Cognitive Business

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


CONTENTS

This e-guide is brought to you by

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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

mailto:[email protected]

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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


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.


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


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.


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


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.


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.


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


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.


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.


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

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Transcript of Cognitive Business