John Q. Todd

Sr. Business Consultant/Product Researcher

Total Resource Management (TRM), Inc. 

“So, I watched the video at the end of this article. Correct me if I’m wrong but it seems as if the biggest difference from one AI to another is from where each is pulling the data they are referencing. Other than that, it’s just the speed at which the AI answers my questions or does my homework for me.”

TRM has been working with AI solutions for quite some time. Not only the Machine Learning models included with the IBM Maximo Application Suite of products, but we have also leveraged the IBM Watson Assistant AI as part of our own product, Omni Assistant. Based on this experience, we are in a unique position to speak to some of the ins and outs of implementing AI solutions.

So, am I wrong?

Your assertion is only partially true. Yes, OpenAI ChatGPT has a much larger training set and uses the internet as a searchable database, and thus it is better at pretending to be a human. IBM Watson is trained to understand language (tuned for certain industries) and does not use the internet as a searchable database.

Where it gets interesting is how the AIs can be manipulated to suit the needs of the company or entity who is implementing it. One difference for example is that at the moment Watson Assistant can be “customized” and ChatGPT can only be “fine-tuned”.

Tell me more…

Watson does great at understanding language. Developers can take a bunch of sentences and customize Watson to understand those and similar sentences as a user “intent”. An example of this would be a user intending to write an email. Programs can then be written around those user intentions. Things like asking follow-up questions, compose a specifically templated email, send it, etc.

ChatGPT on the other hand does not give developers the ability to create these intents and then structure programs around them. Instead, you can suggest that the bot behave or act a certain way. For example: tell the bot it is an asset management expert in Maximo and all questions and responses are in context to Maximo. It will then do that using data it has in its searchable database (pretty much all the internet). As of right now, we can’t tell it to search a customer’s personal set of documents for an answer like we can and do with Watson/Omni.

So ChatGPT is great as a search engine and acting like you are talking to another human…or an expert who gained their expertise from what was publicly available on the internet.

Watson (and similar AWS, GCP tools) is great as a programming tool around which you want to base a computer program that takes human language as input.

Where can we go with this?

TRM has already interfaced ChatGPT into a test version of our Omni product. If the User answers “No” when Omni asks if it answered the question, it takes the original question and passes it to a “Maximo expert” ChatGPT bot, of which then returns a response. If one AI is not enough for you, here you can leverage both!

In this scenario, ChatGPT compliments Omni as an extra document repository, where the document repository is the entire internet. How useful this would be to our customers is still a work in progress as it seems to be a slightly different tool than Omni was intended to be. (Focusing on client data sources.)

How about just integrating ChatGPT with Maximo?

Technically, it is easy to integrate ChatGPT into Maximo. It’s just not cheap. You will be paying per word in the question and response. If you’d like to see it in action, look at this video link below. It might give you some food for thought.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pzgpa8fSFN4 – ChatGPT in Maximo (Or MAS Manage for that matter)

Wrap Up…

Now that you have made it to the end of this article, feel free to look at the video that prompted us to write it. While there is so much being written about AI (and in some cases, written by), as a tool it (they?) is forming into something worth learning about. One could argue that even if the AI only reduces the amount of time your people spend looking for information, that by itself may be worth the effort to bring these tools into the fold.

Who knows… an AI presence might make a good replacement for the office clown during meetings. 😊

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQnIYw9Y9Wk – Differences between Watson and ChatGPT

Then learn more about our chatbot, OMNI, in a previous blog post and on our offering landing page. It’s our AI Powered Maximo Assistant, Training and Content Integration Platform that can also leverage ChatGPT.