IBM claims $3.5 billion productivity boost through AI agent use

Companies are intrigued by AI’s promise to introduce new efficiencies into business processes, but questions about costs, return on investment, employee experience and expectations, and change management remain important concerns.

To address its customers’ concerns, IBM is taking a “Client Zero” approach, having introduced AI directly into more than 70 of its business areas to solve real-world problems, and through this effort, suggesting use cases that customer companies can utilize based on IBM’s own experience, said Lee Ji-eun, IBM Korea’s CTO, when introducing IBM’s differentiated “agentic AI” strategy at a press conference held at the IFC office in Yeouido, Seoul.

The bottom line? “We have achieved a productivity improvement of $3.5 billion over the past two years by applying AI to more than 70 business areas,” CTO Lee Ji-eun explained.

According to Lee Ji-eun, IBM is utilizing AI-based digital agents in areas such as human resources, finance, sales, and IT. In IBM’s human resources function, its AskHR agent has been used to automate 94% of simple tasks such as vacation requests and pay statements. In IT, AskIT has reduced the number of calls and chats for the IT support team by 70%, she said.

Furthermore, IBM has integrated AI agents in each area into a single platform. Defining an ecosystem that links AI agents, assistants, and business applications in each area into a single integrated environment as “agentic AI,” CTO Lee Ji-eun explained that AI agents that perform tasks autonomously can focus on their own areas of expertise while being organically connected to each other like a network to efficiently execute complex work processes. This integrated approach enables IBM to manage work across various departments and functions from a single interface.

Kim Ji-kwan, executive director of client engineering, who took part in the demo, introduced Watsonx Orchestrate as a core platform for agentic AI development. According to Executive Director Kim Ji-kwan, Watsonx Orchestrate integrates multiple business applications and AI agents into a single interface to intelligently analyze user requests and connect them to the appropriate path.

“It goes beyond question-and-answering and flexibly expands to include specific task execution, knowledge base search, and human intervention, processing tasks that previously took minutes or hours in seconds or minutes,” he said.

In addition to providing an integrated platform, CTO Lee Ji-eun said IBM’s AI strategy emphasizes openness, cost efficiency, hybrid technology, and expertise as key differentiating factors.

In terms of openness, IBM provides an environment where companies can flexibly utilize open source and various partner technologies so that they are not locked into specific technologies, she said, explaining that this approach also helps reduce costs by providing language models optimized for the scale of work.

The company’s hybrid approach affords additional flexibility, enabling organizations to run AI workloads in various environments, from public cloud to on-premises. In terms of expertise, CTO Lee Ji-eun said the platform supports corporate strategy formulation by incorporating industry-specific AI.

“At the core of corporate AI adoption is a platform that can comprehensively manage these elements. In addition to data connection capabilities, the platform also includes various insights such as prompts and governance, so I believe that this can reduce risks,” she said. “We will continue to utilize the ‘client zero’ approach that IBM is pioneering, and support companies to utilize diverse and safe agentic AI solutions with an open platform.”