The Growing Use of AI
IBM is leading the integration of AI in industry. It has made a $1 billion investment in AI through the launch of its IBM Watson Group and has made many advancements and published research touting the rise of “cognitive computing” – the ability of computers like Watson to understand words (“natural language”), not just numbers. Rather than take the cutting edge capabilities developed in its research labs to market as a series of products, IBM has chosen to offer a platform of services under the Watson brand. It is working with an ecosystem of partners who are developing applications leveraging the dynamic learning and cloud computing capabilities of Watson.
The biggest application of Watson has been in health care. Watson excels in situations where you need to bridge between massive amounts of dynamic and complex text information (such as the constantly changing body of medical literature) and another mass of dynamic and complex text information (such as patient records or genomic data), to generate and evaluate hypotheses. With training, Watson can provide recommendations for treatments for specific patients. Many prestigious academic medical centers, such as The Cleveland Clinic, The Mayo Clinic, MD Anderson, and Memorial Sloan-Kettering are working with IBM to develop systems that will help healthcare providers better understand patients’ diseases and recommend personalized courses of treatment. This has proven to be a challenging domain to automate and most of the projects are behind schedule.
Another large application area for AI is in financial services. Mike Adler, Global Financial Services Leader at The Watson Group, told me they have 45 clients working mostly on three applications: (1) a “digital virtual agent” that enables banks and insurance companies to engage their customers in a new, personalized way, (2) a “wealth advisor” that enables financial planning and wealth management, either for self-service or in combination with a financial advisor, and (3) risk and compliance management.