IBM campaign promotes tailored use of AI for businesses

Called ‘WatsonX Your Business,’ the campaign includes two new video spots produced by Ogilvy, featuring voiceovers from actor Oscar Isaac. In each spot, amid kaleidoscopic flurries of abstract and sci-fi imagery, the tech company seeks to position WatsonX as a tool that can enable businesses to strategically harness the power of AI – a technology that, despite the huge amount of enthusiasm it has recently generated throughout the marketing landscape, remains somewhat inscrutable to many non-experts.

“Global business leaders remain unclear about the real, transformative power of AI and how to leverage it,” wrote IBM in a statement. “The campaign is designed to define and differentiate WatsonX as a force multiplier that can accelerate impact for global business leaders as they look to apply AI solutions in new and innovative ways.”

IBM was an early pioneer in the field of AI. In 1997, the brand’s Deep Blue AI system defeated chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov – a moment that many AI experts regard as being pivotal for their field. 13 years later, the brand unveiled Watson, a question-answering model that famously defeated two former Jeopardy! champions – another watershed moment for AI.

Since then, as companies like DeepMind (now a Google subsidiary) and OpenAI have emerged and made their own landmark contributions to the field, IBM has largely been devoting its efforts towards helping businesses adopt AI to boost productivity and performance.

“In this new era of AI, businesses need bespoke solutions designed for value creation,” said Jonathan Adashek, IBM’s senior vice-president of marketing and communications. “With this new campaign, we’re reinforcing the transformative power of AI for business to multiply output and ultimately help customers improve their outcomes.” 

IBM has also set its sights on generative AI, a subset of AI that’s designed to produce content like text, images and code, and which has recently been the focus of a considerable amount of legal and ethical controversy. In a recent interview with The Drum, Matt Candy, the newly appointed global managing partner of generative AI at IBM Consulting, said: “Generative AI is the thing that will fuel the next wave of business value within organizations. It will boost employee productivity, enable new experiences for customer engagement, allow for new business models and drive efficiency for the production of content and code.”

Monday also marked the launch of OpenAI's ChatGPT Enterprise, a version of the company's viral AI chatbot which – like WatsonX – is intended exclusively for businesses.

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