About IBM watsonx BI

IBM® watsonx™ BI is a generative AI-powered business intelligence partner that brings analytics to business users in your organization.

Watsonx BI uses natural language to analyze complex data, providing personalized insights and data-aware recommendations that are easy to understand and actionable.

The watsonx BI service makes it easier and faster for Data analysts and Analytics consumers to make data-driven decisions with the following features:

Personalized and trusted insights
Get descriptive and diagnostic insights from your governed business data through a conversational experience. You can use suggested questions to dig deeper into your data.
Natural language interface
A natural language canvas where you can co-create insightful, data stories about the performance of your business with generative AI that is tuned specifically to your data and domain.
Personalized metrics
Track your most important metrics and get a summary of your business health.
Semantic automation
Automate data profiling, business term matching, and data modeling.

Availability

IBM watsonx BI is available as a Service and software deployment.

  • As a service on IBM Cloud in the Dallas (us-south) regional data center

  • As software that can be installed from IBM Software Hub version 5.2 and higher

Relationship between services

Cloud Service Solutions platform

IBM watsonx BI uses the cloud service platform, which lets you connect to your data and use it for analysis.

The platform provides the following core functionality:

  • Security, compliance, and isolation
  • Compute resources for running workloads
  • Global search for assets across the platform
  • The platform assets catalog for sharing connections across the platform
  • Role-based user management within workspaces
  • View compute usage from the Administration menu
  • Connections to remote data sources
  • Connection credentials that are personal or shared
  • Sample assets and projects

For more information about the service platform and its capabilities, see:

Service platform features

You can access the following platform features from the Navigation Menu in watsonx BI.

Projects

Core services on the platform are organized as a set of collaborative workspaces, called Projects, where you can work with your team or organization.

Each project has a set of members with roles that provide permissions to perform actions.

Users work with assets, which are the items in the project that contain metadata about data or data analysis.

In watsonx BI, to add the data that you want to ask questions about, you first need to create a project.

You can then create metrics. Watsonx BI uses metrics and enriched metadata to answer your questions.

Catalogs

The Metrics catalog is a centralized repository of published metrics, their metric definition details, and related visualizations. It provides a single source of truth for published metrics that are used across the organization.

Data analysts can publish metrics to the Metrics catalog and assign them to Analytics consumers.

As an Analytics consumer, you can browse the Metrics catalog to view the metrics that are available to you. Select ametric to view metric details and related visualizations. You can ask a question about a specific metric directly from the Metrics catalog.

You can also add metrics to your Key metrics panel from the Metrics catalog to monitor changes in your data.

Governance

IBM watsonx.data intelligence provides ready-to-use vocabularies that help you quickly deploy data governance and analytics frameworks. It also uses generative AI to enhance technical metadata with additional context, labels, and descriptions.

If you have an instance of watsonx.data intelligence provisioned in your IBM Cloud account or installed along with watsonx BI in IBM Software Hub, you can use this governance framework to apply business context to your data.