Tech giant IBM on Thursday announced the launch of watsonx Code Assistant, a generative AI-powered assistant designed to help enterprise coding through natural language prompts. The product is said to cater to two specific enterprise use cases: IT Automation with watsonx Code Assistant for Red Hat Ansible Lightspeed and mainframe application modernisation with watsonx Code Assistant for Z.
IT Automation with watsonx Code Assistant for Red Hat Ansible Lightspeed:
This feature, as per IBM, enables users to create Ansible Playbooks for tasks such as network configuration and code deployment using natural language prompts. The company shared that during the technical preview, it achieved an 85% acceptance rate of AI-generated content recommendations, leading to productivity gains of 20–45%.
Mainframe Application Modernisation with watsonx Code Assistant for Z: This application is said to accelerate the translation of COBOL to Java on IBM Z, aiding businesses in their application modernisation journey while harnessing IBM Z's performance, security, and resiliency. The product follows a structured application modernisation lifecycle, from application discovery to generating object-oriented Java code.
According to a recent IDC report, "Because it relies on a model trained on curated data, watsonx Code Assistant can help enterprises improve code quality by propagating best practices through code recommendations, instead of polluting enterprise code bases with code generated by models trained on unvetted repositories."
"With this launch, watsonx Code Assistant joins watsonx Orchestrate and watsonx Assistant in IBM's growing line of watsonx assistants that provide enterprises with tangible ways to implement generative AI," said Kareem Yusuf, Ph.D, Senior Vice President, Product Management and Growth, IBM Software. He added that watsonx Code Assistant provides AI-assisted code development and application modernisation tools directly to developers in a non-disruptive manner, addressing skills gaps and increasing productivity.
"There is a significant need for the developer productivity gains that generative AI can bring to transform applications on the mainframe," said Keshav Varma, ISU Head, Technology, Software and Services Business Unit, TCS. "While watsonx Code Assistant for Z has only just become available, we have several clients that have already requested that we create proofs of concept for them. With decades of enterprise experience from both our companies, we look forward to building on our deep partnership with IBM using watsonx."
As technology evolves, the introduction of IBM's watsonx Code Assistant promises to usher in a new era of coding efficiency, fostering innovation and growth in the enterprise development sector.
(Edited by : Ajay Vaishnav)
