IBM has announced a new business AI data tool.

Reuters said that International Business Machines (IBM) announced on Tuesday an AI-based data platform called Watsonx to help companies use the technology in their businesses. This is part of a race to stay active in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) and to get an edge over competitors.

After IBM’s Watson software won the game show Jeopardy ten years ago, it got a lot of attention. Now, a new AI platform has been announced.

At the time, the New York-based company said, “Watson could ‘learn’ and process human language.” Watson was hard for companies to use, though, because of how much it cost.

After the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, a chatbot that acts like a person, tech giants are paying more attention to the race to add AI to their products. They are also looking for new ways to do business.

Before IBM’s annual Think conference, CEO Arvind Krishna told Reuters, “This time, the lower cost of implementing large language AI models means the chances of success are high.”

Krishna said, “When something gets 100 times cheaper, it creates a very different kind of attraction.”

“It’s hard to make the model in the first place, but once you have it, it’s easy to change it for a hundred or a thousand different tasks, and anyone can do it.”

In the coming years, AI could make some back-office jobs at IBM less important. “That doesn’t mean the total number of jobs goes down,” he said, referring to news stories that said IBM was stopping a hiring process that AI could do.

“That means we can put a lot more money into things that create value…We hired more people than we fired because we’re putting people to work in areas where our clients have a lot more work,” he said.

He also said, “IBM was also moving towards a more open ecosystem and working with Hugging Face and other open-source AI software development hubs.”

IBM said, “Companies can use the Watsonx platform to train and deploy AI models, automatically generate code using natural language, and use different large language models built for different purposes, like making chemicals or modelling climate change.”