Navigating AI and More

IBM Unveils watsonx.governance to Help Businesses Navigate AI

Enterprises use AI to solve problems, but businesses are also finding that AI has ushered in a whole new murky world of risks. IBM has announced that watsonx.governance will be released in early December to help businesses deploy AI safely and responsibly.

The new tools offered with watsonx.governance will help enterprises navigate the complexities associated with using Large Language Models or Foundation Models, which can utilize unreliable training data, creating compliance and transparency issues.

According to Kareem Yusuf, Ph.D, Senior Vice President, Product Management and Growth, IBM Software, “Company boards and CEOs are looking to reap the rewards from today’s more powerful AI models, but the risks due to a lack of transparency and inability to govern these models have been holding them back.”

To address these challenges, IBM has designed watsonx.governance to take the friction out of  integrating AI into business by making it easier to:

• Operationalize AI Governance: Accelerate model building at scale. Automate and consolidate multiple tools, applications and platforms while documenting the origin of datasets, models, associated metadata and pipelines.

• Manage risk and reputation: Enable responsible, explainable, high-quality AI models, and automatically document model lineage and metadata. Monitor for fairness, bias and drift to detect the need for model retraining.

• Support regulatory compliance: Use protections and validation to help enable models that are fair, transparent, and compliant. Automatically document model facts in support of audits.

Yusuf emphasizes that the new tools will address business needs for transparency and risk management:

 “Watsonx.governance is a one-stop-shop for businesses that are struggling to deploy and manage both LLM and ML models, giving businesses the tools, they need to automate AI governance processes, monitor their models, and take corrective action, all with increased visibility. Its ability to translate regulations into enforceable policies will only become more essential for enterprises as new AI regulation takes hold worldwide.”

Source: IBM

GovCIO Wins $35M Veterans Affairs Task Order

The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) has awarded GovCIO with a three-year, $35 million contract for the continuation of services for the Life Insurance Policy Administration System (LIPAS) program.

The Veterans Benefits Administration (VBA) Insurance Service provides $1.2 trillion in life insurance coverage through LIPAS to veterans who are unable to purchase commercial insurance at reasonable rates due to service-related impairments.

GovCIO provides advanced technology and digital services for the federal government and has worked with VA Office of Information and Technology (OIT) and VBA for the past four years to modernize and maintain the LIPAS solution.

So far, the work has included moving LIPAS to a cloud-based, shared service infrastructure and synchronizing the legacy mainframe and database with a modern data schema. GovCIO has also integrated the solution with enterprise-shared services, and incorporated automation opportunities to improve performance and Veteran services.

At the beginning of 2023, GovCIO successfully partnered with the VBA and OIT to launch the first fully automated VALife product – and the first new VA life insurance product launched in 20 years.

VALife is a whole life insurance policy for service-connected Veterans and does not consider pre-existing conditions or risk factors. Within the first five days of launching, over 2,800 Veterans applied for VALife policies, and more than 17,000 applications were submitted in the first few months.

“The GovCIO team understands firsthand where the program began and how these programs have evolved to fulfill its commitment to Veterans,” said Jim Brabston, GovCIO CEO. “We have partnered with the VBA and OIT to modernize a complex legacy system to provide benefits to Veterans and their families.”

Source: PR Newswire