What is an IBM Champion?

I’m honored to be named by IBM as a 2020 IBM Champion in IBM Data and AI, my third year as an IBM Champion.

What is an IBM Champion?

IBM Champions are members of the IBM community who are not employees, and who have made substantial contributions towards the community. Those contributions can be technical or business contributions, from creating code to demonstrating the various uses of IBM technology to larger audiences, to guiding IBM customers towards success with their products and services.

What does an IBM Champion Do?

My role in the Champion program is a hybrid of both technical and business; I highlight IBM technology such as IBM Watson Studio in many of my keynotes and workshops.

I also build with IBM technology; recently, I did a project merging data from consumer drone cameras with IBM Watson Visual Recognition as a proof of concept to show how even the smallest businesses can benefit from machine learning technology. I also built a proof of concept lead scoring application in Watson Studio that used Hubspot data to identify feature importance – meaning what variables contributed most to a high lead score.

Finally, I provide training and education to the Champion Community directly. Most recently, I did a series of workshop at IBM’s flagship conference, IBM THINK, to help subject matter experts better market themselves and build their personal brands.

How Do You Become an IBM Champion?

New Champions are nominated by the existing Champion community and/or by IBM employees and other distinguished members of the IBM ecosystem. Champions who have been re-recognized are required to submit monthly reporting of their IBM-related activities and submit a re-nomination at the end of every calendar year.

How Does Being an IBM Champion Benefit You, the Trust Insights Community?

IBM Champions provide benefits to their organizations principally in the form of access to IBM subject matter experts, fellow Champions, and IBM Business Partner organizations. If a Trust Insights customer is struggling with a particularly tricky implementation of, say, IBM Z or IBM Watson Studio, I’d be able to reach into the Champion Community to see if anyone else has experienced similar challenges. By having access to a exclusive community of experts in IBM technology, chances are we can find the best answer together, quickly.

Members of the Trust Insights community – you, if you’re reading this – also benefit by learning about what’s new and important to pay attention to in the fields of analytics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence.

As one of the top 5 companies worldwide using and providing advanced computing, it’s safe to say that IBM sets the tone for parts of the greater analytics and business discussion. By having access to IBM, attending IBM events, and working with IBM subject matter experts and Champions, Trust Insights community members and customers stay ahead of the curve.

FTC Disclosure: Trust Insights is a Registered IBM Business Partner. As such, we receive financial benefit if you purchase IBM goods or services through us.

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Trust Insights (trustinsights.ai) is one of the world's leading management consulting firms in artificial intelligence/AI, especially in the use of generative AI and AI in marketing. Trust Insights provides custom AI consultation, training, education, implementation, and deployment of classical regression AI, classification AI, and generative AI, especially large language models such as ChatGPT's GPT-4-omni, Google Gemini, and Anthropic Claude. Trust Insights provides analytics consulting, data science consulting, and AI consulting.