Watson™ Assistant enables organizations to build, deploy, and maintain virtual assistants that help businesses enhance brand loyalty and transform their client experiences by delivering proactive and personalized customer care in channels such as web, mobile, and over-the-phone.

IBM Cloud Private is an integrated IaaS and PaaS environment for developing and managing on-premises, containerized applications. This integrated environment can be deployed behind firewalls and managed or controlled by whomever the enterprise determines. It is built on the container orchestrator Kubernetes and contains a private image repository, a management console, and monitoring frameworks. With a lightweight footprint, yet powerful platform capabilities, IBM Cloud Private enables enterprises to unleash their development creativity, using industry-common technologies and process guidance, in a minimal timeframe.

With the integration of Watson Assistant and IBM Cloud Private, enterprises can bring Watson to where their data resides and use Watson Assistant in ways that are familiar and comfortable to them. Watson Assistant for IBM Cloud Private provides organizations with the capability to run IBM's robust, conversational platform on their own hardware, behind their own firewall, maintaining the security measures and controls that enterprises have in place over their applications and data.

Watson Assistant for IBM Cloud Private enables developers and nontechnical users to collaborate and build conversational artificial intelligence (AI) solutions. Its graphical UI, powerful Natural Language Processing (NLP), and familiar developer features enable the rapid creation of any conversational solution, from simple chatbots to complex enterprise-grade solutions for customer service and more. With IBM Watson Assistant for IBM Cloud Private, users can:

• Program multiturn dialogue and provide response variations based on different conditions.
• Collect multiple pieces of information from a user.
• Browse from a catalogue of preconfigured customer service and industry content packs to save time and start faster.
• Ensure data and processing run behind their own firewall with IBM Cloud Private.
• Own and protect the insights that are generated. IBM® will not reuse these insights for improving its own machine learning models.

This newly introduced deployment model provides developers and business users with the capability to use the unified experience and simplified toolset of Watson Assistant to build these conversational solutions on-premises and in a self-managed cloud, without the need to be experts in machine learning. Whether set up by in-house experts or complemented by IBM's team of advisors, Watson Assistant for IBM Cloud Private offers a solution to meet the needs of the enterprise.