Case Study: IBM CIO organization boosts employee productivity with IBM watsonx.ai and AskIBM

IBM CIO builds AskIBM in 60 days with IBM

The IBM Chief Information Officer (CIO) organization, IBM's internal IT group, faced the challenge of freeing its employees from time-consuming routine business tasks. To empower its workforce to focus on more strategic work, the organization sought to build a generative AI-powered digital assistant using its own IBM technologies, specifically the watsonx.ai platform.

IBM implemented its solution by rapidly developing the AskIBM assistant using watsonx.ai and IBM Granite-class large language models. The foundation was built in just 60 days, and the alpha release was made available to over 280,000 employees. AskIBM automated tasks like drafting emails and summarizing documents. The solution ingested over 30,000 internal documents to provide tailored responses. A key result was a shift in user behavior; after initial education efforts, the use of effective natural language queries increased from 2-4% to around 10%, demonstrating improved adoption and unlocking greater value from the AI tool for the entire enterprise.

IBM Chief Information Officer (CIO) organization