IBM Launches Watson Workspace Plus, Partners with Zoom

by Jim Lundy

On March 13th, 2018, IBM announced the availability of Watson Workspace Plus, its mobile collaboration offering powered by Watson. This update includes new features and a new video meeting capability backed by Zoom.

IBM and Zoom: Better Together

IBM has been more focused on the asynchronous part of content and collaboration, which includes social networking, content management, and now mobile collaboration.

Partnering with Zoom makes sense because of their focus on video and audio meetings. Enhanced video capabilities of Watson Workspace Plus include screen sharing, white boarding, recording, meeting size options for up to 200 participants, and more.

Watson Workspace Plus with Moments

One of the new features in Watson Workspace Plus is Moments—the meeting summarization that can consolidate days or weeks of meetings down into digestible nuggets. This is a new and unique form of content analytics on the market that others will certainly want to copy. We consider this use of content analytics to be a major innovation in Digital Work Hubs.

Watson Workspace Services: Building Intelligent Digital Assistants

IBM has demonstrated some powerful scenarios wherein unique work solutions are built using Watson Workspace Plus and Workspace Services. These solutions, such as a sales assistant, allow for enterprises and partners to harness the power of AI to push work productivity. In the IBM prototype, the Watson Agent was able to locate certain Q4 deals in Salesforce, add them to a Workspace, and then take further actions toward a close.

With the launch of Watson Workspace Plus, IBM now has an offer that can work with its own app, and integrate with other tools such as Slack. The power of Watson and out-of-the-box capabilities like Moments means that people will be able to work more productively and stay on top of deadlines.