IBM is taking dramatic steps to insure that Watson, its cloud-based set of computing, communications and analytic resources, will be broadly ingrained into the conversational interface between companies and their customers, employees or other stakeholders. It has established Watson Group, a new business unit, which it is “funding forward” with plans to spend about $2 billion over the next couple of years. The new group will employ more than 2,000 professionals and have its headquarters building along Silicon Alley in lower Manhattan.

In addition, IBM is taking advantage of the fact that it is one of the few companies in the world that can build what amounts to an instant ecosystem. Since its announcement in mid-November, more than 750 applicants are vying to build business solutions based on Watson’s core technology-some members of the group hope to take advantage of some of the $100 million that Big Blue has earmarked to make for equity investment in what it deems to be the most promising Watson-based enterprises.

“What does this have to do with Conversational Commerce?” you may ask. The answer is quite simply that, from the beginning, Watson has been a showcase for human-like (or conversational) person-to-machine interactions. Its public debut on the highly popular TV game show Jeopardy was designed to humanize the machine and show how highly developed IBM’s efforts in natural language understanding, artificial intelligence and (by inference) machine learning truly were. Watson recognized figures of speech, irony, poetry, and even rocket science. Plus, it beat the humans at their own game. IBM calls it “Cognitive Computing” and, in that category, IBM is without peer.

The new Watson Group transforms a set of cloud-based technologies into a grounded, funded, go-to resource for developing enterprise-based intelligent virtual assistants. At the business unit’s launch event, IBM execs were joined by top executives from The Cleveland Clinic, Elsevier Publishing, Fluid Retailing and Travelocity/Kayak. All were singing the praises of IBM’s new “Cognitive Solutions,” of which there are several initial horizontal renditions and a growing number of vertical instantiations like The Watson Health Cloud, The Watson Travel Cloud and the Watson Retail Cloud.

The first horizontal solution, Watson Engagement Advisor, debuted in May 2013. At the time it already touted a roster of participants in its Early Customer Program (ECP) that included leading banks, telcos and financial services companies, including RBC (Royal Bank of Canada), ANZ Bank (Australia), USAA, Verizon, Telstra, Allstate Insurance and Celcom Axiata Bhd (Kuala Lumpur). Based on experience, IBM defined a deployment model that started with a 6-week period during which a cloud-based instantiation of Watson would use input from product literature, training documents, Web pages and subject matter experts to build a core of Q&A Pairs that became the beginning of its cognitive development. Without mentioning price or deployment goals, IBM claimed that a positive ROI could be reached in roughly 6 months, presumably based on the deflection of calls to live customer support agents.

Engagement Advisor now has plenty of company in the cloud, including Watson Discovery Advisor, Watson Analytics and Watson Explorer. Each has a special role to play in simplifying an enterprise’s ability to deploy IBM’s foundational Big Data and Analytics solutions. This shortens the time (and therefore expense) of getting projects off the ground that put an enterprise’s trove of customer records, transaction histories, CRM records and related metadata from a multiplicity of sources to work to provide better customer experiences or achieve identified business objectives.

Watson Discovery Advisor, for instance, is a highly-advanced search service that enables researchers to use their own words to tease meaningful results from voluminous amounts of data from a variety of sources, often in a matter of seconds. It is being applied almost exclusively to the healthcare field but its value in any complex domain should be obvious. Watson Analytics is targeted to Sales & Marketing professionals, providing them with a way to surface root cause issues or “hidden patterns” by simply asking questions. Of course, the quality and veracity of responses from analytic systems improves when there are large amounts of data involved. Watson Explorer is the resource that finds, extracts and delivers content from a multiplicity of sources without carrying whether it is in structured or unstructured formats.

IBM formed the Watson Group to give the technologies a home and foster development of the ecosystem. Its $2 billion investment indicates huge expectations for growth in enterprise spending on Cognitive Solutions. The impact on spending for Enterprise Virtual Assistants is bound to be positively impacted as well. In an upcoming report on Enterprise Virtual Assistants (EVAs), Opus Research forecasts enterprise spending on EVA technologies to grow from about $110 million in 2013 to roughly $700 million in 2016, representing over 83% annual growth.

Categories: Conversational Intelligence, Intelligent Assistants, Articles

Tags: Speech recognition, IBM, Analytics, Virtual Assistants, machine learning, User Interface