COGNITIVE BUSINESS

E-GUIDE 

COGNITIVE 

BUSINESS 

How cognitive solutions are 

enhancing the way we live & work 

IN ASSOCIATION WITH

INTRODUCTION 

THE MOST 

TRANSFORMATIVE 

TREND TO HIT 

TECHNOLOGY 

By Shruti Tripathi Chopra, 

Editor, LondonLovesBusiness.com 

At this year’s Consumer Electronic 

Technology event in Las Vegas, 

keynote speaker and IBM CEO, Ginni 

Rometty, applauded the pace that we, as 

a society, are developing and embracing 

digitisation. Yet she also posed an important 

question. When everyone – and everything – 

becomes digital; “Then what? Who wins?” 

As we all race towards digital, it can be 

easy to lose sight of the real benefits at the 

heart of digitisation. Why is it important? Why 

do we all need to do it? How useful can Big 

80% 

of data is still in the dark 

Data and the Internet of Things (IoT) really be 

without fully understanding what they bring to 

our lives – and our businesses? 

“Digital,” says Rometty, “is not a 

destination. It’s a foundation.” There’s no first- 

past-the-post winner in this race; the key to 

getting the most out of digital and data is how 

much understanding we glean from it. The 

winners, so to speak, are those who can bring 

the most intelligence and insight to Big Data 

and IoT. 

It’s estimated that 2.5 quintillion bytes of 

data are created every day; in fact, 90% of the 

data in existence today was created in the 

last two years. Yet the way we process that 

data is not developing as fast; roughly 80% of 

data is still in the dark. We know it’s there, but 

we can’t see it, we can’t use it, it can’t help 

us – although that is now changing, thanks to 

cognitive solutions. 

Rometty predicts that in the future, every 

decision that mankind makes will be informed 

by a cognitive system like IBM’s Watson, and 

our lives will be better for it. In this e-guide, 

we take a look at how cognitive solutions are 

informing the decisions that we make today, 

and how our lives – and our businesses – are 

better for it. 

Are cognitive solutions 

already a part of your 

business? 

Tweet me @Shrutitripathi6 

or @Londonlovesbiz 

2 COGNITIVE BUSINESS | LondonLovesBusiness | IN ASSOCIATION WITH IBM

CONTENTS 

04 FOREWORD 

By Paul Chong, Director of Watson Group, EMEA at IBM Corporation 

05 WHAT ARE COGNITIVE SOLUTIONS? 

Infographic: how cognitive solutions are changing the way we interact with data 

06 SOUND & VISION: BIG DATA GETS PERSONAL 

How cognitive capabilities are revolutionising the way 

we process and understand human data 

08 SMEs: WHAT CAN COGNITIVE BRING 

TO YOUR BUSINESS? 

Cognitive is bridging the gap between staff and systems to bring expertise, 

agility and insight to businesses today 

10 FIRST STEP: WATSON ANALYTICS 

Add insight with predictive analytics 

11 BIG BUSINESS: 

TAKING COGNITIVE TO THE NEXT LEVEL 

How large enterprises are transforming the way they do business 

14 WHAT NOW? 

How to introduce workforce analytics in your organisation 

This e-guide is brought to you by 

LondonLovesBusiness.com, in association with IBM. 

LondonLovesBusiness.com is the new digital 

newspaper for established entrepreneurs and 

executives of London’s mid-market companies. We 

aim to further the ambitions of London businesses, 

celebrate good business and success, and bring 

you frank debate about the issues facing London 

businesses. We are fast becoming the must-read 

website for London’s business community through 

our mix of the latest business news across all 

sectors, profiles of London’s greatest entrepreneurs, 

features exploring the trends you can capitalise on, 

and the best of London lifestyle. 

LondonLovesBusiness.com is published 

by Casis Media Ltd, 56 Buckingham Gate, 

London SW1E 6AE 

Editor: Shruti Tripathi Chopra 

shruti@londonlovesbusiness.com 

Consultant editor: Charlotte Rumsey 

charlotte.rumsey@nutcrackeragency.com 

Business development director: Jenny Knighting 

jenny.knighting@londonlovesbusiness.com 

0203 394 1847 


FOREWORD 

WHERE IT AND 

BUSINESS COLLIDES 

By Paul Chong, 

Director of Watson Group, EMEA at IBM Corporation 

Cognitive computing can be a difficult 

concept to grasp. For most people, 

any mention of Artificial Intelligence 

has their imagination leaping straight to 

sinister thoughts of HAL 9000 or Skynet 

(sadly often forgetting the more helpful and 

less ominous J.A.R.V.I.S, or even Spike Lee’s 

Samantha). For many, the idea of machine 

learning resides firmly in futuristic fiction and 

far beyond the grasp of the average SME. 

Yet the reality is actually very different. 

In fact, with cognitive solutions, we’re seeing 

a paradigm shift between IT and business 

the likes of which we’ve never seen before. 

At odds with the idea of cognitive as a 

complex, inaccessible – perhaps unnerving 

– technology, cognitive solutions are actually 

providing a 

practical, even 

simple way to 

clarify Big Data 

in a way that can 

benefit us and our 

businesses. 

This shift sees 

business leaders 

having a direct input into how Cognitive 

systems are trained. Cognitive systems 

understand, reason and learn. While complex 

coding is essential to their initial development, 

it’s the way systems are trained – with 

protocols designed to help them learn from 

every interaction with data they experience – 

that allow cognitive solutions to improve over 

time. It’s this ability to learn and reason that 

makes cognitive solutions such an exciting 

opportunity for today’s businesses. 

Where in the past we’ve seen systems 

that look glossy and shiny at the beginning 

but begin to depreciate over time, cognitive 

solutions continue to develop without 

the need for extensive revisions and reprogramming. 

Cognitive systems gain in 

confidence, with each new set of data 

informing the way they react in future, helping 

them to evolve and better understand the 

information they process. 

Malcolm Gladwell famously stated that 

it takes 10,000 hours to become an expert in 

any skill. Thanks to Watson, experts in any field 

can pass on their expertise and share their 

knowledge, informing the next generation of 

experts and helping them to take that skill to 

the next level. 

As cognitive solutions develop, we’ll start 

to see even more natural, seamless relations 

between us and our IT systems. Programs 

like Siri are just the start; in future, our mobile 

devices will feature intelligent assistants 

that interact with us entirely naturalistically, 

transforming the way we ask for information. 

It’s an exciting era, not just for IBM, or the 

businesses using our cognitive solutions, but 

for all of us. 


WHAT ARE COGNITIVE SOLUTIONS? 

Cognitive solutions are transforming industries and changing the way we interact 

with data, allowing us to outthink the limits of what’s possible. 

APIs 

Speech, sight and sound APIs can transform dark data into useful information 

Personal 

That means that our 

wearables, sensors and even 

medical equipment can gain 

better insight into who we are 

and what we need. 

SMEs 

Watson enables us to retain 

human expertise and share 

knowledge within our teams. 

It can facilitate better client 

engagement and help leaders 

understand their processes. 

Large Enterprise 

Here, the possibilities seem 

endless. Enterprises are able to 

collate digital information across 

huge networks of staff and 

customers, gaining unparalleled 

insight into their operations. 


SOUND & 

VISION: BIG 

DATA GETS 

PERSONAL 

How cognitive capabilities are revolutionising 

the way we process and understand human data 

It’s not so much the amount of data it can 

process that makes it useful in personal 

applications; it’s the type of data. 

Human activity is difficult to boil down 

into binary data. We can’t easily be distilled 

PERSONAL 

into numbers and statistics, charts and 

graphs. The majority of the digital information 

collected by our mobile devices, IoT 

connected homewares and wearable tech 

isn’t numerical. It is data that, before cognitive, 

was essentially invisible, comprising of natural 

language, sight and sound. 

Over 50 APIs – including language, 

vision and speech APIs – allow programs to 

recognise this information and transform it 

into useful data. Thanks to Watson’s cognitive 

capabilities, these APIs are learning all the 

time, with each transaction informing the 

way that the systems react in future. It’s this 

type of data that makes Watson so unique 

when embedded into applications that help 

us in our day-to-day lives, as it unravels our 

complicated interactions and transforms that 

data into usable information. 

Take Under Armour Inc, a sportswear 

company who have incorporated Watson’s 

cognitive solutions to create a fitness 

wearable that learns and evolves with its user. 

UA Record is a mobile device app, created 

by Under Armour as part of their Health Box 

connected fitness system. It is, essentially, a 

personal health consultant, a fitness trainer 

and a sports assistant, all rolled into one. 

Linked to Under Armour’s wearable, UA 

Record can provide athletes – or those of 

you who are taking your new year’s fitness 

resolution particularly seriously – with 

personalised coaching. 

Connected to the wearable device, the 

app does what you’d expect from a mobile 


fitness wearable – tracking steps, monitoring 

heartrate, measuring athletic performance. 

Yet UA Record goes a few steps further. 

Thanks to these learning capabilities 

and those language, vision and speech APIs, 

UA Record can tap into behavioural trends. 

It connects with a database of millions of 

individuals to compare your achievements 

to others ‘like you’. It can recognise – by 

sight – food images, to gauge nutritional 

intake. Its weather domain knowledge and 

news integration can help the 

device to tailor your exercise 

program every day to fit in 

with the world around you. 

The more you use it, the 

more the app learns 

about you. 

CASE STUDY IBM'S WATSON HEALTH UNIT 

IBM’s Watson Health unit is revolutionising 

diabetes management through its 

collaboration with Medtronic, a global 

healthcare provider. Combining cognitive 

computing with medical devices, 

Medtronic are developing personalised 

diabetes management solutions that 

can offer personal care plans in almost 

real-time. Diabetes device data 

CogniToy is essentially a 

supercomputer packaged into 

a cute toy dinosaur. That may 

sound like the concept of an ‘80s 

comedy sci-fi, but it’s real and it’s 

already interacting with kids in 

test rooms today. Launched on 

Kickstarter last year, CogniToy 

brings cognitive solutions into 

early years learning. Parents 

connect the toy to a home 

Wi-Fi network and input a 

few preliminary details – age, 

CASE STUDY COGNITOY 

can be gathered and analysed instantly, 

before being combined with numerous 

other sources of data – including medical 

records and wider population health data 

– to predict risks and uncover patterns 

for the patient. It’s unlike any diabetes 

management solution that has come 

before it, and is set to transform the lives 

of diabetes sufferers. 

education level, a favourite sport or food. 

This helps the toy to jump straight into 

conversation with the child but, from there 

on in, there’s no need for programming 

– although parents can maintain full 

control via the Parent Panel. Using Watson, 

CogniToy constantly evaluates the child’s 

abilities, changing its interactions to help 

further develop their skills. It can answer 

questions (including those perplexing 

queries that have parents heading for 

Wikipedia) and tell jokes, engaging in a 

naturalistic, age-appropriate style. 


SME'S 

WHAT CAN 


BRING 

TO YOUR 

BUSINESS? 

Cognitive is bridging the gap between 

staff and systems to bring expertise, 

agility and insight to businesses today 

1 

EXPERTISE 

As Keith Mercier, IBM Watson’s 

Global Retail Leader, said 

recently; “by the time a 

medical professional becomes an expert in 

their field, they are often nearing retirement”. 

It’s not only in the field of medicine; in almost 

every industry, the point at which we feel most 

confident in our work is often the time we 

start looking to move on to pastures new, be 

it retirement or our next career challenge. 

With cognitive solutions, businesses can 

create a partnership between staff and systems 

that – to use Mercier’s words – enhances, 

scales and accelerates human expertise. 

Far from replacing human experience within 

the workplace, it helps businesses to draw 

on that experience continuously. With those 

language, vision and speech APIs, Watson 

can compile business data and convert it into 

useful information, to help businesses retain 

knowledge and expertise, even as staff move 

on. Having a Watson-powered system at your 

fingertips is like having an expert at hand, ready 

to help when needed. 

2 

AGILITY 

In the age of digital, agility is 

key to running a successful 

business. Businesses need 


to be ready to move, and move fast. IBM’s 

cognitive cloud capabilities allow businesses to 

manoeuvre quickly and build tailored solutions 

that can adapt and evolve to their needs. 

Through cloud-based platforms like 

Bluemix, Watson brings agility and innovation 

to businesses of any size. Bluemix is a 

responsive, easy to use app development 

platform that can transform ideas into useful 

applications in a matter of hours. 

Getting started is not only easy; it’s free. 

Customers only pay once the app reaches a 

certain threshold – in terms of users, licenses 

or requirements – making it perfect for SMEs 

to rapidly test and deploy pilot apps. 

3 

INSIGHT 

Imagine the insight your 

business could gain from 

a team member who had 

access to every client interaction, every email, 

every spreadsheet – in short, every piece of 

information generated by your business. Not 

only that, but they could trawl through that 

information at breakneck speed, revealing 

patterns based not only on facts and figures, but 

on human interaction, activity and behaviour. 

With Watson on your team, you can do 

just that, allowing your staff to use cognitive 

insights to grow and develop your business. 

Brightminded, a creative 

coding SME based in 

the UK, teamed up with 

two experienced PTs to 

create their first cognitive 

supported app as part of 

the IBM Watson Mobile 

Developer Challenge. TRAIN 

ME is a cognitive application 

designed to help personal 

trainers manage their 

business, improving the way 

they engage with clients 

and access information. 

Powered by Watson, TRAIN 

ME brings personal trainers 

and fitness professionals 

CASE STUDY TRAIN ME 

a whole host of useful 

features in one app. From 

streamlining business 

management to accessing 

industry updates and 

legislation, TRAIN ME can 

help trainers improve their 

business and their expertise. 

By using IBM Watson, the 

team at Brightminded were 

able to draw on a wealth 

of industry information, 

research, and insights, to 

build an adaptable solution 

for their clients in the 

fitness industry. 

Anyone can teach Watson to become an industry expert. 

Through IBM’s Knowledge Studio, you can team up with developers 

and use ‘supervised learning’ techniques to teach Watson about 

your industry. From linguistic nuances to working relationships, 

Knowledge Studio can help Watson get to know you, your team 

and your industry. 


FIRST STEP: 

WATSON ANALYTICS 

Add insight with predictive analytics 

If fully cognitive solutions seem like a big 

leap for your business, Watson Analytics 

could be a step in the right direction. It can 

be used to various structured, or traditional, 

data types – including text, spreadsheets and 

social network statistics – to analyse digital 

information and provide a more accurate 

estimation of upcoming trends. Unlike other 

complex analytics programmes, it’s designed 

to be operated by ordinary business users 

without programming or support from IT staff. 

A FRESH PERSPECTIVE ON 

DYNAMIC DATA 

To better understand the dynamics of your 

business, all you have to do is upload your 

spreadsheets to be presented with userfriendly 

visualisations or dashboards. It will 

highlight information that it thinks might 

be useful to you and integrate results from 

multiple sources 

– data from social 

networks, for instance 

– to give you new 

insights into your 

customer base. By 

providing a new angle 

on your day-to-day 

operations, Watson 

Analytics allows you 

to react faster to new 

trends as they emerge. 

LEVEL UP 

Use Watson Analytics as an inroad to cognitive 

solutions. By deploying this easy to use 

tool, you’ll soon start to see how cognitive 

solutions can add value, efficiency and insight 

to your business. It can even become a core 

part of your service offering. 

CASE STUDY 

HONEST CAFE 

A disruptive start-up from Revive 

Vending, Honest Café operates six 

unmanned coffee shops across southern 

England. If you’re wondering what is so 

disruptive about a coffee shop chain, the 

answer is: analytics. Honest Café uses 

Watson Analytics to 

respond to customer 

behaviour, mining data 

from transactions, 

payments, even 

local weather. By 

making Watson 

Analytics a core 

part of the business, 

Revive Vending has 

uncovered insight into 

customer behaviour 

and preferences that 

would otherwise have been impossible 

to detect. After seeing that customers 

used the Café as a ‘hangout’, Honest Café 

developed their seating areas, offering 

more space and comfort for visitors using 

the cafés to socialise. 


LARGE ENTERPRISE 

BIG BUSINESS: 

TAKING COGNITIVE 

TO THE NEXT LEVEL 

For large enterprises, the potential for cognitive solutions to transform 

business processes is seemingly endless. Cognitive solutions have the 

capability to draw together disparate parts of a business, collating client 

information, bringing together colleagues in offices all over the world and 

unifying corporate strategy. Just like SMEs, large enterprises can bring greater 

agility, expertise and insight to their businesses through cognitive solutions. 

Here are two large enterprises who are embracing this new era, taking 

cognitive solutions to the next level. 


CASE STUDY THE NORTH FACE 

In 2015, globally recognised outdoor apparel brand, The North Face, 

launched an interactive shopping experience. The brand’s mission 

was to apply technology to the retail experience in a way that adds 

to, rather than detracts from, the consumer’s overall shopping 

experience. The result was an interactive shopping experience 

powered by Watson and Fluid XPS, a digital commerce platform. 

The intuitive online shop allows The North Face customers to use 

natural conversation to find the products they are looking for, 

via a dialog-based recommendation engine. 

Utilising natural language processing capabilities, the e-commerce 

portal is a comprehensive search engine that naturalistically asks 

consumers questions to find out more about what they need, 

learning from each interaction. It can then factor in details like 

location and temperature, to recommend products that suit the 

customer’s needs; so no one ends up purchasing a spring walking 

jacket for a climb to Kilimanjaro. 


CASE STUDY ROBOTICS 

No cognitive eGuide would be complete 

without at least one mention of robots. 

Introducing Pepper, a collaboration between 

SoftBank’s robotics division and Watson. 

Aimed at global enterprise customers, 

Pepper is a humanoid robot who was initially 

designed to be a personal companion. 

Currently installed in over 140 SoftBank 

Mobile stores in Japan, Pepper meets and 

greets customers as they come into stores. 

assistant that he recently became the 

first humanoid robot to be adopted into 

Japanese homes. 

If you’re worried that poor little Pepper 

might get lonely, fear not. It’s estimated 

that by 2019, the market for consumer and 

business robots could reach$1.5 billion. 

Unlike other humanoid robots, Pepper is able 

to interact in a natural, intuitive way, and – 

thanks again to those language, vision and 

speech APIs – he can recognise and react to 

human emotions. He even responds personally 

to the mood of a conversation, expressing his 

‘feelings’ through his tablet, the colour of his 

eyes and the tone of his voice. 

As with all Watson-powered technology, 

Pepper can learn from his perceptions 

and interactions, gradually memorising 

personality traits and preferences. Such is 

Pepper’s popularity as a customer services 


WHAT 

NOW 

? 

If you’re ready to 

embrace cognitive in 

your business, it’s time 

to find out more. These 

IBM resources are 

your next step towards 

introducing cognitive 

solutions to your 

organisation. 

CONTACT 

RONAN 

HETHERINGTON, 


SOLUTIONS 

SPECIALIST 

RHetheri@ie.ibm.com 

44-239 228 9747 

JOIN THE COGNITIVE 

CONVERSATION 

MORE 

INFORMATION 

ON IBM 


SOLUTIONS 


The online newspaper for London’s business community 

Published by Casis Media 

56 Buckingham Gate 

London 

SW1E 6AE 

020 3394 1847 

jenny.knighting@LondonLovesBusiness.com 

IN ASSOCIATION WITH

COGNITIVE BUSINESS

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