Your cognitive future: Industry perspectives

Organizations have just begun to scratch the surface of cognitive computing capabilities. From improving customer engagement to enhancing research capabilities that identify new life-saving medical treatments, the potential value is boundless. Through our research, we uncover multiple innovative opportunities across industries, creating chances for early adopters to achieve a substantial first-mover advantage. WinterGreen Research estimates the global healthcare decision support market alone will increase to more than $200 billion by 2019 as a result of new cognitive computing technologies.

For decades, science fiction visionaries have shared their renditions of intelligent machines and computers that could learn and function as humans. Intelligent machines have since moved beyond the lore of science fiction; today, they are a reality thanks to breakthroughs in cognitive computing. Cognitive computing is here – and this innovative capability is becoming ubiquitous in our everyday lives and fundamentally changing how we perform our jobs, engage and interact with others, learn and make decisions. Pioneering organizations across industries and around the world are already leveraging its capabilities to realize significant business value and help solve some of society’s greatest challenges.

We are entering a new era of computing. Following the programmable and tabulating systems eras, cognitive computing represents a huge leap forward. This new era brings with it fundamental differences in how systems are built and interact with humans.

In the programmable systems era, humans do most of the directing. Traditional programmable systems are fed data and their results are based on processing that is pre-programmed by humans. The cognitive era on the other hand is about thinking itself – how we gather information, access it and make decisions. Cognitive-based systems build knowledge and learn, understand natural language, and reason and interact more naturally with human beings than traditional programmable systems. The term “reasoning” refers to how cognitive systems demonstrate insights that are very similar to those of humans.

Cognitive systems are able to put content into context, providing confidence-weighted responses, with supporting evidence. They are also able to quickly find the proverbial needle in a haystack, identifying new patterns and insights. Over time, cognitive systems will simulate even more closely how the brain actually works. In doing so, they could help us solve the world’s most complex problems by penetrating the complexity of big data and exploiting the power of natural language processing and machine learning.

While tremendous advancements have been made over the past 50 years, cognitive computing is virtually in its infancy in terms of how this exciting technology could potentially evolve. Adopting and integrating cognitive solutions into an organization is a journey and not a destination. Therefore, organizations need to set realistic expectations and develop long-term plans with incremental milestones to benefit from the technology’s future progression. Based on experience with clients and extensive research, we have identified multiple opportunities across industries for innovative application of cognitive computing today, as well as examined how the technology might evolve in the future.

In this, the first in a series of reports based on the IBM Your cognitive future research study, we explore three capability areas for cognitive computing. We also discuss how future opportunities will be influenced by the evolution of cognitive computing capabilities, such as advancements in machine learning techniques, and how adoption will be impacted by multiple forces, from societal views to policies and skills. In the second report, we will explore lessons learned from pioneering early adopters and provide insights on how you can prepare to take advantage of cognitive computing solutions.