RedMonk senior analysts Rachel Stephens and Kelly Fitzpatrick discuss their experiences at the first two days of IBM TechXchange 2024.

This was a RedMonk video, sponsored by IBM; IBM also covered analyst T&E to this event.

Correction: the video mentions “blue hoodies”; these were, in fact, blue jackets.

Transcript

Rachel Stephens: Hi, I’m Rachel Stephens.

Kelly Fitzpatrick: And I’m Kelly Fitzpatrick,

Rachel: And we are analysts with RedMonk. We are here in Las Vegas at IBM’s TechXchange event. It has been a great event focused on developers and practitioners, and it’s had a lot of fun energy. It’s been fun. What do you think?

Kelly: A lot of fun energy, as you said, especially the kickoff this morning. There was a drumline coming in. And there were a lot of IBM champions running around in blue hoodies, all of them, I think of them as practitioners. So this a very practitioner focused event, especially from someone like IBM, who we tend to think of, of more of like business suits and things like that.

Rachel: There’s been more of a sense of community at this event than I’ve ever gotten from any previous IBM event. It’s been fun, and we were also here yesterday for the Community Day, and the Community Day had really great practitioner focused sessions. They had lots of really wonderful events. And the other thing that we spent a lot of time with was the AI Alliance portion of the Community Day. Do you want to talk a little bit about that?

Kelly: So we were at an AI Alliance unconference, if you will, which was great because we got to hear from people who had prepared talks, but then we just got to hear from people who happened to be attendees in the audience. So getting their thoughts on AI was really great. One of the things that we heard a lot about was different trends. And of course, agents came up.

Rachel: Absolutely.

Kelly: And I know you have thoughts about agents.

Rachel: Thoughts and feels (though we don’t necessarily need to talk about the feels). But I think one of the things that’s come up a lot in the community at large right now is agentic AI as the buzzword of the year. But what does “an agent” actually mean? I think the definitions are a little fuzzy and sometimes lacking. IBM took a stab at it. They they had some this morning. Do you want to talk about the community day they this morning and how they described it?

Kelly: So this morning was the kickoff–it was a kickoff for the event proper. Yesterday was Open Source Community Day. And Dinesh Nirmal actually did have a really good example of here’s what this experience would be like with an AI assistant versus an agent. And then there were a couple of actual IBM SMEs on stage going through the process of building an agent.

Rachel: I still think it’s pretty fuzzy, but the way that, the word that has stood out to me as people talk about agents is “autonomous”. And so rather than AI chatbot assistive technology, where we’ve seen the industry kind of go so far, is how can then you have the agents be able to act without a human in the loop.

Kelly: Another takeaway for me was that data is still one of the most important parts of all of this, like software industry, AI, you name it. Data is important.

Rachel: And so they definitely have a lot of tools and sessions in and around the tools for data. And that’s a historic IBM strong suit in terms of their enterprise data play and helping enterprises manage and govern all of their data. So obviously they are having strong plays, and how does that extend to an AI ecosystem? So that’s been, I think, a place where IBM can and does differentiate.

Kelly: In addition, there was a lot for developers and other kinds of really techie folks. I went to a session Docker and Granite models co-presented by Docker and Red Hat. It was beyond standing room only. There wasn’t enough room to stand in the room. People were walking away. So more content like that at IBM TechXchange next year, please. But please give the Docker folks a bigger room.

Rachel: Yes. I think they really tried to do a good job in making this more concrete. So I think agents still feels fuzzy. But there’s definitely things in and around the AI ecosystem where people are trying to get their hands on how do we actually do this? So there are sessions on PyTorch. There are sessions on, like the new Llama stack. And how do we start to put all of these tools together in coherent ways? There’s this Docker session. So I think people are really trying to grapple with what this all looks like in practice. And that’s what this event has been about.

Kelly: In addition, some other fun things: Rachel and I now have “cloud” friendship bracelets.

Rachel: Besties For Ever!

Kelly: In Ansible colors.

Rachel: Yes, I was excited about friendship bracelets. We mentioned the drumline. That was a lot of fun. They had they had a scavenger hunt that I’m really excited about.

Kelly: They had a quantum core made of Lego.

Rachel: I was very excited about that.

Kelly: We’ll try to get some pictures of that in this. But overall, what is your final take on IBM TechXchange 2024?

Rachel: I think it was a solid event, and I think that’s one of the better events that I have been to that’s been in IBM community stronghold. So I would come again. What about you?

Kelly: I would definitely come back. Yeah.

Rachel: Two-monk seal of approval. Thanks, IBM!