IBM Watson Moves Into Tech Support With Intelligent Helpdesk

IBM hopes Watson’s cognitive capabilities will be able to predict existing and future tech support requirements, helping save the time and resources of IT departments.

The company is integrating Watson into its Workplace Support Service, so it can learn from user behaviour and help organisations manage different devices around the world and automate functions to help teams fix problems quicker.

Tech support

“Today, governments and enterprises need to provide an effective set of capabilities to their workforce, so that their employees can deliver a superior interaction and experience for their citizens and consumers,” said Richard Esposito, general manager of GTS Mobility Services at IBM.

“We need a system that can understand and communicate in a natural language conversation, one that solves problems and continues to learn while engaging with employees. Our Workplace Support Services with Watson delivers this value.”

Watson will continually learn from its interactions with employees and apply this learning to “objectively identify the most probable answers or actions” to solve user problems. This method will also improve the user experience over time, enabling employees to ‘chat’ to Watson using natural language.

Furthermore, Workplace Support Services with Watson takes an action-oriented approach, performing support actions such as adding additional storage to an email account, unlocking a password or ordering a new phone.

IBM has been busy spreading Watson’s wings into a variety of different industries in recent months, with organisations eager to make use of its analytical power.

For example, the company has teamed up with BMW to research the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in cars, as well as partnering with Arthritis Research UK to develop a ‘virtual personal assistant’ that will provide information and advice to sufferers of Arthritis.

Watson is also now playing a key role in securing the Swiss financial sector through a next-generation Security Operations Center (SOC) and was used at the US Masters to automatically detect and package ‘exciting’ golf highlights for broadcasters.

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