My thoughts on IBM’s World of Watson conference and where IBM sees cognitive going.

IBM has a very clear vision of what cognitive means to them. IBM calls it “a cognitive world for enterprises”. While Facebook and Google are creating Artificial Intelligence solutions focused towards consumers, IBM wants to help businesses achieve cognitive intelligence over its data, human resources, apps etc. And IBM does not want any of the data unlike Facebook and Google who keeps your data, leverages that data for a number of reasons, customer insight, targetted advertising, machine learning etc.

Ginni in her Keynote said “In the next five years, every important business decision, will be made with the assistance of IBM Watson”. She talked about the transition from Artificial Intelligence to Augmented Intelligence. “Our goal is for man and machine to exist together. This is all about extending your expertise. A teacher. A doctor. A lawyer. It doesn’t matter what you do. We will extend it”. It is a bold promise and can IBM achieve that?

Although AI and cognitive has been around for years, it is getting the much-needed attention now thanks to Google, Microsoft, Facebook and Amazon. It also means, they are all competing for market space. While the core Watson technology isn’t trained using customers’ proprietary data, it has received large chunks of information in various industries, from health care to weather to financial services. That data is being used to train the technology in specific domains to make watson expert in that domain.

With focus on enterprises and knowledge of domain data, IBM is well positioned to lead the enterprises into this cognitive world.

Mallesh Murugesan

CEO & Founder, chirrp.ai