The combination of digital business and artificial intelligence creates cognitive business. In Cognitive Business, cognitive technology will bring enterprises and various industries to new changes, leading the transformation of industry enterprises, including replacing part of human work, as well as redefining the content of some work, so that people and machines can work more y and smoothly, thus generating greater business value.
Cognitive technologies have the potential to have a profound impact on careers, workers and companies over the next three to five years. These technologies can, and will soon, eliminate some human jobs. At the same time, these technologies have the potential to be used to redefine human work. Creating new opportunities for workers and higher value for business companies and customers.
David Autor, an economist at MIT, identified several skills for tasks that computers can't replace for now. Examples include problem-solving, intuition, creativity, and persuasion -- which are needed for so-called "abstract" tasks -- as well as adaptability to situations, visual and verbal cognition, and human interaction, which are the "purely human tasks" that computers can't replace. "Purely human tasks". So product design, service, entertainment, or building delightful environments are not going to be replaced by computers anytime soon, and creative skills will become increasingly valuable.
According to a report released by IBM, cognitive business has five outstanding advantages:
- Personalized connectivity: By understanding users' backgrounds and personalities, cognitive business can help companies and users form intelligent connections and provide more personalized services.
- Enhancement of professionalism: Cognitive Commerce can enhance the professionalism of enterprises by introducing them to the leading knowledge at the forefront.
- Continuously learn and improve products and services: In the process of continuously communicating with users, Cognitive Commerce can develop products and services that are continuously self-learning and improving.
- Accelerate product development and time-to-market: Cognitive Commerce can accelerate high-stakes research and development and shorten time-to-market by gaining insight into patterns in traditional and unstructured data.
- Reduce Enterprise Decision Time: Using traditional and unstructured data to extract insights, Cognitive Commerce can reduce the time and cost of enterprise decisions and improve decision quality.
As cognitive technologies continue to develop and evolve new applications, they are often used in conjunction with work to help workers be more productive and get better results. Leaders should find ways to engage humans, rather than taking for granted that the best cognitive technology application is to eliminate human labor altogether. They should also uncover some cognitive technology capabilities that can compensate for skill shortages. A cognitive enterprise means that products and processes within the organization are able to "think" - to sense what's important, to reason about all the data, and to continuously learn and improve. When the business can think for itself, decision makers are able to consider a wider range of issues, such as industry challenges, competitors, and limitations.
Cognitive businesses differ from traditional businesses in many important ways, including:
- They accumulate specialized knowledge. Knowledge is increasing rapidly in every industry and profession, putting it out of reach of all professionals. And cognitive systems allow access to the best and most up-to-date information and insights, which in turn allows people to do their jobs better. In addition, cognitive systems can access the knowledge and experience of the top people in each profession and then make it available to all others, which actually makes wisdom more widely available.
- They can interact more y with people. Cognitive technologies can help organizations deepen their connections with individuals and interact with customers. They utilize new sources of private information, such as social networks, to create accurate profiles, understand their needs and perceptions, and use this information to probe what really matters to individuals. Cognitive systems also understand how people want to interact with brands, allowing companies to communicate with each customer in the way they prefer.
- Their discovery capabilities are enhanced. Every business needs to innovate and needs to understand what's likely to change in the months and years ahead. So, in a sense, they have to see their way through a sea of confusion. While traditional computers miss 80 percent of the world's information, cognitive technologies can support organizations in discovering hidden patterns in data, unearthing surprising new business opportunities, and accelerating the discovery of new medicines, new ways to land on the moon, and even all uncharted territory.
Why are technology companies so keen to pursue cognitive technologies? Deloitte's analysis suggests that by investing in cognitive technologies, companies try to increase revenue by creating value with newer and better products or services rather than by cutting costs. Beyond more revenue and greater market share, however, there's a deeper reason why these companies are using cognitive technology as a way to reinvent themselves to be more competitive in the future -- in effect, the basis for a shift in business models.
In order to achieve business transformation, some technology companies create a new business unit that generates revenue from scaling up by applying cognitive technologies to product innovation and even to architectural, operational, process, and business model innovation. These new divisions are also treated as a shift in the parent company's structure to facilitate business transformation. Such reorganizations emphasize the potential of cognitive technologies to completely revolutionize the technology industry -- and by extension, vertical industries and markets.
Transforming to a cognitive enterprise:
IBM
According to a Deloitte report , the clearest example of business model transformation through cognitive technologies is none other than IBM, which invested $1 billion in a new business unit, the Watson team, in January 2014; of that amount, $100 million is being used as an investment fund to "support the company's recently launched startup and business ecosystem to build a new class of cognitive applications powered by IBM Watson Developers Cloud (IBM Watson Developers Cloud) Watson."
IBM also recently announced the formation of an industry-first consulting division designed to help clients transform the "cognitive enterprise," according to the company. The new division will also leverage the proprietary computational argumentation and learning capabilities of IBM Watson, a division in which IBM has invested $1 billion to drive cognitive innovation across industries.
The IBM Watson team, which was created to enable radical business model transitions, seeks to create a robust business ecosystem, a complex, dynamic and adaptive community. To this end, the group provides open source infrastructure to develop cognitive technology services to a group of strategic partners in a variety of vertical markets (e.g., healthcare, financial services, insurance, retail, education, media, and telecommunications). This business model will also enable further expansion of the IBM Watson Developer Cloud as IBM acquires more and more cognitive technology companies.
Alphabet (formerly Google Inc.
Google's parent company, Alphabet, is similarly ambitious and has been reorganizing its structure at a dramatic pace and scale, essentially aiming to grow the company exponentially in the cognitive technology space.
Cognitive technologies will be an integral part of this business model transformation, based on Google's recent corporate acquisitions: between 2012 and 2015, Google acquired a number of cognitive technology companies, including eight robotics firms in 2013, all of which will be integrated into Alphabet. Their robotics technologies range from humanoid robotic systems, to next-generation robotic arm technology, to high-tech robotic wheels that can move in any direction, to robotics that use computer vision to make them better understand the events they observe and learn how to deal with non-standard situations, to robotics that are used in the world of movie-making, advertising, and design.