Reflections and Projections about IBM Watson

An nicely done internal look at Watson.   As I have mentioned here before, Watson may not have lived up to some of the early expectations, but it remains a serious contender for serious, practical AI  applications.  And in particular because they already have capabilities like BPM which can be used to model and link to real business process.  Early on talked to them about that.  They seemed enthusiastic about the idea, but I have not seen any development since.  They have external collaboration with RPA vendors, which is a good thing also.

IBM Watson: Reflections and Projections  By Rob Thomas, IBM

AI has gone through many cycles since we first coined the term “machine learning” in 1959. Our latest resurgence began in 2011 when we put Watson on national television to play Jeopardy! against humans. This became a cornerstone event, demonstrating that we had something unique. And we saw early success, putting Watson to work on projects with clients. This created even more excitement. That excitement led to more opportunity. At this stage, we have a large product organization, separate dedicated research organization, and an entire health organization all leveraging and building on this technology.

So, what is Watson? This is the question I’ve been asked the most since IBM combined its Data and AI software units earlier this year. ......

By Rob Thomas
Author of ‘The End of Tech Companies’ & ‘Big Data Revolution’  amzn.to/2uVu84R. Leading Data and AI @IBM. Robdthomas@gmail