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Harnessing the Power of Human Community and AI with watsonx

AI and community

At Higher Logic, innovation is part of our DNA. We are dedicated to embracing the latest technological advancements that deliver meaningful value to our customers. Everything we do—from platform innovations to service delivery—stems from our mission to build successful communities. Infusing an AI chatbot into our solutions is the next step in fulfilling this commitment.

With over 15 years of experience, Higher Logic has developed a mastery of community building, collaborating with tens of thousands of experts across various disciplines to understand what fosters thriving communities. Meanwhile, IBM has built a vast online community with an extensive knowledge base through IBM TechXchange.

By collaborating with IBM to embed both watsonx.ai and watsonx Discovery into our platform, we are able to provide online communities such as IBM TechXchange with on-demand answers.

Using AI to Grant Instant Access to Human Expertise

By embedding IBM watsonx capabilities into the Higher Logic community platform, users can leverage a powerful conversational AI chatbot alongside a rich human community, merging the best of both worlds.

For example, the IBM TechXchange community offers peer-to-peer questioning among a diverse group of developers, engineers, IT experts, and tech enthusiasts. However, there are times when users need immediate answers or want to quickly surface insights from previous discussions or the hundreds of thousands of documents housed within the IBM TechXchange community.

IBM TechXchange members can now ask the platform’s chatbot questions and receive rapid responses supported by countless credible sources. Imagine the impact of developers receiving answers within seconds, freeing up valuable time to focus on driving innovation. In instances when AI chatbots may not fully address users’ needs, users can seamlessly turn to the human community for assistance—simple yet powerful. Our chatbot is designed to complement the meaningful human interaction that makes online communities special.

How AI is Transforming the IBM TechXchange Community

Delving deeper, we’re leveraging watsonx.ai to transform the user’s question into a robust search query. We then utilize watsonx Discovery to access the extensive digital assets across IBM TechXchange resource libraries and return relevant content. This content is ingested into watsonx.ai using the Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pattern. This is designed to enhance response quality and relevance by combining external information retrieval with generative capabilities, resulting in more accurate, contextually aware, and meaningful outputs. watsonx.ai then answers the question using all its trained knowledge along with the content returned from watsonx Discovery.

For instance, a developer in the IBM TechXchange community will ask a question of the chatbot. Using watsonx, Higher Logic will be able to craft an individualized and targeted response addressing the developer’s problem, drawn from across vast resources and data stores, without the developer needing to manually sift through pages of search results. This is designed to help improve developer productivity and increase the value of IBM TechXchange to its community members.

The Future of Online Communities with AI

Bringing watsonx capabilities to the Higher Logic platform is just the next step in our AI journey. We are excited to continue our collaboration with IBM to bring AI capabilities to our association and other corporate clients.

We look forward to helping organizations create differentiated online experiences by empowering communities with boundless access to meaningful insights, both human and digital.

Rob Wenger

Rob Wenger has 30 years of experience as an entrepreneurial founder and technology executive. He is the Co-Founder of Higher Logic and currently the Chief Executive Officer for the company. Founded in 2007, Higher Logic connects people, knowledge and ideas through its community and engagement platform. Higher Logic serves over 3,000 customers through 350,000+ online communities with over 200 million users in 42 countries worldwide.

Previously, Rob was Chief Product Officer and Executive Chairman of Association Analytics, Founder and CEO of Cloud Generation as well as a Board of Director for Cosential. Underlying Rob’s repeated success is a deep passion and expertise in product strategy and development. Across businesses, associations and nonprofits, he works to positively impact each client’s success using smart, collaborative technology.

When not inventing the next great software tool, Rob is hanging out with his kids and planning their next great skiing adventure.