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Inside IBM's Bold Vision For AI: 7 Strategic Insights From CEO Ginni Rometty

This article is more than 6 years old.

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(Note: After an award-winning career in the media business covering the tech industry, Bob Evans was VP of Strategic Communications at SAP in 2011, and Chief Communications Officer at Oracle from 2012 to 2016. He now runs his own firm, Evans Strategic Communications LLC.)

CLOUD WARS -- As AI enters the mainstream of not only consumer consciousness but also business strategy, you could make a pretty good case that IBM and its Watson brand have been by far the primary drivers behind this profound phenomenon.

Yeah, okay...but so what? Unless Watson and AI generating huge gobs of new revenue for IBM, who cares?

Well, one person who cares very deeply about the rapid emergence of AI is Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella—and if you're wondering about Nadella's chops in AI, consider that as he's boosted Microsoft's market cap by $250 billion during his 3-1/2 years as CEO, he's also created a global AI team of more than 5,000 computer scientists and engineers.

In fact, I'd go so far as to say that any significant business—whether inside or outside the tech industry—that's not aggressively evaluating the potential impacts of AI on its customers and industry is being short-sighted at best and profoundly foolish at worst.

Speaking at an event last week, Nadella said that "artificial intelligence is not just another piece of technology—it could be one of the more fundamental pieces of technology the human race has ever created," as the Wall Street Journal reported.

And if you're still wondering if AI's just a fad, consider this comment made by Nadella at the same event: "To me, AI can in fact bring more human empowerment, bring more inclusion to that people can fully participate in our community and society."

Against that backdrop, it's illustrative to examine the role that AI is playing today and the even larger role it will play in the future within IBM's massive transformation away from hardware and into software, the cloud, AI, and other advanced technologies. (And remember: IBM recently beat Amazon in 12-month cloud revenue, $15.1 billion to $14.5 billion. Amazon ranks #2 and IBM #5 on my Cloud Wars Top 10 list.)

An excellent interview last month with IBM CEO Ginni Rometty by Bloomberg Businessweek under the compelling headline Ginni Rometty: The End of Programming reveals her compelling views on AI and several other subjects.

Bob Evans

From that piece, here are seven brief insights from Rometty that illuminate IBM's vision for AI and for putting Watson and cognitive computing at the center of its strategy for the future. To capture the full sweep and power of the conversation, though, be sure to read Bloomberg Businessweek Editor Megan Murphy's entire piece.

  1. On the power of turning corporate data into insights: "If that’s my data, and it’s my IT and my competitive advantage, I’m training algorithms, and I want to be sure those algorithms become mine. I want a platform that’s my AI even if it operates in a cloud. Business AI knows the domain and the profession, and it can protect your insight. Not just your data, your insight."
  2. Why it's incorrect to view AI as "man versus machine": "A study said on average that a third of your decisions are really great decisions, a third are not optimal, and a third are just wrong.... That’s what led us all to really calling it cognitive and getting through to people that, “Look, we really think this is about man and machine, not man vs. machine."
  3. Differentiating Business AI from Consumer AI: "For example, if you were on your phone and searched for the best song in 1950, you don’t think, Well, who voted on that? Why did they pick that song? But if you asked for the right diagnosis of a type of cancer, you’d want to know who trained the computer, what data and what was the evidence behind it. It would be the same for business: AI would be vertical. You would train it to know medicine. You would train it to know underwriting of insurance. You would train it to know financial crimes. Train it to know oncology. Train it to know weather."
  4. Watson and "The End of Programming": "Everything you know until today is programmable—an entire era for decades has been programmable. Watson would be the beginning of a new era where you didn’t program. Machines would look at data, understand, reason over it, and they continue to learn: understand, reason and learn, not program, in my simple definition."
  5. AI systems must be taught before they can learn: "What a doctor wants is, “OK, give me the possible answers. Tell my why you believe it. Can I see the research, the evidence, the ‘percent confident’? What more would you like to know?” The first cancer Watson took almost a year. We are down to less than 30 days now. By the end of this year, Watson will have been trained on what causes 80 percent of the world’s cancers."
  6. Balancing AI plus transparency plus trust: "It’s our responsibility if we build this stuff to guide it safely into the world. First, be clear on the purpose, work with man. We aren’t out here to destroy man. The second is to be transparent about who trained the computers, who are the experts, where did the data come from. And when consumers are using AI, you inform them that they are and inform the company as well that owns the intellectual property."
  7. Overhauling education system for age of Man Plus AI: "This country has 5 million to 6 million jobs open. That’s about skill. This is not being caused by AI. We’ve got to revamp education for this era of man and machine. And that means you cannot insist that every person needs to be a university or a Ph.D. graduate to be productive in society. You cannot."

 

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