On the May 8th edition of Closing Bell on CNBC, venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya, founder and CEO of Social Capital, created quite a stir in enterprise artificial intelligence (AI) circles, when he took on IBM Watson, Big Blue’s AI platform.
“Watson is a joke, just to be completely honest,” Palihapitiya said. “I think what IBM is excellent at is using their sales and marketing infrastructure to convince people who have asymmetrically less knowledge to pay for something.”
IBM quickly parried. “Watson is not a consumer gadget but the A.I. platform for real business. Watson is in clinical use in the U.S. and 5 other countries. It has been trained on 6 types of cancers with plans to add 8 more this year,” IBM told CNBC. “Beyond oncology, Watson is in use by nearly half of the top 25 life sciences companies, major manufacturers for IoT applications, retail and financial services firms, and partners like GM, H&R Block and Salesforce.com. Does any serious person consider saving lives, enhancing customer service and driving business innovation a joke?”
The next day, Palihapitiya walked back his comments – somewhat. “I probably should have been more careful with my words,” he told CNBC, but he added that “there are a lot of people building extremely meaningful solutions who are probably getting somewhat out-marketed” by IBM – including one or more of his firm’s own portfolio companies.
Clearly, IBM sees no humor in Watson’s progress in the marketplace, and given Palihapitiya is building competitors to Watson, he may simply be talking smack. Nevertheless, the challenges IBM is facing with its bet-the-company gamble on Watson are well-known, as I discussed in a recent article on the company.
Now that Palihapitiya has poked a stick at Big Blue, it’s time to take another look at Watson, joke or not.
Read the entire article at https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonbloomberg/2017/07/02/is-ibm-watson-a-joke/.
Intellyx publishes the Agile Digital Transformation Roadmap poster, advises companies on their digital transformation initiatives, and helps vendors communicate their agility stories. As of the time of writing, none of the organizations mentioned in this article are Intellyx customers. Image credit: Atomic Taco.
