IBM Introduces "Cognitive Business Solutions" Department

IBM launches its own Cognitive Business Solutions unit to advise other businesses on the best way to gain from its artificial intelligence software, Watson.

International Business Machines Corp. has now established a new business segment that has been named as “Cognitive Business Solutions”. A recent boom has been observed when it comes to artificial intelligence, which the New York based cloud computing company wishes to capitalize.

The department for Cognitive Business Solutions will be under the able leadership of Stephen Pratt who was initially offering his services to TPG Capital- a private equity firm. The company also came up with a press release according to which that this business unit would recruit almost 2000 employees. The job of these employees will be to advise the companies on board so that they can extract the best out of their AI software named as Watson.

Watson is named after Mr. Thomas J. Watson who was the first chief executive officer at IBM. The Artificial Intelligence software is similar to a question answer system that encompasses techniques of “advanced language processing” which is designed based on a popular AI technique known as “deep learning”. David Ferruci was the lead investigator for the software who made sure that the software was developed in his supervision so that he could answer questions on Jeopardy- the popular quiz show.

In the press release published by IBM, the firm encompassed the International Data Corporation (IDC) – a market research firm estimated that by the fiscal year of 2018, almost 50 per cent of the users would be able to interact with services regularly using cognitive computing.

IBM at this point believed in the future of this technology is considering the growth prospects and thus invested a hefty amount of almost $1 billion in Watson. The software is classified in the company’s analytics business whose net worth is $17 billion. So far, at this point of time, the company has not revealed the share of Watson in their business. As per Wall Street Journal, Watson is likely to contribute $1 billion to the company’s profit by 2018.

Stephen Pratt, stated, "Over the next decade, this transformation will be very personal for professionals as we embrace learning algorithms to enhance our capacity. For clients, cognitive systems will provide organizations that adopt these powerful tools outperform peers."

The Watson venture is futuristic and has immense growth potential making it a stable revenue churning business for IBM in the times to come. The new unit will further add more support to Watson increasing its user accessibility in the times to come.