IBM pushes Watson onto other cloud services

IBM is opening up its Watson Assistant and Watson OpenScale to everyone for the first time, enabling businesses to take advantage of conversational AI and smart platform management, even if they're not using IBM Cloud.Although the services have been available for IBM cloud customers to use in the past, the move means that enterprises can now use the services within their own data centres too, opening up the tech to a much larger range of businesses.The company explained it decided to open up parts of its AI ecosystem to enable businesses with data stored across multiple cloud environments to better analyse their information."Businesses have largely been limited to experimenting with AI in siloes due to the limitations caused by cloud provider lock-in of their data," said Rob Thomas, general manager of IBM Data and AI.