Post-Jeopardy Period: What the Cognitive Era means for Business today

I’ve always been a big fan of the Man vs Machine concept. 20 years ago, we saw something special in Deep Blue beating a near-invincible World Chess Champion Kasparov at his peak. This was just raw, computational power alone. Traditional AI. Fast forward another 15 years and we saw the rise of Watson.

An incredible cognitive system developed by IBM, Watson, not only dispatched its human competitors during the Jeopardy game show as we had come to expect but reflected its ability to learn from experience and use that to provide better answers overtime. And with that, the cognitive era was heralded upon us. What would this mean though? Could cognitive systems like Watson have real-world applications in business for example?

Fundamentally, it isn’t about Man vs Machine anymore – it’s about humans working with machines to enable better, data-driven decision making.

This idea was clearly on display during IBM’s recent SolutionsConnect event in both Sydney and Melbourne; showcasing the power of cognitive solutions today in addressing the key business and societal challenges we face beyond into the future.

A couple of key messages that resonated strongly with me included:

Acceleration of digital disruption

As per the title phrased by IBM’s A/NZ GM Kerry Purcell, the world has clearly become digitally driven through the wash of new digital technologies, processes and new ways of working. The shift has never been more clear; thriving businesses of the future will need to adopt an ‘innovation’ mindset when it comes to their operations, an ability to trial new things and fail fast like a start-up and ensure that this mentality is driven together through the whole organisation. Expect all kinds of industries to be disrupted at some stage – as they say, disrupt or be disrupted.

For ANZ’s Steven Spangher, Head of Business Management and Engagement, the focus has been on developing a digital mindset within the workforce, to think differently about solving problems. Through the company’s recent Agribusiness hackathon, university participants supported by IBM mentors were able to work on real-world business challenges and produce some useful prototypes such as an agribusiness digital marketplace.

The value of Big Data

What is the value of a dollar? Whatever it can buy. By analogy, what is the value of big data? Simply; whatever unique, actionable insights can be extracted from it to enable better decision-making. With big data increasingly growing beyond traditional capabilities of dealing with it, unique cloud solutions such as IBM’s Bluemix PaaS are becoming a necessary tool to process and analyse it much more rapidly than a legacy data centre ever could.

The recent IBM/Weather Company partnership signified this with IBM geared towards extracting deep insights about the weather across more than a billion data points through Watson. More data does equal greater actionable insights. This is almost certainly going to create ripples within industries such as insurance, which would immensely benefit from near real-time weather predictions to factor in proper risk for their claims and prepare for major weather events in advance.

Cognitive systems are the future

While we like to pride ourselves on the ability to process information, even professionals make the wrong decisions at times. Whether it be a slight error in judgement, this just goes to show that we are human after all.

Simply, cognitive systems are far superior in analysing data without the laggards of inherent bias and subjective experience that lead to data-driven, objective decisions with greater accuracy and properly derived insights. Imagine an industry like health where the push towards individualised healthcare is constrained by the sheer expertise required and number of doctors available.

Health& faced this exact issue. Established as a personalised health portal of useful medical information among other services, they wrestled with the problem of how to program traditional doctor diagnosis within an online system. In reality, a doctor would ask a patient a question, which would lead to an answer, which would lead to another question – clearly they discovered there would have to a smarter, automated way to deal with the endless possibilities.

Through the Watson API, they were able to seamlessly connect the dots between information contained within various medical repositories and provide more informative answers to its patients quickly.

Conclusion:

For me, it is truly exciting to be part of the cognitive era; one that brings together humans and machines to solve some of the biggest problems out there. From assisting melanoma diagnosis to unlocking key business insights, business and society will be the better for it.

Steven Chan, IBM Account Manager (Technology Support Services) - passionate about the way cognitive technologies are transforming industries and creating opportunities for our clients. Connect with me on LinkedIn.