Slow start, but IBM’s Watson AI more relevant now than ever

It may have started slow, but IBM’s artificial intelligence (AI) platform Watson is becoming more relevant to customers, leading to its increased adoption by enterprises, said an IBM executive.

"Watson is now being utilised as a core of many of our products," Vikas Arora, Vice President, Cloud and Cognitive leader Software & Services, IBM India and South Asia told Moneycontrol.

The AI platform is part of range of IBM’s application suite ranging from its Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) products to its core platform architecture including cloud. Arora explained that Watson is being used across applications such as the automation suite, cloud or SaaS applications like the Internet of Things (IoT), analytics and endpoint security applications.

While IBM did not share numbers, Sriram Raghavan, Vice President, IBM Research in AI said the conversations are in thousands now. "Our conversation involving Watson are in the thousands with reference customer in the hundreds across various geographies," Raghavan said.

This traction comes a decade after the Jeopardy! win by Watson back in 2011.

With Watson, IBM was one of the early movers into the AI industry. The company invested significantly in Watson, which was initially designed as the question-answering computer system back in 2004 to participate in the television challenge show Jeopardy!

Watson shot to fame in 2011 when it won the competition against Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, who are the top-earning American contestants of the show.

However, the company was unable to tap into the AI boom despite being the early mover. It struggled to compete as most the segments saw either flat growth or steep decline for the December 2018 quarter. This further declined in the first quarter of 2019. According to a lawsuit filed in the US, it laid off close to one lakh employees.

Arora agreed that the firm has not been able to capitalise on the early mover advantage. But according to him, it has more to do with lack of market maturity rather than the company's failure to tap into it. The kind of conversations the company is having with consumers now around AI was non-existent a few years back, he added.

"AI, in general, is sort of finding its feet today in its true sense where it starts impacting both life and businesses," Arora said.

Raghavan explained that companies are using AI for core business decisions as opposed to the customer and client experience use-cases earlier. A study by IBM showed close to 35-40 percent of the organisations have adopted AI, where 40 percent use it for core business applications.

These use-cases, Arora pointed, has been much better than a few years back when the company was experimenting with AI and applications use cases were narrow.

"Now we are done experimenting. I believe that with the work we have done we are very well placed today to address all these issues," Arora added.