BENGALURU : IBM Corp. has made several advances in artificial intelligence (AI), hybrid cloud, and quantum computing to help its clients and partners accelerate their digital transformation journeys and return to work smarter post the pandemic.

“We will look back on this year and the last as moments the world entered the digital century in full force," Arvind Krishna, chairman and chief executive officer, IBM, said at Think 2021, the annual flagship event of the firm. “In the same way that we have electrified factories and machines in the past century, we will use hybrid cloud to infuse AI into software and systems in the 21st century."

A new IBM study on the adoption of AI for business revealed that the imperative to embed AI into business processes became more urgent during the pandemic. Of the IT professionals surveyed, 43% said that their companies had accelerated their rollout of AI. And nearly half of global IT professionals surveyed said they evaluate AI providers in large part on their ability to automate processes.

IBM launched Watson Orchestrate, a new interactive AI capability designed to increase the personal productivity of all business professionals helping them save up to 50% of their time to focus on more strategic work. “Requiring no IT skills to use, professionals initiate work using Watson Orchestrate in a very human way, using collaboration tools such as Slack and email in natural language. It also connects to popular business applications such as Salesforce, SAP and Workday," IBM said.

IBM has also launched Maximo Mobile, a mobile platform designed to help field technicians gather insights from real-time data even in remote locations to solve complex issues.

IBM Research is releasing Project CodeNet, a large-scale, opensource dataset comprisingof 14 million code samples, 500 million lines of code and 55 programming languages, to enable AI’s understanding and translation of code. IBM believes Project CodeNet will serve as a valuable benchmark dataset for source-to-source translation and transitioning legacy codebases to modern code languages, helping businesses speed up their application of AI.

For the financial services sector, IBM has collaborated with EY to establish a Centre of Excellence that offers new open hybrid cloud solutions built with Red Hat OpenShift for the IBM Cloud for financial services. The solutions will be centred on regulatory compliance, digital trust and security, leveraging IBM technology and EY experience working with financial institutions to drive digital transformation and accelerate cloud adoption.

As part of its $1 billion investment to support the partner ecosystem, IBM said it will offer new competencies, skills training, and benefits to ensure its partners succeed in an increasingly competitive market. According to IBM, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) Ltd is one such partner which has already achieved competencies for building an industrial and manufacturing AI solution for data scientists and AI developers.

To make it faster and easier for developers to use quantum software, IBM launched Qiskit Runtime, software that is containerized and hosted in the hybrid cloud, instead of running most of its code on the user's computer.

Earlier this month, IBM launched the world's first 2 nanometer (nm) chip to cater to the demand for increased chip performance and energy efficiency in the era of hybrid cloud, AI, and the internet of things (IoT). The new chip is projected to achieve 45% higher performance, or 75% lower energy use, than the most advanced 7 nm node chips today.