with some scope of improvement.

AI Capabilities

Intent recommendations helped us provide direct links to our internal blogs on Confluence or even put an emoji. It was very helpful to establish human-connect and expand our reach.

Alternatives Considered

Azure Bot Service (Microsoft Bot Framework) and Amazon Lex

Watson Assistant was cheaper and more feature rich which led to immediate ROI.

Key Insights

Do you think IBM watsonx Assistant delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with IBM watsonx Assistant's feature set?

Yes

Did IBM watsonx Assistant live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of IBM watsonx Assistant go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy IBM watsonx Assistant again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Atlassian Confluence, Jira Software, Zoom

Likelihood to Recommend

Well suited for Chatbots to be built for something like Human Resources or workforce intelligence. Also it can be helpful in e-Commerce with its ML algorithms to capture conversation insights and do forecasting of supply/demand of products.
Can't think specifically of a use-case where it will be less appropriate.

Watson Assistant - A sleek Chatbot with no coding!

Overall Satisfaction with IBM Watson Assistant