IBM Watson Solutions to help professionals leverage cognitive capabilities

IBM has unveiled a series of new cognitive solutions designed for professionals in marketing, commerce, supply chain and human resources. The company claims that the new solutions will help enable organizations across all industries and of all sizes to integrate new cognitive capabilities into their businesses. Dubbed as Watson solutions, Big Blue states that the offering helps professionals uncover insights from data to understand, reason and learn about their customers and important business processes. This in turn can be used to augment the professionals’ existing knowledge and experience without needing to engage a data analyst and make more informed business decisions, spot opportunities and take action with confidence. Harriet Green, General Manager, Watson IoT, Cognitive Engagement and Education, IBM states that IBM is bringing Watson cognitive capabilities to millions of professionals around the world, putting a trusted advisor and personal analyst at their fingertips.

“Similar to the value that Watson has brought to the world of healthcare, cognitive capabilities will be extended to professionals in new areas, helping them harness the value of the data being generated in their industries and use it in new ways.”

Marketers

The company states that the new Cognitive Solutions for Marketers will help practitioners identify and target the right audiences based on customer behaviors and quickly create the ideal combination of campaign assets to drive conversion and build brand loyalty. It will use:

• IBM Watson Customer Experience Analytics that taps into a variety of behavioral data (for example shopping patterns, buying trends, etc.) to understand which customers are the right target for a campaign. The offering is constantly reasoning, processing new behavioral data and models so marketers can adapt their customer segmentation quickly and easily through visualizations and natural language interactions.
• IBM Watson Content Hub which will use cognitive capabilities to understand and learn about the data in a company’s content management system. It trains itself to understand what has been stored and then recognize and automatically tag content including images, videos and documents based on millions of previous examples. This will allow marketers and merchandisers to select the right content based on the needs of the campaign regardless of the channel they are using.

Retailers

IBM has also released Watson Order Optimizer, a part of cognitive solutions for commerce professionals, which helps retailers deliver last-mile fulfillment that meets client demand while improving profitability and reducing costs across all sales channels. The optimizer helps online commerce practitioners fulfill orders across all channels. And, because it is cognitive, the offering learns over time, studying patterns from past orders and current market trends to make recommendations on everything from network capacity to shipping costs and times.

Supply Chain leaders

To address issues of visibility and transparency into supply chain leaders’ physical and digital supply chain, specifically the ability to see and understand the vast amounts of data being generated with supply chain, IBM has also released new cognitive solutions for supply chain professionals, IBM Watson Supply Chain Insights. Big Blue claims that this offering continuously learns about a company’s normal supply chain patterns by analyzing and spotting trends in the data from multiple systems including trade partners, which can account for up to 65% of the value of a company derives from its products and services (according to CAPS research). The solution then alerts practitioners to potential disruptions, provides insights into estimated time delays and financial costs of the issue and recommends specific experts who can gather in a virtual work room to quickly solve the problem.

Human Resource

For driving improvements in the delivery of HR services and to retain key talent, IBM states that organizations must have the tools that support employees’ preferred working style. With IBM Watson Work cognitive-powered productivity applications and services, employees can connect with the right experts, ensure relevant content and insights are utilized and work together in a simple manner.

• IBM Watson Workspace learns how an individual works and interacts, and consolidates multiple work conversations from various communications channels into a single space. Using Watson, the technology highlights the most urgent action items, points to the right content needed at the time, and automates everyday tasks so employees can focus on the most vital business tasks.
• IBM Watson Work Services are a set of cognitive APIs –Action Identification, Moment Identification and Summarization –developers can access through the offering’s website so they can infuse cognitive capabilities into existing work products and applications such as IBM Watson Workspace, existing third party applications and when building new applications.

The technology uses natural language classifiers so it can analyze and facilitate the necessary action. For example, if someone says: “Great point –let’s schedule a meeting to discuss further,” the system can identify ‘schedule a meeting’ as an action, and help find the best time to continue the conversation.