Digital transformation through technology advancement and data-driven innovation turns out to be the game changer for the new economy.

To boost this overwhelming trend, the Internet Economy Summit offers a vision into the digital future with a sweeping influence in areas of fintech, virtual marketplaces, internet of things, artificial intelligence, cyber security, industry 4.0 and more.

The two-day summit is co-organized by the Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region and Cyberport from 15 April.

With artificial intelligence moving to the next phase, shifting from experimentation in favor of true digital transformation, IBM Corp intends to seize this historic opportunity by helping its enterprise clients deploy and scale this transformational technology.

"It's about gaining speed and scale," IES keynote speaker Samson Tai, distinguished engineer and chief technologist of IBM Innovation Network Hong Kong, told China Daily.

IBM Chairman and CEO Ginni Rometty said at the IBM Think conference in February that the company's "Chapter One" of cloud development represented about 20 percent of the workload opportunity, which was largely about moving new and customer-facing applications to the cloud.

"Chapter Two" entails more-complicated tasks, such as scaling AI and creating hybrid clouds; bringing the cloud operating model to all those mission-critical apps; and enabling customers to manage data, workloads, and apps and move them between multiple clouds, Rometty said.

According to a global survey, "Shifting Toward Enterprise-Grade AI", conducted by the IBM Institute for Business Value and Oxford Economics, the top two factors that put the brakes on enterprises' AI scaling are the availability of skilled resources or technical skills; and the regulatory constraints.

Data science, another innovative technology that IBM is working on, remains underpinning the development and application of AI. Without expensive data science resources hand-holding multiple AI models, it's difficult to track and measure indicators of business success and almost impossible to teach subtle domain knowledge into AI models in production, Tai said.

It also plays an indispensable role to make sure AI models achieve expected business outcomes and not violate regulatory risks and meet enterprise governance requirements, he added.

Leveraging on its massive services business and deep industry expertise, IBM wants to help its customers, especially enterprise clients, seize the opportunity of Chapter Two. Thus, IBM has served as a consultant to help enterprises understand the purpose of AI, the AI priorities, and AI models that address their requirements and aspirations.

After that, IBM will participate in the life cycle of the client's AI application covering building, running, managing AI everywhere and in-app operations, through which clients are able to give businesses new transparency into AI through tools and services to detect bias and explain how AI makes decisions.

joycesun@chinadailyhk.com

IBM, New York-based information technology company, aspires to help its clients scale AI and create hybrid clouds as well as introduce cloud operating models so that they can better manage data. Michael Nagle / Bloomberg

(HK Edition 04/11/2019 page8)