13 March 2018

IBM Announces Watson Workspace Plus

By Ann-Marie Darrough

I am thrilled to announce, on behalf of IBM Collaboration Solutions, that Watson Workspace Plus, the first team collaboration application built with Watson’s Artificial Intelligence at its core, now offers audio and video meetings, powered by Zoom, as part of our Plus offering.

This is an exciting step for us as we believe the future of work relies on intelligent workstream collaboration; which means bringing the power of Watson to your everyday work processes. As you work with others, we will empower you to work more effectively and efficiently to deliver real business outcomes.  Our goal is to arm users with the collaborative capabilities they need, as well as real-time intelligence that assists, guides, and enables users in key business scenarios. It’s truly about putting Watson to work for you.

Watson Workspace Plus comes with everything a user needs to do their best work.  With the application, users can connect and collaborate with their teams and other work groups from anywhere, on any device.  It has full, searchable history and one central place for all shared images and resources. Users can also connect third party apps to work more seamlessly with their daily tools. And, when conversations move fast, users can take advantage of our proprietary Moments feature, which summarizes hours’, days’, even weeks’ worth of conversations down to meaningful highlights – extracting key topics, actions, questions and decisions into a smart summary so users can catch up in a matter of minutes. And now, with built-in capabilities from Zoom, the leader in modern video communities, users can connect face-to-face with anyone around the globe with a single click.

We are confident that Zoom will bring tremendous value to our users.   Zoom’s unified video communications suite consistently tops the list for end-user satisfaction for instant, high-quality, reliable video, audio, and web conferencing.  And we know that coupling Watson Workspace Plus with Zoom will elevate how people collaborate.

Our partnership with Zoom doesn’t just stop with Video and Audio capabilities.  We fully intend to apply the same intelligence that’s bringing summarization, prioritization and personalization to conversations, to video meetings.  The same challenges that plague users, such as information overload and content discovery, catching up, and where to focus time and energy – applies to video meetings as much as it does to any other conversation.  Fortunately, our built-in artificial intelligence understands natural language, recognizes actionable language, and can be trained on industry specific dialect. As teams are working or meeting, Watson is actually able to progress the work forward – relying on a corpus of knowledge gleaned from previous interactions and providing insight into what will work for many different business scenarios.  This IS the future of work.

IBM has been a long-standing leader in enterprise collaboration and fully intends to continue that trend with Watson Workspace Plus.  You can rest assured you’ll get enterprise grade security, administration, and support, coupled with the thought leadership, you’ve grown to trust.

Developers, take note: Watson Workspace Plus is built upon the Watson Work Services platform, which allows users to create apps, infuse them with the same cognitive APIs, and publish right into their spaces.  Visit our developer experience to learn more.

We are committed to solving problems that other tools have not been able to and suggest you try our preview offering for free.   Stay tuned for many more exciting updates as we are working around the clock to bring the future of collaboration to today.