Building the Cognitive Side of Your Business

How Can Cognitive Computing Performance Help Business?

      You are at a critical juncture in history where the impact of technology on business is significant enough to change the entire way business is conducted.

The exponential convergence of new technologies such as AI, automation, IoT, blockchain, and 5G has the power to transform business models, reinvent processes, and reorganize the way you all work. This is the era of the rise of Cognitive Enterprise

What is Cognitive Business?

Cognitive business is characterized by a learning system that is explicitly designed to collaborate with people in a conversational style, and understand natural language. Cognitive business may also benefit from cognitive analytics. Instead of using predefined rules, and structured queries to identify data to enable decision making, cognitive analytics uses cognitive computing technology to generate multiple hypotheses, collect and weigh evidence from multiple data sources to support each hypothesis, and rank the hypotheses.

The hypotheses that score above a certain threshold are presented as recommendations with a numerical score to measure the system's confidence in each hypothesis. The quality level of insights generated by cognitive analytics increases as more data is used to train machine learning algorithms. Versions of IBM Watson are being marketed as a cognitive business solution.

How to Help Your Company Become A Cognitive Business

Here are some fundamentals to dive into to help your company become a cognitive business:

1. Develop a cognitive strategy. Decide which products, services, processes and operations are to be infused with cognition. Determine what data your organization needs and choose experts to train cognitive systems. The aim is to increase skills.

At one company, a retailer estimates that its primary sales associate performs eight times better than the average salesperson. What if all of your professionals were as good as the very best?

2. Use cloud services that are designed for your industry. The building blocks for cognitive products and services are Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and industrial data sets. A cloud company brings together clinical, research and social data from multiple healthcare sources, creating a secure cloud-based data sharing hub.

Hospitals, insurance partners, and medical researchers can create new connections between previously closed health care data sets. By creating a culture of agile development, the healthcare industry can encourage better, faster, and cheaper care.

3. Create a database of data and analytics. Collect and curate the most useful data for your organization. This data can include data held by the organization – such as sales figures or customer complaint records – or data outside of the business, such as tweets or news stories. Pandora uses over 450 music attributes to personalize its service for music lovers.

4) Establish security for the cognitive era. The goal is to secure every transaction, piece of data, and interaction as the cognitive system gets into cars, buildings, highways, and business processes. A secure system ensures system-wide trust and ultimately, the organization's brand image.

In the past, professionals made decisions based on experiences and historical data. Now cognitive abilities allow business leaders to make strategic decisions based on data, structured and unstructured, that changes in real-time.

Today's companies are rapidly embarking on Digital Transformation, as they seek to gain the cost savings, agility, and collaboration enabled by cloud, analytics, mobile and social technologies. However, for all the benefits of digitization and automation, companies are finding that they are still not able to effectively incorporate new business models, respond quickly to market and disruptive forces, and increase benefits across the enterprise.

Business imperatives are clear: Companies consistently improve business models to improve profitability; increase revenue or be closer to the customer; to innovate and cope with competition and new market entrants. The availability of IT, which can be accessed via the cloud, makes it efficient to acquire, deploy and manage IT with results that even the smallest players and startups can achieve with disruptive innovations and capture market share.

It became clear to executives that Digital was not the destination. On the contrary, it lays the groundwork for a much more profound transformation to come. this transformation is driven by the need to incorporate decision intelligence into insurance products and processes, multi-channel interactions with customers, and the increased expectations of digitally empowered consumers. As companies race toward digital capabilities, a new business design is now gaining traction: designs that combine digital business with digital intelligence, leading to the Cognitive Business vision.