​IBM has launched a slew of new AI services that aim to help chief information officers (CIOs) to predict and tackle IT problems before they occur. 

Watson AIOps, unveiled at the company’s Think Digital Conference, are designed to provide automated protection for IT infrastructures that make them more resilient to future disruptions. 

Unforeseen IT incidents and outages can cost businesses in both revenue and reputation, according to IBM, while tech hub Aberdeen.com suggests that the average cost of an outage across businesses is $260,000 an hour. 

Artificial intelligence is being widely tipped as the solution to this; analysts at IDC have predicted that, by 2024, enterprises that are powered by AI will respond to customers, competitors, regulators, and partners 50% faster than those that are not using AI.

AIOps is IBM’s answer, a service that can automate how enterprises self-detect, diagnose and respond to IT anomalies in real-time. 
 
“We want to arm every CIO in the world to use AI to predict problems before they happen, fix problems before they happen and if they still happen to occur, they can quickly address problems within their IT infrastructure,” Rob Thomas, IBM’s senior VP for Cloud and Data Platform, said during a press conference. 

“Complexity is increasing, certainly things like COVID-19 is driving us to a distributed work environment. A CIO needs a powerful AI – think of it as metaphorically sitting on their shoulder, helping them run the operation and do that in a really elegant way.”

Along with AIOps, IBM also announced edge computing services, launched in partnership with Red Hat. It starts with IBM Edge Application Manager, which is for remote management of AI, analytics and IoT workloads.

IBM Telco Network Cloud Manager, which runs on Red Hat OpenShift, automates virtual and container network functions for 5G applications, and there is also a new dedicated IBM service team for edge computing and telco networks.