Blogs

By Mimi Poon, General Manager, IBM Hong Kong

Partnering with our business partners including Compucon, Ingram Micro, ELM, ICO Tech, LPS, Network-Applications, OneAsia, TechNet, and Tech-Trans, we gathered over 300 customers from 169 companies at the IBM Hong Kong Technology Forum on June 19. Together, we discussed how to scale AI for business productivity and efficiency in an ethical and responsible way through collaborative and open innovation.

The event was a resounding success.  I am grateful to all our business partners and customers who attended and engaged with us throughout the event. A special THANK YOU to our esteemed guest speakers who took time out of their busy schedules to share their insights and expertise through the panel discussions – and they are:

Mr. Alfian Michael Sharifuddin (Left 1st in the photo above), Managing Director & Head of Technology and Operations, Hong Kong and Mainland China, DBS Bank (Hong Kong) Limited; Mr. Forrest Chai (Left 2nd), Chief Information Officer, Hang Seng Bank Limited; and Mr. Kenny Au (Left 4th), Acting Head of Operations Division, the Bank of East Asia, Limited, who joined the Panel Discussion of “Scaling the Impact of Generative AI with Trusted Data and Governance”, hosted by Mr. Chris Leung (Left 5th), Data & Technology Transformation Leader, Consulting, IBM Hong Kong.

Mr. Arthur Wong (Left 1st in the photo above), Founder & CEO, Alpha Square Technology; Dr. Connie Yuen (Left 2nd), Associate Professor and Head, Department of Applied Data Science, Hong Kong Shue Yan University; Mr. Edwin Hui (Left 3rd), Head of Data & Analytics Office, Hang Seng Bank; and Dr. Toa Charm (Left 5th), Founding Chairman, Data Literacy Association who attended the Panel Discussion of “Is Your Data AI-Ready?” hosted by Mr. Kayton Wan (Left 6th), Data & AI Sales Leader of IBM Hong Kong.

Mr. Jim Man (Left 2nd in the photo above), Chief Information Officer, United Asia Finance Limited, Mr. Dave Chen (Left 4th), Vice President, Hong Kong Computer Society, and Mr. Eugene Lai (Left 5th), Principal Architect, Asia Data Office, Manulife, who attended the Panel Discussion of “Building the Right Infrastructure for Business Needs” hosted by Mr. Kelvin Li (Left 1st), Systems Sales Leader of IBM Hong Kong.

The meaningful discussions and insights are great testament to the transformative potential of AI and hybrid cloud technologies.  In today’s rapidly evolving technology landscape, AI adoption has become a top priority for businesses worldwide.  At IBM, we focus on the practical business uses of AI, including code modernization, customer service, digital labor and more, with building trustworthy and advancing responsible AI at the core of our agenda.

As we move forward, IBM is committed to pushing the boundaries of AI with ethical development and transparent deployment.  Our flagship AI and data platform, IBM watsonx, that we proudly announced in July 2023, has emerged as a game-changer, driving value creation, enabling businesses to scale, increase productivity, and seize new market opportunities. With just 10 months on the market, we have made significant progress. Let me share some notable use cases:

1. Enhancing Customer Experiences:

• Bouygues Telecom, a leading French communications service provider, faced big challenge in keeping up with an enormous volume of support calls.  Thankfully, Bouygues had partnered with IBM previously in one of our first pre-IBM watsonx™ AI deployments. This phase 1 engagement laid the groundwork perfectly for AI’s injection into the telecom’s call center during phase 2.

Today, Bouygues handles over 800,000 calls a month with IBM watsonx Assistant, and IBM watsonx Orchestrate helps alleviate the repetitive tasks that agents previously had to handle manually.  The agents’ pre-and-post-call workloads were reduced by 30%.  In addition, 8 million customer-agent conversations have now been summarized with consistent accuracy for the creation of actionable insights, resulting in 40% improvement in customer satisfaction.

Taken together, these technologies have made Bouygues a disruptor in the world of customer care, yielding a USD 5 million projected reduction in yearly operational costs and placing them at the forefront of AI technology. ¹

• NatWest, a leading UK bank.  According to the bank’s Artificial Intelligence Lead Ankit Chhajer, customer expectations have skyrocketed in banking because of the great services provided by tech giants and FinTechs.  Customers want to bank at the time of their choice, anywhere, with instant communication and instant assurance for their finances.  NatWest worked with IBM to enhance its virtual assistant, Cora.  Cora is a built with a range of technologies, including IBM technologies like IBM watsonx Assistant, which uses machine learning and generative AI capabilities to understand customers’ inquiries and provide the customers with access to a wider range of information through conversational interactions. This helps making Cora not only feel more 'human' and, most importantly, a trusted, safe, and reliable digital partner for their customers. ²

2. Increasing Productivity:

• EY Organization and IBM launched EY.ai Workforce, a digital worker platform for the HR function powered by IBM watsonx Orchestrate, uses AI to automate HR tasks and streamline HR operations and processes. 

EY.ai Workforce combines AI and automation from IBM watsonx Orchestrate with the EY organization’s domain knowledge in HR transformation to help organizations innovate their HR processes.   Packaging automations into individual tasks, watsonx Orchestrate guides employees through common processes such as drafting job descriptions and extracting payroll reports. The natural language interface is designed to make it easy for all employees to access these automations, freeing up their time to focus on higher value work.³

• At IBM, we have AskHR system, powered by watsonx, supports over 280,000 IBMers worldwide. It is a self-service, one stop digital assistant that gives real-time responses to HR-related questions and services requests like checking vacation balance, requesting time off, viewing compensation history, retrieving pay slips, searching colleagues, initiating colleague department transfer and cost centre changes, etc.

3. Elevating Digital Experiences:

• Watsonx has enhanced the digital experiences of significant sports events like the Masters, Wimbledon, ESPN Fantasy Football, and the U.S. Open, providing real-time match analysis and personalized fan experiences.

Taking Wimbledon as an example, by leveraging the capabilities of hybrid cloud and enterprise-grade AI, IBM Consulting partnered with Wimbledon to develop an open and flexible innovation platform. This platform transforms more than 2.7 million data points from Wimbledon into actionable insights, automates essential business processes, and secures Wimbledon's digital operations.

For two weeks from July 1st to 14th, IBM watsonx was helping to tell some of the most captivating stories of the tournament. Available in the official app and on Wimbledon.com, the new Catch Me Up feature offers AI-generated summaries for each singles player, detailing the events of their last match and the challenges they will face in their next one. Users can customize their Catch Me Up list by adding their favorite players. 

To create the Catch Me Up summaries, the team utilizes the IBM-developed Large Language Model (LLM) of Granite family trained on meticulously reviewed, transparent, enterprise-grade data. With 13 billion parameters, this model is optimized for dialogue applications such as virtual agents and chatbots.

4. Scaling AI-Powered Open Innovation:

• Granite is IBM's flagship series of LLM foundation models based on decoder-only transformer architecture designed for coding and language tasks in generative AI. Trained on trusted enterprise data spanning internet, academic, code, legal and finance, Granite is purpose-built for business, engineered from the ground up to ensure trust and scalability in AI-driven applications.  At THINK 2024, IBM announced to release a family of Granite models into open source and launched InstructLab in collaboration with Red Hat. InstructLab is a first-of-its-kind model alignment technique to bring open-source community contributions directly into LLMs. Open-sourcing a family of its most advanced and performant language and code Granite models, IBM is inviting clients, developers and global experts to build on these strengths and push the boundaries of what AI can achieve in enterprise environments. ⁴

Trained in 116 programming languages, the code Granite series can improve the productivity of human programmers by more than 20%.⁵ In Hong Kong, we have clients applied watsonx for JSON code generation, COBOL code conversation and synthetic data generation etc. In addition, one APAC client has chosen IBM watsonx for code convertion due to its on-premise characteristic to prevent their sensitive source code exposed to internet with risk data leakage.

• Beyond IBM consulting, other services organizations like NTT DATA Business Solutions, TCS, and Wipro have established Centers of Excellence for the watsonx generative AI platform, focusing on developing embedded generative AI solutions for clients.⁶

Since the launch of IBM watsonx, more than 150 enterprise clients have shared their success stories. There are also many successful cases in Hong Kong, for example: 

• A government engineering department adopted watsonx as a digital assistant to facilitate its incident report generation and enhance working efficiency. Using the Incident Reporting Chat Robot powered by IBM watsonx Assistant and watsonx.ai, after the engineers have recorded information of incidents, the AI assistant allows rapid automated generation of accurate incident reports based on the standardized reporting templates.
• A leading financial services client utilized watsonx.ai, watsonx Assistant, and IBM business partner Soul Machines' Digital Person to power its Avatar, a wealth digital assistant, facilitating the Relationship Managers (RM) to understand their financial products and market dynamics. In turn, RMs can save time on knowledge acquisition and focus on value-added tasks that enhance customer service.
• A transportation client in Hong Kong, with the support of IBM Consulting, drives innovation through generative AI technology. By leveraging watsonx.ai and IBM Consulting services, they have achieved significant productivity gains in SQL statement and synthetical data generation tasks, reducing development time and enabling accelerated innovation.
• In partnership with IBM Consulting, a local sports and entertainment industry player is reinventing its customer experience. By harnessing the power of watsonx.ai, they provide their club members with sports performance summarization insights, significantly enhancing their data literacy and engagement experience.

Embracing the AI-Powered Future Together

The success stories and cross-boundary partnerships underscore IBM’s commitment to empowering industries and businesses with advanced AI capabilities, driving innovation, and preparing for the AI-first era. As we move forward, IBM emphasizes responsible AI development and usage, investing in talent development to address the skills gap. In Hong Kong, our partnerships with clients, business partners, industry associations, and educational organizations aim to embrace the AI-powered future together.

We look forward to continuing this tradition and co-creating more transformative AI use cases with our clients and business partners. Together, we will shape the future of AI, driving productivity and innovation in a responsible and ethical manner.

About the blog writer: 

Mimi Poon, General Manager, IBM China/Hong Kong Limited
@LinkedIn

Mimi Poon is the General Manager of IBM Hong Kong, responsible for the IBM business in Hong Kong and Macao region.  She leads the company to assist clients in digital transformation by adopting a hybrid cloud and AI platform.  Besides her IBM role, Mimi is a member of the Advisory Committee of the Department of Systems Engineering and Engineering Management of The Chinese University of Hong Kong, the Advisory Committee of the IT Innovation Lab in School Programmes under the Office of the Government Chief Information Officer, and the ICT Services Advisory Committee of the Hong Kong Trade Development Council. She is also a council member and Director of Highly-skilled Professional Development at the Hong Kong Computer Society.

¹ IBM Blog: Bouygues Becomes the AI Standard-Bearer in French Telecom. Last updated 10 November 2023. https://www.ibm.com/blog/business-process-reengineering-examples/
² IBM News: NatWest and IBM Collaborate on Generative AI Initiative to Enhance Customer Experience
³ IBM News: EY and IBM Launch Artificial Intelligence Solution Designed to Help Increase Productivity and Drive Efficiencies within HR
⁴ IBM. IBM Unveils Next Chapter of watsonx with Open Source, Product & Ecosystem Innovations to Drive Enterprise AI at Scale
⁵ IBM. “Granite Code Models: A Family of Open Foundation Models for Code Intelligence”
⁶ IBM. https://newsroom.ibm.com/IBM-Expands-Routes-to-Growth-for-Partners