IBM has launched new Watson solutions and services pre-trained for a variety of industries and professions including agriculture, customer service, human resources, supply chain, manufacturing, building management, automotive, marketing, and advertising.
“As data flows continue to increase, people are overwhelmed by the amount of information we have to act on every day, but luckily the information explosion coincides with another key technological advance: artificial intelligence,” said David Kenny, senior vice-president of IBM Cognitive Solutions.
“AI is the tool professionals need to take advantage of the data that’s now at our fingertips and tailoring general AI for specific industries and professions is a critical way to enable everyone to reach new potential in their daily jobs.”
The latest news follows IBM’s recent announcement of a new software service that gives businesses more transparency into AI decisions, as well as research from IBM’s Institute for Business Value, which revealed that 82% of businesses are now considering AI deployments.
AI to Table
IBM is making available the Watson Decision Platform for Agriculture. The platform gathers data from multiple sources – such as weather, IoT enabled tractors and irrigators, satellite imagery, and more – and provides a single, overarching, predictive view of data as it relates to a farm in an easy-to-use app.
For the individual grower, this means support for making more informed decisions to help improve yield. For example, using AI-enabled visual recognition capabilities, growers can identify certain types and severity levels of pest and disease damage and determine where to spray pesticides. Or a grower can forecast water usage, thereby reducing waste and helping to save money.
Customer service
In a study of 5 000 executives released by IBM last week, 77% of top performing organisations said they see customer satisfaction as a key value driver for AI.
To give customer service agents increased ability to respond quickly to customer questions and complex inquiries, IBM is making available today Watson Discovery for Salesforce. The solution gives customer service agents the relevant information about a caller’s request in real-time.
Human resources
The average hiring manager flips through hundreds of applicants a day, spending approximately six seconds on each resume, which can make it difficult to make well-considered decisions. IBM’s new AI functionality for HR analyzes the background of current top performing employees from diverse backgrounds and uses that data to help flag promising applicants.
It provides an indicator of success and can help address bias in hiring decisions. For companies that face hiring litigation, it can also help provide a clearer explanation of hiring rationale.
A recent IBM study of global Chief Human Resource Officers found that 33% surveyed believe AI will revolutionize the way they do business over the next few years. These leaders are realizing that AI not only helps recruiters to attract the right talent, but also to create a workplace culture that is highly personalised at the employee level and highly collaborative across the organization.
Marketing
The new IBM Watson Assistant for Marketing feature, embedded into the Watson Campaign Automation SaaS solution for marketers, can help by converting the busy work of marketing into a simple conversation with Watson.
A recent IBM study of global CMOs found that 34% of CMOs surveyed are planning to reinvent their customer experiences with AI. New services from IBM help marketers fast track their integration onto marketing platforms, so they can more easily create compelling, personalised consumer experiences with AI.
Advertising
Subway used IBM’s new WEATHERfx Footfall with Watson to design ads based on shifting weather patterns. During its advertising campaign, Subway increased traffic by 31%, far exceeding all other targeting methods. In addition, they saw a 53% reduction in campaign waste, salvaging about 7,9-million impressions that would have otherwise gone to waste.
Manufacturing for Industrial Equipment
IBM is releasing specially-crafted Watson toolsets to help industrial teams reduce product inspection resource requirements significantly using visual and acoustic inspection capabilities.
At a time of intense global competition, manufacturers are facing a variety of issues that impact productivity including workforce attrition, skills-gaps and rising raw material costs – all exacerbated by downstream defects and equipment downtime.
By combining the Internet of Thing (IoT) and AI, manufacturers can stabilise production costs by pinpointing and predicting areas of loss such as energy waste, equipment failures, and product quality issues.
Buildings that Talk
Combining industrial IoT and AI, IBM IoT Buildings Insights can decode the exabytes of data that commercial properties create so that building managers can leverage that data to help reduce energy costs and understand occupancy dynamics in buildings, allowing them to understand and prepare for different occupancy patterns.
It enables property owners and building managers to leverage insights from weather, historical performance, and data from other third-party analytics to maximize real-estate investments.
AI for Vehicles
AI will also play a role on the front lines of product development. Since 47% of projects fail due to inaccurate or poorly written requirements (1), IBM is bringing the power of AI to the next generation of our Requirements Management solution. Watson can now assess the quality of requirements and provide guidance on how to improve their quality.
Additionally, to help businesses in all industries drive industrial size outcomes, IBM is introducing services to accelerate companies’ IoT transformations – from strategy, implementation, and security to managed services and ongoing operations.
Supply Chain
Each department in a company is different. Look at the folks responsible for the supply chain: they’re dealing with data flows coming in from all over the world. That’s why a global technology company is using a tailor-made version of Watsonto keep an eye on five aspects of its supply chain.
Watson can incorporate weather data, traffic reports, and regulatory reports to provide a fuller picture of global supply issues. IBM is making this technology available to the world with Watson Supply Chain Insights.