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IN ASSOCIATION WITH
COGNITIVE BUSINESS
How cognitive solutions are enhancing the way we live & work
E-GUIDE
2 COGNITIVE BUSINESS | LondonLovesBusiness | IN ASSOCIATION WITH IBM
At this year’s Consumer Electronic
Technology event in Las Vegas,
keynote speaker and IBM CEO, Ginni
Rometty, applauded the pace that we, as
a society, are developing and embracing
digitisation. Yet she also posed an important
question. When everyone – and everything –
becomes digital; “Then what? Who wins?”
As we all race towards digital, it can be
easy to lose sight of the real benefits at the
heart of digitisation. Why is it important? Why
do we all need to do it? How useful can Big
past-the-post winner in this race; the key to
getting the most out of digital and data is how
much understanding we glean from it. The
winners, so to speak, are those who can bring
the most intelligence and insight to Big Data
and IoT.
It’s estimated that 2.5 quintillion bytes of
data are created every day; in fact, 90% of the
data in existence today was created in the
last two years. Yet the way we process that
data is not developing as fast; roughly 80% of
data is still in the dark. We know it’s there, but
we can’t see it, we can’t use it, it can’t help
us – although that is now changing, thanks to
cognitive solutions.
Rometty predicts that in the future, every
decision that mankind makes will be informed
by a cognitive system like IBM’s Watson, and
our lives will be better for it. In this e-guide,
we take a look at how cognitive solutions are
informing the decisions that we make today,
and how our lives – and our businesses – are
better for it.
Are cognitive solutions already a part of your business? Tweet me @Shrutitripathi6 or @Londonlovesbiz
THE MOST TRANSFORMATIVE
TREND TO HIT TECHNOLOGY
By Shruti Tripathi Chopra, Editor, LondonLovesBusiness.com
INTRODUCTION
Data and the Internet of Things (IoT) really be
without fully understanding what they bring to
our lives – and our businesses?
“Digital,” says Rometty, “is not a
destination. It’s a foundation.” There’s no first-
80%of data is still in the dark
3 COGNITIVE BUSINESS | LondonLovesBusiness | IN ASSOCIATION WITH IBM
CONTENTS
This e-guide is brought to you by
LondonLovesBusiness.com, in association with IBM.
LondonLovesBusiness.com is the new digital
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LondonLovesBusiness.com is published
by Casis Media Ltd, 56 Buckingham Gate,
London SW1E 6AE
Editor: Shruti Tripathi Chopra
Consultant editor: Charlotte Rumsey
Business development director: Jenny Knighting
0203 394 1847
04 FOREWORD By Paul Chong, Director of Watson Group, EMEA at IBM Corporation
05 WHAT ARE COGNITIVE SOLUTIONS?Infographic: how cognitive solutions are changing the way we interact with data
06 SOUND & VISION: BIG DATA GETS PERSONAL How cognitive capabilities are revolutionising the way
we process and understand human data
08 SMEs: WHAT CAN COGNITIVE BRING TO YOUR BUSINESS?
Cognitive is bridging the gap between staff and systems to bring expertise,
agility and insight to businesses today
10 FIRST STEP: WATSON ANALYTICS Add insight with predictive analytics
11 BIG BUSINESS: TAKING COGNITIVE TO THE NEXT LEVEL
How large enterprises are transforming the way they do business
14 WHAT NOW? How to introduce workforce analytics in your organisation
4 COGNITIVE BUSINESS | LondonLovesBusiness | IN ASSOCIATION WITH IBM
Cognitive computing can be a difficult
concept to grasp. For most people,
any mention of Artificial Intelligence
has their imagination leaping straight to
sinister thoughts of HAL 9000 or Skynet
(sadly often forgetting the more helpful and
less ominous J.A.R.V.I.S, or even Spike Lee’s
Samantha). For many, the idea of machine
learning resides firmly in futuristic fiction and
far beyond the grasp of the average SME.
Yet the reality is actually very different.
In fact, with cognitive solutions, we’re seeing
a paradigm shift between IT and business
the likes of which we’ve never seen before.
At odds with the idea of cognitive as a
complex, inaccessible – perhaps unnerving
– technology, cognitive solutions are actually
time. It’s this ability to learn and reason that
makes cognitive solutions such an exciting
opportunity for today’s businesses.
Where in the past we’ve seen systems
that look glossy and shiny at the beginning
but begin to depreciate over time, cognitive
solutions continue to develop without
the need for extensive revisions and re-
programming. Cognitive systems gain in
confidence, with each new set of data
informing the way they react in future, helping
them to evolve and better understand the
information they process.
Malcolm Gladwell famously stated that
it takes 10,000 hours to become an expert in
any skill. Thanks to Watson, experts in any field
can pass on their expertise and share their
knowledge, informing the next generation of
experts and helping them to take that skill to
the next level.
As cognitive solutions develop, we’ll start
to see even more natural, seamless relations
between us and our IT systems. Programs
like Siri are just the start; in future, our mobile
devices will feature intelligent assistants
that interact with us entirely naturalistically,
transforming the way we ask for information.
It’s an exciting era, not just for IBM, or the
businesses using our cognitive solutions, but
for all of us.
WHERE IT AND BUSINESS COLLIDES
By Paul Chong, Director of Watson Group, EMEA at IBM Corporation
FOREWORD
providing a
practical, even
simple way to
clarify Big Data
in a way that can
benefit us and our
businesses.
This shift sees
business leaders
having a direct input into how Cognitive
systems are trained. Cognitive systems
understand, reason and learn. While complex
coding is essential to their initial development,
it’s the way systems are trained – with
protocols designed to help them learn from
every interaction with data they experience –
that allow cognitive solutions to improve over
5 COGNITIVE BUSINESS | LondonLovesBusiness | IN ASSOCIATION WITH IBM
WHAT ARE COGNITIVE SOLUTIONS? Cognitive solutions are transforming industries and changing the way we interact
with data, allowing us to outthink the limits of what’s possible.
APIs Speech, sight and sound APIs can transform dark data into useful information
Personal That means that our
wearables, sensors and even medical equipment can gain
better insight into who we are and what we need.
SMEs Watson enables us to retain human expertise and share
knowledge within our teams. It can facilitate better client
engagement and help leaders understand their processes.
Large EnterpriseHere, the possibilities seem
endless. Enterprises are able to collate digital information across
huge networks of staff and customers, gaining unparalleled
insight into their operations.
6 COGNITIVE BUSINESS | LondonLovesBusiness | IN ASSOCIATION WITH IBM
SOUND & VISION: BIG DATA GETS PERSONALHow cognitive capabilities are revolutionising
the way we process and understand human data
It’s not so much the amount of data it can
process that makes it useful in personal
applications; it’s the type of data.
Human activity is difficult to boil down
into binary data. We can’t easily be distilled
PERSONAL
into numbers and statistics, charts and
graphs. The majority of the digital information
collected by our mobile devices, IoT
connected homewares and wearable tech
isn’t numerical. It is data that, before cognitive,
was essentially invisible, comprising of natural
language, sight and sound.
Over 50 APIs – including language,
vision and speech APIs – allow programs to
recognise this information and transform it
into useful data. Thanks to Watson’s cognitive
capabilities, these APIs are learning all the
time, with each transaction informing the
way that the systems react in future. It’s this
type of data that makes Watson so unique
when embedded into applications that help
us in our day-to-day lives, as it unravels our
complicated interactions and transforms that
data into usable information.
Take Under Armour Inc, a sportswear
company who have incorporated Watson’s
cognitive solutions to create a fitness
wearable that learns and evolves with its user.
UA Record is a mobile device app, created
by Under Armour as part of their Health Box
connected fitness system. It is, essentially, a
personal health consultant, a fitness trainer
and a sports assistant, all rolled into one.
Linked to Under Armour’s wearable, UA
Record can provide athletes – or those of
you who are taking your new year’s fitness
resolution particularly seriously – with
personalised coaching.
Connected to the wearable device, the
app does what you’d expect from a mobile
7 COGNITIVE BUSINESS | LondonLovesBusiness | IN ASSOCIATION WITH IBM
fitness wearable – tracking steps, monitoring
heartrate, measuring athletic performance.
Yet UA Record goes a few steps further.
Thanks to these learning capabilities
and those language, vision and speech APIs,
UA Record can tap into behavioural trends.
It connects with a database of millions of
individuals to compare your achievements
to others ‘like you’. It can recognise – by
sight – food images, to gauge nutritional
intake. Its weather domain knowledge and
news integration can help the
device to tailor your exercise
program every day to fit in
with the world around you.
The more you use it, the
more the app learns
about you.
CASE STUDY IBM'S WATSON HEALTH UNIT
CASE STUDY COGNITOY
IBM’s Watson Health unit is revolutionising diabetes management through its collaboration with Medtronic, a global healthcare provider. Combining cognitive computing with medical devices, Medtronic are developing personalised diabetes management solutions that can offer personal care plans in almost
real-time. Diabetes device data
can be gathered and analysed instantly, before being combined with numerous other sources of data – including medical records and wider population health data – to predict risks and uncover patterns for the patient. It’s unlike any diabetes management solution that has come before it, and is set to transform the lives of diabetes sufferers.
CogniToy is essentially a supercomputer packaged into a cute toy dinosaur. That may sound like the concept of an ‘80s comedy sci-fi, but it’s real and it’s already interacting with kids in test rooms today. Launched on Kickstarter last year, CogniToy brings cognitive solutions into early years learning. Parents connect the toy to a home Wi-Fi network and input a few preliminary details – age,
education level, a favourite sport or food. This helps the toy to jump straight into conversation with the child but, from there on in, there’s no need for programming – although parents can maintain full control via the Parent Panel. Using Watson, CogniToy constantly evaluates the child’s abilities, changing its interactions to help further develop their skills. It can answer questions (including those perplexing queries that have parents heading for Wikipedia) and tell jokes, engaging in a naturalistic, age-appropriate style.
8 COGNITIVE BUSINESS | LondonLovesBusiness | IN ASSOCIATION WITH IBM
WHAT CAN COGNITIVE
BRING TO YOUR
BUSINESS?Cognitive is bridging the gap between staff and systems to bring expertise,
agility and insight to businesses today
SME'S EXPERTISEAs Keith Mercier, IBM Watson’s
Global Retail Leader, said
recently; “by the time a
medical professional becomes an expert in
their field, they are often nearing retirement”.
It’s not only in the field of medicine; in almost
every industry, the point at which we feel most
confident in our work is often the time we
start looking to move on to pastures new, be
it retirement or our next career challenge.
With cognitive solutions, businesses can
create a partnership between staff and systems
that – to use Mercier’s words – enhances,
scales and accelerates human expertise.
Far from replacing human experience within
the workplace, it helps businesses to draw
on that experience continuously. With those
language, vision and speech APIs, Watson
can compile business data and convert it into
useful information, to help businesses retain
knowledge and expertise, even as staff move
on. Having a Watson-powered system at your
fingertips is like having an expert at hand, ready
to help when needed.
AGILITYIn the age of digital, agility is
key to running a successful
business. Businesses need
1
2
9 COGNITIVE BUSINESS | LondonLovesBusiness | IN ASSOCIATION WITH IBM
to be ready to move, and move fast. IBM’s
cognitive cloud capabilities allow businesses to
manoeuvre quickly and build tailored solutions
that can adapt and evolve to their needs.
Through cloud-based platforms like
Bluemix, Watson brings agility and innovation
to businesses of any size. Bluemix is a
responsive, easy to use app development
platform that can transform ideas into useful
applications in a matter of hours.
Getting started is not only easy; it’s free.
Customers only pay once the app reaches a
certain threshold – in terms of users, licenses
or requirements – making it perfect for SMEs
to rapidly test and deploy pilot apps.
INSIGHTImagine the insight your
business could gain from
a team member who had
access to every client interaction, every email,
every spreadsheet – in short, every piece of
information generated by your business. Not
only that, but they could trawl through that
information at breakneck speed, revealing
patterns based not only on facts and figures, but
on human interaction, activity and behaviour.
With Watson on your team, you can do
just that, allowing your staff to use cognitive
insights to grow and develop your business.
Anyone can teach Watson to become an industry expert. Through IBM’s Knowledge Studio, you can team up with developers and use ‘supervised learning’ techniques to teach Watson about your industry. From linguistic nuances to working relationships, Knowledge Studio can help Watson get to know you, your team and your industry.
3
CASE STUDY TRAIN ME
Brightminded, a creative coding SME based in the UK, teamed up with two experienced PTs to create their first cognitive supported app as part of the IBM Watson Mobile Developer Challenge. TRAIN ME is a cognitive application designed to help personal trainers manage their business, improving the way they engage with clients and access information. Powered by Watson, TRAIN ME brings personal trainers and fitness professionals
a whole host of useful features in one app. From streamlining business management to accessing industry updates and legislation, TRAIN ME can help trainers improve their business and their expertise.
By using IBM Watson, the team at Brightminded were able to draw on a wealth of industry information, research, and insights, to build an adaptable solution for their clients in the fitness industry.
10 COGNITIVE BUSINESS | LondonLovesBusiness | IN ASSOCIATION WITH IBM
FIRST STEP: WATSON ANALYTICS
Add insight with predictive analytics
If fully cognitive solutions seem like a big
leap for your business, Watson Analytics
could be a step in the right direction. It can
be used to various structured, or traditional,
data types – including text, spreadsheets and
social network statistics – to analyse digital
information and provide a more accurate
estimation of upcoming trends. Unlike other
complex analytics programmes, it’s designed
to be operated by ordinary business users
without programming or support from IT staff.
A FRESH PERSPECTIVE ON DYNAMIC DATA To better understand the dynamics of your
business, all you have to do is upload your
spreadsheets to be presented with user-
friendly visualisations or dashboards. It will
highlight information that it thinks might
be useful to you and integrate results from
multiple sources
– data from social
networks, for instance
– to give you new
insights into your
customer base. By
providing a new angle
on your day-to-day
operations, Watson
Analytics allows you
to react faster to new
trends as they emerge.
LEVEL UPUse Watson Analytics as an inroad to cognitive
solutions. By deploying this easy to use
tool, you’ll soon start to see how cognitive
solutions can add value, efficiency and insight
to your business. It can even become a core
part of your service offering.
CASE STUDY HONEST CAFE
A disruptive start-up from Revive Vending, Honest Café operates six unmanned coffee shops across southern England. If you’re wondering what is so disruptive about a coffee shop chain, the answer is: analytics. Honest Café uses
Watson Analytics to respond to customer behaviour, mining data from transactions, payments, even local weather. By making Watson Analytics a core part of the business, Revive Vending has uncovered insight into customer behaviour and preferences that
would otherwise have been impossible to detect. After seeing that customers used the Café as a ‘hangout’, Honest Café developed their seating areas, offering more space and comfort for visitors using the cafés to socialise.
11 COGNITIVE BUSINESS | LondonLovesBusiness | IN ASSOCIATION WITH IBM
BIG BUSINESS: TAKING COGNITIVE TO THE NEXT LEVEL
For large enterprises, the potential for cognitive solutions to transform business processes is seemingly endless. Cognitive solutions have the
capability to draw together disparate parts of a business, collating client information, bringing together colleagues in offices all over the world and
unifying corporate strategy. Just like SMEs, large enterprises can bring greater agility, expertise and insight to their businesses through cognitive solutions.Here are two large enterprises who are embracing this new era, taking
cognitive solutions to the next level.
LARGE ENTERPRISE
12 COGNITIVE BUSINESS | LondonLovesBusiness | IN ASSOCIATION WITH IBM
CASE STUDY THE NORTH FACE
In 2015, globally recognised outdoor apparel brand, The North Face, launched an interactive shopping experience. The brand’s mission was to apply technology to the retail experience in a way that adds to, rather than detracts from, the consumer’s overall shopping experience. The result was an interactive shopping experience powered by Watson and Fluid XPS, a digital commerce platform. The intuitive online shop allows The North Face customers to use natural conversation to find the products they are looking for, via a dialog-based recommendation engine.
Utilising natural language processing capabilities, the e-commerce portal is a comprehensive search engine that naturalistically asks consumers questions to find out more about what they need, learning from each interaction. It can then factor in details like location and temperature, to recommend products that suit the customer’s needs; so no one ends up purchasing a spring walking jacket for a climb to Kilimanjaro.
13 COGNITIVE BUSINESS | LondonLovesBusiness | IN ASSOCIATION WITH IBM
CASE STUDY ROBOTICS
No cognitive eGuide would be complete without at least one mention of robots. Introducing Pepper, a collaboration between SoftBank’s robotics division and Watson.
Aimed at global enterprise customers, Pepper is a humanoid robot who was initially designed to be a personal companion. Currently installed in over 140 SoftBank Mobile stores in Japan, Pepper meets and greets customers as they come into stores.
Unlike other humanoid robots, Pepper is able to interact in a natural, intuitive way, and – thanks again to those language, vision and speech APIs – he can recognise and react to human emotions. He even responds personally to the mood of a conversation, expressing his ‘feelings’ through his tablet, the colour of his eyes and the tone of his voice.
As with all Watson-powered technology, Pepper can learn from his perceptions and interactions, gradually memorising personality traits and preferences. Such is Pepper’s popularity as a customer services
assistant that he recently became the first humanoid robot to be adopted into Japanese homes.
If you’re worried that poor little Pepper might get lonely, fear not. It’s estimated that by 2019, the market for consumer and business robots could reach$1.5 billion.
14 COGNITIVE BUSINESS | LondonLovesBusiness | IN ASSOCIATION WITH IBM
WHAT NOW
?If you’re ready to
embrace cognitive in your business, it’s time to find out more. These
IBM resources are your next step towards introducing cognitive
solutions to your organisation.
JOIN THE COGNITIVE CONVERSATION
CONTACT RONAN HETHERINGTON, COGNITIVE SOLUTIONS SPECIALIST [email protected]
44-239 228 9747
MORE INFORMATION ON IBM COGNITIVE SOLUTIONS
15 COGNITIVE BUSINESS | LondonLovesBusiness | IN ASSOCIATION WITH IBM
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