Today I was working from home and watched the keynote session of Ginni Rometty, the Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer of IBM at IBM World Of Watson Event 2016.
This blog post is just to recap the first 20 minutes, as it really great where we are going with the assisted augmented computing for mankind. And Ginni also explains the architectural choice IBM made in regard of YOUR data and using Watson to get more insight and assist and transform your business.
IBM Watson is the AI platform for business. IBM sees three big decision why IBM Watson the platform for business:
The goal is important. It is not to deliver Artificial Intelligence, the goal is to augment intelligence that assists the human knowledge, experience and creativity. It is man and machine!
Second: Your data matters: IBM choose by design that your data, your intellectual property, your corporate knowledge, your competitive advantage is yours! Watson is not using your data to feed train an IBM knowledge graph. IBM Watson is used to analyse your data and brings more (public) data you can use to generate new insights for your business. Those insights are for you and your company only. This will help to create a foundational competitive advantage. Ginni said: “Watson is where your data goes to learn, but when school is over, it goes back home.”.
Third: The ecosystem is important as the possibilities for using Watson are limitless. IBM is helping Watson in certain areas to develop, but there are so many possibilities that we are helping enterprises, startups, universities, developers and IBM-ers to use Watson to use for their own specific idea. Partners are building services on top of, integrating Watson in services. Not in the keynote – Within IBM we had a ideation jam/hackathon where all IBM-ers could come up with cognitive ideas and after voting the best were presented to Ginni and her team. In the end the ten winners received money to actually productize their idea. Human creativity is limiteless. The only thing that holds us back is probably that as we are grown ups, we tend to have a (slight) focus on limitations than on possibilities, as I notice that my own kids have a wild imagination.
Ginni mentions in the keynote that Watson is a cloud platform for business is because we have a business focus where IBM bought companies and trained Watson to support domain knowledge for business domains, e.g. Financial (risk and compliancy), healthcare and others.
Watson will make your company more competitive. It will understand and learn domain knowledge. There are five areas where you can look for change:
- Deeper human bond/ engagement with employees, experts, customers and partners. Improve human interaction, enhance customer intimacy, tailor education programs. Deeper engagement with whomever you interact.
- How to improves everybody’s expertise. Scale your expertise throughout the whole organization. Find, get and share information and let Watson help to share. This will improve everyones expertise, scale imagination.
- Cognitive can be in any product or service. It will help to understand and learn about the usage of products. Improve the usage, lifespan of a product by sharing client usage experiences. eg. Battery life of a car. When understanding the usage by analyzing the data of every car.
- For companies Watson can help to improve forecasting predicting better by analyzing, learning and suggesting. What processes are realtime and need improvement. Watson can help. e.g. fleet amana
- Fuel discovery and research. Watson is good at connecting the dots. It can analyse massive amounts of data to support new (crazy) ideas
Last part of the keynote, before the guest speakers come on stage are about some lessons learned (700 companies).
- the better the data, the better the outcome
- The difference between training a system vs programming a system. It will take a bit more effort and time, but add more value over time!
- Cognitive and Cloud are two sides of the same coin. It is ubiquitous as you want and can integrate it any where.
- Take care of the sentiments towards AI. People are sometime affraid of where we are going. Job loss, Taking over the world, etc. This is IBM is in the AI alliance with other big tech companies.
Watson is the best cognitive platform and cognitive is here to stay to transform industries.
So far the first 20 minutes of the keynote. If you want to see the keynote yourself you can go to https://ibmgo.com/wow16 – Here are also a lot more session about IBM Watson.
Enjoy this great video about a World with Watson:
And remember the best has yet to come!
Collaborative thoughts... 