Five years after its Jeopardy! victory, IBM’s cognitive computing system is through playing games. It’s now a hired gun for thousands of companies in at least 20 industries. A Q&A with the Watson boss.
David Kenny took the helm of IBM’s Watson Group IBM 0.32% in February, after Big Blue acquired The Weather Company, where Kenny had served as CEO. In the months since then, the Watson business has grown dramatically, with well over 100,000 developers worldwide now working with more than three dozen Watson application program interfaces (APIs). Fortune Deputy Editor Clifton Leaf caught up with Kenny in mid-October, when IBM Watson’s General Manager was in San Francisco, getting ready to open Watson West—the AI system’s newest business outpost—and to launch the company’s second World of Watson conference, a gathering of its burgeoning ecosystem of partners and users, in Las Vegas on Oct. 24. Below, an edited Q&A.