Using Cognitive to Help Answer Questions About Cognitive

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As cognitive computing grows in acceptance as a capability, as well as a concept, business leaders are beginning to ask new and important questions about how to approach these innovations.

They want to know things like, how to apply cognitive to particular businesses and business challenges; where and how to get started; and what goals should be set.

Luckily, we’ve got a growing stable of cognitive clients and generally speaking, so far the use cases fall into four areas: innovation and discovery, augmenting and scaling expertise, personalizing experiences, and optimizing processes and operations.

One example of operational optimization is a government taxation office that wanted to improve the effectiveness of their key investigations. For this group, fraud and noncompliance investigations took an average of eight months, and 90% ended in no further action. They determined the problem was the inability to use all of their data.

To improve the speed and quality of their auditing and case management, they needed a solution that could understand unstructured data. They’re now using natural language processing and cognitive ranking to analyze more than 60 million cases, notes, activities and other real-time sources to spot suspicious trends and prioritize cases that warrant investigation. While examining far more inputs, they’re also saving about 9,000 hours a day – one for each of their auditors and case workers.

Stories like this are the perfect raw materials for answering leaders’ new wave of questions about cognitive. They can help leaders envision the kinds of challenges and opportunities cognitive can address – and provide insights on how others have accomplished similar goals.

It wasn’t without irony that we in the IBM Watson Solutions Lab realized that these are exactly the type of questions and exploration a cognitive system is suited for. This involves integrating data in a variety of formats, from a variety of sources, from projects that have been run in every industry with widely varying business goals – and then extracting pertinent insights for a user’s specific business situation.

That is why we developed the IBM Watson Business Coach, a new tool that uses cognitive technologies to help business leaders better understand how cognitive solutions can address their individual goals.  Users can talk or chat with Watson, share their story – the challenges they face and the tools they use – and receive related case studies and recommended actions in return.  The tool will also learn from every user interaction.  So bring Watson your questions, ambitions and aspirations, and explore what cognitive computing can do for you.