EXPRESS COMPUTER | APRIL, 2017
6 | COVER STORY
We believe that organizations have just begun to scratch the surface of cognitive computing capabilities Prativa Mohapatra Vice President, Watson, IBM India/South Asia
With Watson, every digital application, product and process can understand, reason and learn Dr Prashant Pradhan, Chief Developer Advocate, IBM India / South Asia
insights of prospective buyers, easing the process of supplier negotiations which often takes weeks/months to just a few minutes,” says Bajwa. In education, Watson is helping in personalizing academic instruction and enhance experiences for students and teachers. Oil pipeline analysts are using Watson to trim years off production timelines; a leading audit firm is using Watson to reinvent audits – the difference between manually analyzing a small sample of hundreds of documents to using Watson to read and derive insights from thousands or millions of materials. A medical school has discovered a protein that inhibits the growth of tumor in cancer patients. A university in Australia uses Watson as a student advisor to answer their questions as they arrive in campus. Citizens of Singapore have access to government services with help from Watson. Last year, Macy’s announced the pilot of “Macy’s On Call,” a mobile web tool that allows customers to interact with an AI-powered platform, via their mobile devices. “Macy’s On Call” taps IBM Watson, via Satisfi, an intelligent engagement platform, to deliver a solution that will enhance the customer in-store shopping experience. The mobile companion, accessed via a mobile browser, allows customers to input natural language questions regarding each participating store’s unique product assortment, services and facilities and receive a customized response to the inquiry. There are a number of ways that customers may request information. For example, a customer could type, “Where are the ladies shoes?” or type a combination of brand and product inquiry such as “INC dress,” and they will receive the relevant response and location of that product in the store. Positioning Watson in India Watson is a big bet for IBM. The company continues to invest in Watson, including dedicating $100 million to
venture investments to support startups building cognitive apps through the Watson Developer Zone on Bluemix. IBM is also making Watson more widely available through the Watson Ecosystem, which has grown to more than 500 partners. Paired with Watson is the company’s core big data and analytics business. IBM has also invested over $15 billion in these areas since 2010, including over $7 billion on more than 20 acquisitions. Nearly half of IBM Research’s spending is focused on analytics and cognitive technologies. India is a high growth market, and extremely strategic, as it has a large domestic market, and a huge base of developers of software services players. Explaining the positioning of Watson in India, Bajwa says, “Our approach will be “bi modal” in nature. On the one hand, we will bring to bear deep, specialised solutions and expertise to specific industry verticals. You can think of Watson Oncology, deployed at Manipal Hospitals, as an example of such deep, domainspecific solutions. In addition, IBM has created a number of solutions to address specific business function challenges including Expertise Finder,
Agent Assist, Cognitive Claims, Equipment Repair, Conversation Bot and many more. On the other hand, developers, ISVs and startups can leverage Watson APIs via BlueMix on IBM Cloud to create innovative solutions, products and services with Watson.” Pradhan says that the consumption of cognitive technology is happening in two modes. So business and governments are adopting IBM Watson pre-built offerings/products and solutions which have a distinct Industry Pattern or leveraging IBM Watson Developer Cloud as a platform and appropriate APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) to built point solutions/ capabilities. “We have a plethora of ecosystem partners including business partners, start-ups and developers who have adopted this mode and are scaling fast. While industries like telecom, financial services, healthcare are early adopters, we also see lot of interest and applicability across emerging verticals like fashion retailers, media & entertainment and education. Knowledge based and services centric businesses like consulting, legal, BPOs are also rapidly adopting these technologies.” IBM is also engaging with
academia through its University Relations team, and with organizations such as Manipal Academy of Data Sciences, to introduce cognitive computing to students, professionals and budding entrepreneurs. IBM also recently signed a MoU with Infrastructure Leasing and Financial Services institute to provide personalized education to their students. IL& FS will leverage Watson capabilities to create technology-driven personalized learning and tutoring. IBM will use its cognitive technology platform, IBM Watson, as part of the partnership. IBM will use the IBM Watson data cloud as part of the deal, and access Watson education insight services, Watson library, student information insights — these are big data sets that have been created through collaboration and inputs with many universities. Similarly, students at MIT Pune have been using IBM Watson APIs powered by IBM Bluemix, and have hit the ground running with speed within weeks. Drawing from Watson’s domain knowledge, Chintu will assist senior citizens in conducting everyday tasks such as reading the newspaper / book and provide mood based
COGNITIVE IN ACTION Company
Cognitive solution used
InspireOne Technologies
Uses IBM Watson cognitive APIs in its professional development app to empower employees to develop their leadership skills
TEXTIENT
Uses Watson’s Personality Insights API along with sentiment analysis, entity extraction, and concept extraction to automatically generate a comprehensive Brand-Essence Report in a matter of minutes
Kalyan Jewellers
Has deployed IBM’s cognitive solution on the IBM Cloud platform to redefine its customer interface and experience
Manipal Hospitals
Uses IBM Watson to deliver personalized cancer care to its patients
Signzy Technologies
Uses Watson's cognitive APIs to quickly create an Artificial Intelligence assisted digital on-boarding solution. Using different APIs, the company has been able to replicate human intelligence in document verification and in detecting potential frauds
With cognitive capabilities, IBM Watson could prove to be extremely useful in areas such as fraud detection, procurement and even detecting new cyber attacks
entertainment services for song and dance and generate reminders on their daily medication. IBM has opened Watson’s APIs to an ecosystem of developers, partners and startups – who are adding the power of Cognitive to their businesses. For example, TEXTIENT is a Software as a Service (SaaS) platform for brand, marketing and customer insights. TEXTIENT uses Watson’s Personality Insights API along with sentiment analysis, entity extraction, and concept extraction to automatically generate a comprehensive Brand-Essence report in a matter of minutes. The report reflects dimensions influencing a brand’s strength and equity such as dominant brand personalities, emotional and sensory brand experiences, customer engagement and brand credibility. Talview, a HR technology solution provider uses a Watson-enabled solution to capture and objectively analyze all the data associated with the hiring process. The core functionality of the solution is to enable job candidates to record video interviews through a fixed or mobile device and to enable employers to apply sophisticated screening criteria to evaluate candidates. The solution analyzes a candidate’s resume content and social media posting content for recurring or important content patterns. The linguistic analysis
capabilities of the IBM Watson Tone Analyzer service allow the solution to read between the lines of what a candidate writes in a blog or says in a video interview, including emotions, social tendencies and language styles. Against the same data, IBM Watson Personality Insights service extracts personality insights such as values and needs. Similarly, professional development organization,InspireOne Technologies has embedded Watson in its Supernova application to empower employees to develop their leadership capabilities. Supernova uses Watson’s Sentiment Analysis and Natural Language Classifier APIs to analyze corporate emails, enabling Supernova to deliver evidence-based insights so managers can refine their own leadership capabilities and areas for development. Supernova can capture and quantify to what extent an employee applies leadership competencies such as collaboration or strategic thinking and also explain how to further develop such skills. For example, an employee who does not demonstrate collaboration frequently might get specific pointers, such as asking more questions from team members during interactions. HDFC Life, a large insurance company in India, has been using InspireOne’s Supernova solution powered by Watson. For SMEs, IBM expects Watson APIs on cloud to be the dominant consumption pattern. Companies such as Wayblazer - who developed a travel and hospitality business using Watson APIs - or ROSS Intelligence, who developed a cognitive app for lawyers - are prominent, and very interesting examples of this model. Says Mohapatra, “We recognise that many SMEs are going to be cloud- and mobilefirst, and hence the cloud based pay-per-use model is important. We enable hybrid cloud patterns where a business can build cognitive applications using the optimal mix of public and private cloud.” But the biggest potential of
Watson could be in the Government sector. Most central and state government departments are grappling with the challenges of managing huge volumes of data. With cognitive capabilities, IBM Watson could prove to be extremely useful in areas such as fraud detection, procurement and even detecting new cyber attacks. “We believe one of the biggest beneficiaries of this technology could be the public and government services. This is where we need - skill and scale. There are volumes of information, enormous data residing in documents and journals across departments Imagine the power of harnessing these and making them consumable,” states Bajwa. Future of Watson in India With Watson, IBM is seeing growth in both dimensions breadth as well as depth. On the depth front, IBM sees the early adopters of today moving on to leverage their IP and collective expertise deeper and better with Watson becoming better as they learn more. Here IBM sees Watson redefining professions altogether, where instead of spending 80 percent of their time in gathering and analyzing information, professionals are able to focus more and more on value-added work, while Watson assists them in understanding and leveraging all data and insights in the organization and beyond. On the breadth front, IBM sees the collective ecosystem leading the charge. “We believe in a few years, every decision we take - in every aspect of life and in every profession - will be impacted by cognitive. With increasing pace of digitization in India, a lot of domains will be ripe for the application of cognitive technologies and services, delivered via the cloud,” says Bajwa. At a time when a majority of private Indian enterprises and government departments are looking to transform themselves digitally, IBM’s big bet on cognitive technologies could pay off in India.