watsonx and AI Services

IBM Cloud provides a comprehensive AI and data platform through watsonx, along with pre-built AI services for common tasks. This lesson covers the watsonx platform, Watson AI services, and how to integrate AI into your applications.

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The watsonx Platform

watsonx is IBM's enterprise AI and data platform, consisting of three components:

watsonx.ai

A studio for building, training, and deploying AI models:

Feature	Description
Foundation models	Access IBM Granite models and third-party models (Meta Llama, etc.)
Prompt Lab	Experiment with prompts and foundation models
Tuning Studio	Fine-tune models with your own data
ML pipelines	Build and deploy traditional ML models
AutoAI	Automatically generate and compare ML models

watsonx.data

A data lakehouse for analytics and AI:

Feature	Description
Lakehouse architecture	Combines data lake flexibility with warehouse performance
Open formats	Built on Apache Iceberg, Parquet, and ORC
Multiple engines	Query with Presto, Spark, or Db2
Cost optimisation	Store data in COS (cheap), query with right-sized compute
Data sharing	Share data across engines without copying

watsonx.governance

Manage AI responsibly:

Feature	Description
Model monitoring	Track model performance, drift, and bias
Factsheets	Document model lifecycle and metadata
Compliance	Meet regulatory requirements for AI transparency
Risk management	Identify and mitigate AI risks

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IBM Granite Models

Granite is IBM's family of foundation models, trained on enterprise-curated data:

Model	Purpose
Granite Code	Code generation, explanation, and translation
Granite Language	Text generation, summarisation, classification
Granite Time Series	Forecasting and anomaly detection
Granite Embedding	Text embeddings for search and RAG

Key advantages:

• Enterprise-grade — trained on curated, licensed data
• Indemnification — IBM provides IP indemnity for Granite models
• Efficient — smaller models that perform well on enterprise tasks

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Watson AI Services

IBM Cloud provides pre-built AI services for common tasks:

Watson Assistant

Build conversational AI chatbots and virtual agents: