COGNITIVE BUSINESS

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.
4 COGNITIVE BUSINESS | LondonLovesBusiness | IN ASSOCIATION WITH IBM