IBM Think is an annual

business conference A convention, in the sense of a meeting, is a gathering of individuals who meet at an arranged place and time in order to discuss or engage in some common interest. The most common conventions are based upon industry, profession, and fand ...

organized by IBM. Before 2018, IBM held similar business conferences under different names. Think is seen as a successor to World of Watson that was held in 2017. The conference name is a reference the ' Think' slogan used by IBM.

History

2010s

2017 – World of Watson

IBM held a conference named World of Watson, centered around its AI products and

Watson Watson may refer to: Companies * Actavis, a pharmaceutical company formerly known as Watson Pharmaceuticals * A.S. Watson Group, retail division of Hutchison Whampoa * Thomas J. Watson Research Center, IBM research center * Watson Systems, maker ...

, a QA computer AI system in

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, on October 29 – November 2. IBM delivered several speeches related to Watson's capabilities and its possible integration to health and business sectors, which were criticized 2 years later by

IEEE Spectrum ''IEEE Spectrum'' is a magazine edited by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is a 501(c)(3) professional association for electronic engineering and electrical e ...

to be

exaggerated Exaggeration is the representation of something as more extreme or dramatic than it really is. Exaggeration may occur intentionally or unintentionally. Exaggeration can be a rhetorical device or figure of speech. It may be used to evoke stron ...

2018

IBM rebranded its World of Watson convention as IBM Think to be the company's flagship business conference that includes all major IBM products along with

. It was held in Las Vegas, on March 19–22. The topics of the conference were mainly about

blockchain A blockchain is a type of distributed ledger technology (DLT) that consists of growing lists of records, called ''blocks'', that are securely linked together using cryptography. Each block contains a cryptographic hash of the previous block, ...

, AI,

data science Data science is an interdisciplinary field that uses scientific methods, processes, algorithms and systems to extract or extrapolate knowledge and insights from noisy, structured and unstructured data, and apply knowledge from data across a bro ...

quantum computing Quantum computing is a type of computation whose operations can harness the phenomena of quantum mechanics, such as superposition, interference, and entanglement. Devices that perform quantum computations are known as quantum computers. Thou ...

and

cloud In meteorology, a cloud is an aerosol consisting of a visible mass of miniature liquid droplets, frozen crystals, or other particles suspended in the atmosphere of a planetary body or similar space. Water or various other chemicals may ...

. IBM announced the creation of an AI assistant tool called Watson Assistant, and that they AI-enhanced some of their products such as

IBM Cloud IBM Cloud, (formerly known as Bluemix) is a set of cloud computing services for business offered by the information technology company IBM. Services As of 2021, IBM Cloud contains more than 170 services including compute, storage, networkin ...

with the help of Watson, which was criticized by outsiders to not be practical despite years of development. A partnership between IBM and

Apple An apple is an edible fruit produced by an apple tree (''Malus domestica''). Apple trees are cultivated worldwide and are the most widely grown species in the genus '' Malus''. The tree originated in Central Asia, where its wild ances ...

to enhance apps with Watson's AI was revealed as well. IBM unveiled a 1x1mm chip reportedly compatible with Blockchain and as powerful as microprocessors of 1990s that they dubbed " world's smallest computer". IBM also revealed IBM Q, a family of quantum computers that can be accessed via cloud. Think Campuses, a

trade exposition A trade fair, also known as trade show, trade exhibition, or trade exposition, is an exhibition organized so that companies in a specific industry can showcase and demonstrate their latest products and services, meet with industry partners and cu ...

area were also introduced for the first time.

2019

The conference was held in

Moscone Center The George R. Moscone Convention Center (pronounced ), popularly known as the Moscone Center, is the largest convention and exhibition complex in San Francisco, California. The complex consists of three main halls spread out across three blocks ...

, San Francisco, CA, on February 12–15. Topics included cloud, AI, data,

analytics Analytics is the systematic computational analysis of data or statistics. It is used for the discovery, interpretation, and communication of meaningful patterns in data. It also entails applying data patterns toward effective decision-making. It ...

, infrastructure and more, a lot similar to previous year. IBM announced ''Watson Anywhere'', allowing Watson AI tools to be used outside of IBM's own cloud services.

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, a grand finalist in 2016's World Debating Championships, had a debate challenge with IBM's

Project Debater Project Debater is an IBM artificial intelligence project, designed to participate in a full live debate with expert human debaters. It follows on from the Watson project which played ''Jeopardy!'' Development Project Debater was developed at I ...

and won against it while the debate showed state of AI's advancement. Several big customers of IBM had speeches in the conference as well, talking about the impact of IBM's AI/ML products and

Power Systems An electric power system is a network of electrical components deployed to supply, transfer, and use electric power. An example of a power system is the electrical grid that provides power to homes and industries within an extended area. The e ...

had on their businesses. This year also included a 4-day training program titled Think Academy that provided certification and hand-on lab experience to participants.

2020s

2020

The conference was planned to be held in San Francisco again, on May 4–7. Due to

COVID-19 pandemic The COVID-19 pandemic, also known as the coronavirus pandemic, is an ongoing global pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). The novel virus was first identified ...

, the conference was made

online In computer technology and telecommunications, online indicates a state of connectivity and offline indicates a disconnected state. In modern terminology, this usually refers to an Internet connection, but (especially when expressed "on line" o ...

along with several locally hosted events and interactive sessions. IBM also put a ban on employees to not attend face-to-face conferences with more than 1000 people. This time topics were heavily centered around AI, data, cloud, 5G and various open technologies that were developed under IBM and its subsidiaries. IBM announced several changes to Red Hat, an

open-source software Open-source software (OSS) is computer software that is released under a license in which the copyright holder grants users the rights to use, study, change, and distribute the software and its source code to anyone and for any purpose. Ope ...

and Linux company that IBM bought for 34 billion dollars a year ago, Changes include shifting company's focus to hybrid cloud and 5G compatibility. IBM revealed Watson AIOps, an AI tool to manage IBM built on Red Hat's

OpenShift OpenShift is a family of containerization software products developed by Red Hat. Its flagship product is the OpenShift Container Platform — a hybrid cloud platform as a service built around Linux containers orchestrated and managed by Kuber ...

cloud computing software. Along with other topics,

IBM Research IBM Research is the research and development division for IBM, an American multinational information technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, with operations in over 170 countries. IBM Research is the largest industrial research or ...

unveiled its ambitious roadmap for

2021

Two online conferences were held for different regions, on May 11 for Americas and May 12 for APAC, Japan and

EMEA EMEA is a shorthand designation meaning Europe, the Middle East and Africa. The acronym is used by institutions and governments, as well as in marketing and business when referring to this region: it is a shorthand way of referencing the two ...

. Topics of this year, albeit similar to the previous ones, were centered around

hybrid cloud Cloud computing is the on-demand availability of computer system resources, especially data storage (cloud storage) and computing power, without direct active management by the user. Large clouds often have functions distributed over mul ...

and AI. During the conference, IBM has announced several new projects such as IBM WebSphere Hybrid Edition, a commercialized version of IBM Mono2Micro and Watson Orchestrate, an AI assistant tool that is later renamed Watsonx Orchestrate and became a subfeature of

Watsonx Watsonx is IBM's commercial generative AI and scientific data platform based on cloud computing, cloud. It offers a studio, data store, and governance toolkit. It supports multiple large language models (LLMs) along with IBM's own IBM Granite ...

in 2023. IBM reported 120x increase in quantum processing speed of

Qiskit Qiskit is an open-source software development kit (SDK) for working with quantum computers at the level of circuits, pulses, and algorithms. It provides tools for creating and manipulating quantum programs and running them on prototype quantum ...

, an open source quantum computing SDK maintained by the company, and revealed Qiskit runtime to enable traditional computer processing when its desired within the SDK. IBM announced a 1 billion dollars worth of investment to its partnership programs as well.

2022

The conference was held digital and face-to-face in

Boston Boston (), officially the City of Boston, is the capital city, state capital and List of municipalities in Massachusetts, most populous city of the Commonwealth (U.S. state), Commonwealth of Massachusetts, as well as the cultural and financ ...

, on May 10–11. Several other conferences in attendance were held in various cities around the world. This time the conference was centered around quantum computing, a field IBM started to be prevalent about along with other usual topics like AI and cloud. In the conference IBM announced its goal to achieve a 4,000+

qubit In quantum computing, a qubit () or quantum bit is a basic unit of quantum information—the quantum version of the classic binary bit physically realized with a two-state device. A qubit is a two-state (or two-level) quantum-mechanical system, ...

processor Processor may refer to: Computing Hardware * Processor (computing) **Central processing unit (CPU), the hardware within a computer that executes a program *** Microprocessor, a central processing unit contained on a single integrated circuit (I ...

built with multiple clusters of modularly scaled processors. IBM also announced updates regarding

and company's growth in AI sector. IBM also announced multiple partnerships with other companies including providing

SaaS Software as a service (SaaS ) is a software licensing and delivery model in which software is licensed on a subscription basis and is centrally hosted. SaaS is also known as "on-demand software" and Web-based/Web-hosted software. SaaS is co ...

and Red Hat software to

AWS Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS) is a subsidiary of Amazon that provides on-demand cloud computing platforms and APIs to individuals, companies, and governments, on a metered pay-as-you-go basis. These cloud computing web services provide di ...

, a rival cloud service provider.

2023

The conference was held in

Orlando, FL Orlando () is a city in the U.S. state of Florida and is the county seat of Orange County. In Central Florida, it is the center of the Orlando metropolitan area, which had a population of 2,509,831, according to U.S. Census Bureau figures r ...

, on May 9–11. The conference was expanded to other regions via one day local events titled Think on Tour. For the main conference, Think Forum was revealed as a platform for atendees to talk with tech business leaders, which shifted Think's definition as an

expo An expo is a trade exposition. It may also refer to: Events and venues * World's fair, a large international public exposition * Singapore Expo, convention and exposition venue ** Expo Axis, one of the world's largest membrane roofs, constructe ...

to that of a

forum Forum or The Forum (plural forums or fora) may refer to: Common uses *Forum (legal), designated space for public expression in the United States *Forum (Roman), open public space within a Roman city **Roman Forum, most famous example *Internet ...

. The program of the conference included similar topics to previous years such as hybrid cloud, AI and automation and futuristic quantum computing talks. IBM unveiled many new projects and products such as

, a

generative AI Generative artificial intelligence (generative AI, GenAI, or GAI) is a subset of artificial intelligence that uses generative models to produce text, images, videos, or other forms of data. These models machine learning, learn the underlying p ...

tool and IBM Quantum System Two, a quantum computer.

References

{{IBM IBM Recurring events established in 2018