IBM has formed a new unit to help clients realize the transformative value of cognitive business, which the company envisions to be the next evolution of technology and business.
Thomas Neil Wagan, IBM Philippines external relations lead, said in an e-mail that cognitive business is the successor to e-Business and Smarter Planet initiatives.
“With e-Business, it was about the Internet transforming business. Smarter Planet was based on new opportunities created by the world becoming instrumented, interconnected and intelligent,” he said.
A cognitive business, on the other hand, uses systems that can understand, reason and learn to tap into all data, including those that computers and current IT systems can’t see or make sense of.
In a statement, IBM said cognitive business refers to a new computing model that includes a range of technology innovations in analytics, natural language processing and machine learning.
Industry analyst IDC has projected that half of all consumers will interact regularly with services based on cognitive computing by 2018.
The new IBM unit for cognitive business has more than 2,000 consulting professionals.
“Our work with clients across many industries shows that cognitive computing is the path to the next great set of possibilities for business,” said Bridget van Kralingen, senior vice president, IBM Global Business Services, in the statement.
She said 80 percent of all the available data — images, voice, literature, chemical formulas, social expressions — remains out of reach for traditional computing systems.
“We’re scaling expertise to close that gap and help our clients become cognitive banks, retailers, automakers, insurers or healthcare providers,” she added.
A survey of more than 5,000 C-suite executives to be released this fall by IBM’s Institute for Business Value (IBV) finds that executives from the highest-performing companies place significantly greater priority on cognitive capabilities than peers in market-following enterprises.