Market Perspectives

The annual Ventana Research Digital Innovation Awards showcase advances in the productivity and potential of business applications, as well as technology that contributes significantly to the improved processes and performance of an organization. Our goal is to recognize technology and providers that have introduced noteworthy digital innovations to advance business and IT.

Ventana Research has awarded IBM its prestigious 2024 Artificial Intelligence Digital Innovation Award for IBM watsonx.governance. This award is given to the provider that best exemplifies innovation in any use or application of AI across business and/or IT. All finalists in the areas of expertise — AI, Analytics and Data, Customer Experience, Data, Digital Business, Digital Technology, Human Capital Management, Marketing, Office of Finance, Office of Revenue and Operations and Supply Chain — are considered for this award.

Enterprises that make a higher proportion of business decisions based on data stand to gain competitive advantage, responding faster to customer and worker demands for more innovative, data-rich applications and personalized experiences. The need for enterprises to operate smarter requires insights derived from analytics including AI. Enterprises of all sizes and industries are challenged to manage, govern and process an increasing torrent of data generated in many formats by a multitude of disparate sources, while at the same time increasing analytic agility and accelerating business decision making through the use of discovery, machine learning, predictive analytics and visualization, as well as generative AI. Doing so requires cultural and organizational change, as well as the adoption of new technologies that enable new approaches to increase the value derived from the accumulated data.

Ventana Research selected IBM for the 17th Annual Artificial Intelligence Digital Innovation Award for its watsonx.governance product.

As we’ve recently written, good governance efforts can lead to improved business processes, but as we saw with analytics, AI is emerging as a weak link in data governance. As a result, we expect that through 2026, one-third of enterprises will realize that a lack of AI and machine learning (ML) governance has resulted in biased and ethically questionable decisions. Enterprises have largely been left to their own devices to create processes to manage AI governance since many vendors have inadequate capabilities in their product offerings.

IBM has been investing in and developing AI technology for decades. In 2023, IBM introduced watsonx as its new platform to address the development, testing, training, tuning and deployment of AI applications. As part of the platform, watsonx.governance provides an environment to collaboratively manage, catalog and monitor AI models in the context of ethical concerns and regulatory requirements. It provides a suite of automated governance, risk and compliance tools and functionality for model monitoring and mitigating bias and drift, as well as explainability.

Given the importance and focus around AI, watsonx.governance provides the assurance enterprises need to experiment, innovate and deploy AI models into production. It can replace manual processes that would otherwise be necessary for proper AI governance. If you have not examined how IBM watsonx.governance can help your enterprise, it is well worth your time. Congratulations, IBM, for your continued innovation.