Cognitive business

IN ASSOCIATION WITH
COGNITIVE
BUSINESSHow cognitive solutions are
enhancing the way we live & work
E-GUIDE

2 COGNITIVE BUSINESS | LondonLovesBusiness | IN ASSOCIATION WITH IBM
A
t this year’s Consumer Electronic
Technology event in Las Vegas,
keynote speaker and IBM CEO, Ginni
Rometty, applauded the pace that we, as
a society, are developing and embracing
digitisation. Yet she also posed an important
question. When everyone – and everything –
becomes digital; “Then what? Who wins?”
As we all race towards digital, it can be
easy to lose sight of the real benefits at the
heart of digitisation. Why is it important? Why
do we all need to do it? How useful can Big
past-the-post winner in this race; the key to
getting the most out of digital and data is how
much understanding we glean from it. The
winners, so to speak, are those who can bring
the most intelligence and insight to Big Data
and IoT.
It’s estimated that 2.5 quintillion bytes of
data are created every day; in fact, 90% of the
data in existence today was created in the
last two years. Yet the way we process that
data is not developing as fast; roughly 80% of
data is still in the dark. We know it’s there, but
we can’t see it, we can’t use it, it can’t help
us – although that is now changing, thanks to
cognitive solutions.
Rometty predicts that in the future, every
decision that mankind makes will be informed
by a cognitive system like IBM’s Watson, and
our lives will be better for it. In this e-guide,
we take a look at how cognitive solutions are
informing the decisions that we make today,
and how our lives – and our businesses – are
better for it.
Are cognitive solutions
already a part of your
business?
Tweet me @Shrutitripathi6
or @Londonlovesbiz
THE MOST
TRANSFORMATIVE
TREND TO HIT
TECHNOLOGY
By Shruti Tripathi Chopra,
Editor, LondonLovesBusiness.com
INTRODUCTION
Data and the Internet of Things (IoT) really be
without fully understanding what they bring to
our lives – and our businesses?
“Digital,” says Rometty, “is not a
destination. It’s a foundation.” There’s no first-
80%of data is still in the dark

CONTENTS
This e-guide is brought to you by
LondonLovesBusiness.com, in association with IBM.
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Editor: Shruti Tripathi Chopra
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Consultant editor: Charlotte Rumsey
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Business development director: Jenny Knighting
jenny.knighting@londonlovesbusiness.com
0203 394 1847
04 FOREWORD
By Paul Chong, Director of Watson Group, EMEA at IBM Corporation
05 WHAT ARE COGNITIVE SOLUTIONS?
Infographic: how cognitive solutions are changing the way we interact with data
06 SOUND & VISION: BIG DATA GETS PERSONAL
How cognitive capabilities are revolutionising the way
we process and understand human data
08 SMEs: WHAT CAN COGNITIVE BRING
TO YOUR BUSINESS?
Cognitive is bridging the gap between staff and systems to bring expertise,
agility and insight to businesses today
10 FIRST STEP: WATSON ANALYTICS
Add insight with predictive analytics
11 BIG BUSINESS:
TAKING COGNITIVE TO THE NEXT LEVEL
How large enterprises are transforming the way they do business
14 WHAT NOW?
How to introduce workforce analytics in your organisation

C
ognitive computing can be a difficult
concept to grasp. For most people,
any mention of Artificial Intelligence
has their imagination leaping straight to
sinister thoughts of HAL 9000 or Skynet
(sadly often forgetting the more helpful and
less ominous J.A.R.V.I.S, or even Spike Lee’s
Samantha). For many, the idea of machine
learning resides firmly in futuristic fiction and
far beyond the grasp of the average SME.
Yet the reality is actually very different.
In fact, with cognitive solutions, we’re seeing
a paradigm shift between IT and business
the likes of which we’ve never seen before.
At odds with the idea of cognitive as a
complex, inaccessible – perhaps unnerving
– technology, cognitive solutions are actually
time. It’s this ability to learn and reason that
makes cognitive solutions such an exciting
opportunity for today’s businesses.
Where in the past we’ve seen systems
that look glossy and shiny at the beginning
but begin to depreciate over time, cognitive
solutions continue to develop without
the need for extensive revisions and re-
programming. Cognitive systems gain in
confidence, with each new set of data
informing the way they react in future, helping
them to evolve and better understand the
information they process.
Malcolm Gladwell famously stated that
it takes 10,000 hours to become an expert in
any skill. Thanks to Watson, experts in any field
can pass on their expertise and share their
knowledge, informing the next generation of
experts and helping them to take that skill to
the next level.
As cognitive solutions develop, we’ll start
to see even more natural, seamless relations
between us and our IT systems. Programs
like Siri are just the start; in future, our mobile
devices will feature intelligent assistants
that interact with us entirely naturalistically,
transforming the way we ask for information.
It’s an exciting era, not just for IBM, or the
businesses using our cognitive solutions, but
for all of us.
WHERE IT AND
BUSINESS COLLIDES
By Paul Chong,
Director of Watson Group, EMEA at IBM Corporation
FOREWORD
providing a
practical, even
simple way to
clarify Big Data
in a way that can
benefit us and our
businesses.
This shift sees
business leaders
having a direct input into how Cognitive
systems are trained. Cognitive systems
understand, reason and learn. While complex
coding is essential to their initial development,
it’s the way systems are trained – with
protocols designed to help them learn from
every interaction with data they experience –
that allow cognitive solutions to improve over

WHAT ARE COGNITIVE SOLUTIONS?
Cognitive solutions are transforming industries and changing the way we interact
with data, allowing us to outthink the limits of what’s possible.
APIs
Speech, sight and sound APIs can transform dark data into useful information
Personal
That means that our
wearables, sensors and even
medical equipment can gain
better insight into who we are
and what we need.
SMEs
Watson enables us to retain
human expertise and share
knowledge within our teams.
It can facilitate better client
engagement and help leaders
understand their processes.
Large Enterprise
Here, the possibilities seem
endless. Enterprises are able to
collate digital information across
huge networks of staff and
customers, gaining unparalleled
insight into their operations.

SOUND &
VISION: BIG
DATA GETS
PERSONALHow cognitive capabilities are revolutionising
the way we process and understand human data
I
t’s not so much the amount of data it can
process that makes it useful in personal
applications; it’s the type of data.
Human activity is difficult to boil down
into binary data. We can’t easily be distilled
PERSONAL
into numbers and statistics, charts and
graphs. The majority of the digital information
collected by our mobile devices, IoT
connected homewares and wearable tech
isn’t numerical. It is data that, before cognitive,
was essentially invisible, comprising of natural
language, sight and sound.
Over 50 APIs – including language,
vision and speech APIs – allow programs to
recognise this information and transform it
into useful data. Thanks to Watson’s cognitive
capabilities, these APIs are learning all the
time, with each transaction informing the
way that the systems react in future. It’s this
type of data that makes Watson so unique
when embedded into applications that help
us in our day-to-day lives, as it unravels our
complicated interactions and transforms that
data into usable information.
Take Under Armour Inc, a sportswear
company who have incorporated Watson’s
cognitive solutions to create a fitness
wearable that learns and evolves with its user.
UA Record is a mobile device app, created
by Under Armour as part of their Health Box
connected fitness system. It is, essentially, a
personal health consultant, a fitness trainer
and a sports assistant, all rolled into one.
Linked to Under Armour’s wearable, UA
Record can provide athletes – or those of
you who are taking your new year’s fitness
resolution particularly seriously – with
personalised coaching.
Connected to the wearable device, the
app does what you’d expect from a mobile

fitness wearable – tracking steps, monitoring
heartrate, measuring athletic performance.
Yet UA Record goes a few steps further.
Thanks to these learning capabilities
and those language, vision and speech APIs,
UA Record can tap into behavioural trends.
It connects with a database of millions of
individuals to compare your achievements
to others ‘like you’. It can recognise – by
sight – food images, to gauge nutritional
intake. Its weather domain knowledge and
news integration can help the
device to tailor your exercise
program every day to fit in
with the world around you.
The more you use it, the
more the app learns
about you.
CASE STUDY IBM'S WATSON HEALTH UNIT
CASE STUDY COGNITOY
IBM’s Watson Health unit is revolutionising
diabetes management through its
collaboration with Medtronic, a global
healthcare provider. Combining cognitive
computing with medical devices,
Medtronic are developing personalised
diabetes management solutions that
can offer personal care plans in almost
real-time. Diabetes device data
can be gathered and analysed instantly,
before being combined with numerous
other sources of data – including medical
records and wider population health data
– to predict risks and uncover patterns
for the patient. It’s unlike any diabetes
management solution that has come
before it, and is set to transform the lives
of diabetes sufferers.
CogniToy is essentially a
supercomputer packaged into
a cute toy dinosaur. That may
sound like the concept of an ‘80s
comedy sci-fi, but it’s real and it’s
already interacting with kids in
test rooms today. Launched on
Kickstarter last year, CogniToy
brings cognitive solutions into
early years learning. Parents
connect the toy to a home
Wi-Fi network and input a
few preliminary details – age,
education level, a favourite sport or food.
This helps the toy to jump straight into
conversation with the child but, from there
on in, there’s no need for programming
– although parents can maintain full
control via the Parent Panel. Using Watson,
CogniToy constantly evaluates the child’s
abilities, changing its interactions to help
further develop their skills. It can answer
questions (including those perplexing
queries that have parents heading for
Wikipedia) and tell jokes, engaging in a
naturalistic, age-appropriate style.

WHAT CAN
COGNITIVE
BRING
TO YOUR
BUSINESS?Cognitive is bridging the gap between
staff and systems to bring expertise,
agility and insight to businesses today
SME'S EXPERTISE
As Keith Mercier, IBM Watson’s
Global Retail Leader, said
recently; “by the time a
medical professional becomes an expert in
their field, they are often nearing retirement”.
It’s not only in the field of medicine; in almost
every industry, the point at which we feel most
confident in our work is often the time we
start looking to move on to pastures new, be
it retirement or our next career challenge.
With cognitive solutions, businesses can
create a partnership between staff and systems
that – to use Mercier’s words – enhances,
scales and accelerates human expertise.
Far from replacing human experience within
the workplace, it helps businesses to draw
on that experience continuously. With those
language, vision and speech APIs, Watson
can compile business data and convert it into
useful information, to help businesses retain
knowledge and expertise, even as staff move
on. Having a Watson-powered system at your
fingertips is like having an expert at hand, ready
to help when needed.
AGILITY
In the age of digital, agility is
key to running a successful
business. Businesses need
1
2

to be ready to move, and move fast. IBM’s
cognitive cloud capabilities allow businesses to
manoeuvre quickly and build tailored solutions
that can adapt and evolve to their needs.
Through cloud-based platforms like
Bluemix, Watson brings agility and innovation
to businesses of any size. Bluemix is a
responsive, easy to use app development
platform that can transform ideas into useful
applications in a matter of hours.
Getting started is not only easy; it’s free.
Customers only pay once the app reaches a
certain threshold – in terms of users, licenses
or requirements – making it perfect for SMEs
to rapidly test and deploy pilot apps.
INSIGHT
Imagine the insight your
business could gain from
a team member who had
access to every client interaction, every email,
every spreadsheet – in short, every piece of
information generated by your business. Not
only that, but they could trawl through that
information at breakneck speed, revealing
patterns based not only on facts and figures, but
on human interaction, activity and behaviour.
With Watson on your team, you can do
just that, allowing your staff to use cognitive
insights to grow and develop your business.
Anyone can teach Watson to become an industry expert.
Through IBM’s Knowledge Studio, you can team up with developers
and use ‘supervised learning’ techniques to teach Watson about
your industry. From linguistic nuances to working relationships,
Knowledge Studio can help Watson get to know you, your team
and your industry.
3
CASE STUDY TRAIN ME
Brightminded, a creative
coding SME based in
the UK, teamed up with
two experienced PTs to
create their first cognitive
supported app as part of
the IBM Watson Mobile
Developer Challenge. TRAIN
ME is a cognitive application
designed to help personal
trainers manage their
business, improving the way
they engage with clients
and access information.
Powered by Watson, TRAIN
ME brings personal trainers
and fitness professionals
a whole host of useful
features in one app. From
streamlining business
management to accessing
industry updates and
legislation, TRAIN ME can
help trainers improve their
business and their expertise.
By using IBM Watson, the
team at Brightminded were
able to draw on a wealth
of industry information,
research, and insights, to
build an adaptable solution
for their clients in the
fitness industry.

FIRST STEP:
WATSON ANALYTICS
Add insight with predictive analytics
I
f fully cognitive solutions seem like a big
leap for your business, Watson Analytics
could be a step in the right direction. It can
be used to various structured, or traditional,
data types – including text, spreadsheets and
social network statistics – to analyse digital
information and provide a more accurate
estimation of upcoming trends. Unlike other
complex analytics programmes, it’s designed
to be operated by ordinary business users
without programming or support from IT staff.
A FRESH PERSPECTIVE ON
DYNAMIC DATA
To better understand the dynamics of your
business, all you have to do is upload your
spreadsheets to be presented with user-
friendly visualisations or dashboards. It will
highlight information that it thinks might
be useful to you and integrate results from
multiple sources
– data from social
networks, for instance
– to give you new
insights into your
customer base. By
providing a new angle
on your day-to-day
operations, Watson
Analytics allows you
to react faster to new
trends as they emerge.
LEVEL UP
Use Watson Analytics as an inroad to cognitive
solutions. By deploying this easy to use
tool, you’ll soon start to see how cognitive
solutions can add value, efficiency and insight
to your business. It can even become a core
part of your service offering.
CASE STUDY
HONEST CAFE
A disruptive start-up from Revive
Vending, Honest Café operates six
unmanned coffee shops across southern
England. If you’re wondering what is so
disruptive about a coffee shop chain, the
answer is: analytics. Honest Café uses
Watson Analytics to
respond to customer
behaviour, mining data
from transactions,
payments, even
local weather. By
making Watson
Analytics a core
part of the business,
Revive Vending has
uncovered insight into
customer behaviour
and preferences that
would otherwise have been impossible
to detect. After seeing that customers
used the Café as a ‘hangout’, Honest Café
developed their seating areas, offering
more space and comfort for visitors using
the cafés to socialise.

BIG BUSINESS:
TAKING COGNITIVE
TO THE NEXT LEVELFor large enterprises, the potential for cognitive solutions to transform
business processes is seemingly endless. Cognitive solutions have the
capability to draw together disparate parts of a business, collating client
information, bringing together colleagues in offices all over the world and
unifying corporate strategy. Just like SMEs, large enterprises can bring greater
agility, expertise and insight to their businesses through cognitive solutions.
Here are two large enterprises who are embracing this new era, taking
cognitive solutions to the next level.
LARGE ENTERPRISE

CASE STUDY THE NORTH FACE
In 2015, globally recognised outdoor apparel brand, The North Face,
launched an interactive shopping experience. The brand’s mission
was to apply technology to the retail experience in a way that adds
to, rather than detracts from, the consumer’s overall shopping
experience. The result was an interactive shopping experience
powered by Watson and Fluid XPS, a digital commerce platform.
The intuitive online shop allows The North Face customers to use
natural conversation to find the products they are looking for,
via a dialog-based recommendation engine.
Utilising natural language processing capabilities, the e-commerce
portal is a comprehensive search engine that naturalistically asks
consumers questions to find out more about what they need,
learning from each interaction. It can then factor in details like
location and temperature, to recommend products that suit the
customer’s needs; so no one ends up purchasing a spring walking
jacket for a climb to Kilimanjaro.

CASE STUDY ROBOTICS
No cognitive eGuide would be complete
without at least one mention of robots.
Introducing Pepper, a collaboration between
SoftBank’s robotics division and Watson.
Aimed at global enterprise customers,
Pepper is a humanoid robot who was initially
designed to be a personal companion.
Currently installed in over 140 SoftBank
Mobile stores in Japan, Pepper meets and
greets customers as they come into stores.
Unlike other humanoid robots, Pepper is able
to interact in a natural, intuitive way, and –
thanks again to those language, vision and
speech APIs – he can recognise and react to
human emotions. He even responds personally
to the mood of a conversation, expressing his
‘feelings’ through his tablet, the colour of his
eyes and the tone of his voice.
As with all Watson-powered technology,
Pepper can learn from his perceptions
and interactions, gradually memorising
personality traits and preferences. Such is
Pepper’s popularity as a customer services
assistant that he recently became the
first humanoid robot to be adopted into
Japanese homes.
If you’re worried that poor little Pepper
might get lonely, fear not. It’s estimated
that by 2019, the market for consumer and
business robots could reach$1.5 billion.

WHAT
NOW
?If you’re ready to
embrace cognitive in
your business, it’s time
to find out more. These
IBM resources are
your next step towards
introducing cognitive
solutions to your
organisation.
JOIN THE COGNITIVE
CONVERSATION
CONTACT
RONAN
HETHERINGTON,
COGNITIVE
SOLUTIONS
SPECIALIST
RHetheri@ie.ibm.com
44-239 228 9747
MORE
INFORMATION
ON IBM
COGNITIVE
SOLUTIONS

IN ASSOCIATION WITH
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Cognitive business

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