Stop being an "Observer" and become a "Collaborative Inventor" of the future. Companies with optimal Artificial Intelligence (AI) innovation strategies generate greater shareholder value, according to new research by Accenture. However, Accenture also found that despite these shareholder gains, only one fifth of leading companies that leverage Artificial Intelligence have achieved this performance in recent years. These companies, according to the report, have demonstrated high'AIQ' by combining strong in-house innovation and external collaboration. The research, however, only placed 17% of companies in the high performing bracket of collaboration and innovation, with a much larger 57% recognised as "Observers" and taking little action to collaborate and innovate in the AI space.

Human thinking is beyond imagination. Can a computer develop such ability to think and reason without human intervention? This is something programming experts at IBM Watson are trying to achieve. Their goal is to simulate human thought process in a computerized model. The result is cognitive computing – a combination of cognitive science and computer science.

Who will be the first to implement the new suite of Watson services? From the newly formed Watson Financial Services division, IBM has released the first suite of services covering regulatory requirements, financial crime insights, and financial risk modelling. These cognitive tools have been made possible following IBM's 2016 acquisition of global consulting operation, Promontory Financial Group. Promontory was originally working to provide support to banks dealing with the growing and tightening regulation and risk management within the financial services. It was the knowledge and expertise accessed in this acquisition that brought life to the new financial services-focussed Watson services, with regulation and risk accounting for two thirds of the suite, and a financial crime tool completing the set.

With a changing workforce, the enterprise workspace is also undergoing a distinct change, aided by the HR technology available today. Trends such as mobility, flexibility, and cognitive computing are forcing organizations to rethink the ways of workplace management. Not only are HRMS changing talent management practices, but they are also helping revolutionize organizational designs. New office ergonomics and new policies and practices are sweeping across the modern organization. The boundaries between HR and technology are blurring, and innovative means for workforce management (WFM) are taking to the mainstream.

Background: IBM Watson for Oncology is an artificial intelligence cognitive computing system that provides confidence-ranked, evidence-based treatment recommendations for cancer. In the present study, we examine the level of agreement for lung and colorectal cancer therapy between the multidisciplinary tumour board from Manipal Comprehensive Cancer Centre in Bangalore, India, and Watson for Oncology. Methods: Watson for Oncology is a Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (New York, USA) trained cognitive computing system that uses natural language processing and machine learning to provide treatment recommendations. It processes structured and unstructured data from medical literature, treatment guidelines, medical records, imaging, lab and pathology reports, and the expertise of Memorial Sloan Kettering experts to formulate therapeutic recommendations. Treatment recommendations are provided in three categories: recommended, for consideration and not recommended.

Brain has intrigued researchers since the beginning of scientific endeavors. Firstly, beginning of computers saw the advent of exciting developments which culminated to the development of the new discipline of artificial neural networks (ANN). ANNs have been through several generations of major developments, with the recent phase consisting of spiking neural networks based works [1]. Another parallel field of computational neuroscience has been the bio-inspired cognitive architectures (BICA) [2] a field which got major thrust in development. Cognitive architecture (CA) in general and BICA in particular also has a long history and the efforts have been devoted towards trying to emulate the functioning of brain. CAs like SOAR and ACT-R have been under development for many decades and have been applied in various studies [3, 4].

Cognitive computing refers to systems that learn at scale, reason with purpose and interact with humans naturally. Rather than being explicitly programmed, they learn and reason from their interactions with us and from their experiences with their environment. They are made possible by advances in a number of scientific fields over the past half-century, and are different in important ways from the information systems that preceded them. IBM has been working on the foundations of cognitive computing technology for decades, combining more than a dozen disciplines of advanced computer science with 100 years of business expertise. The birth of computing consisted of single-purpose mechanical systems that counted, using punched cards to input and store data, and to eventually instruct the machine what to do (albeit in a primitive way).

IBM are not doing "cognitive computing" no matter how many times they say they are. I was chatting with an old friend recently and he reminded me of a conversation we had nearly 50 years ago. I tried to explain to him what I did for living and he was trying to understand why getting computers to understand was more complicated than key word analysis. I explained about concepts underlying sentences and explained that sentences used words but that people really didn't use words in their minds except to get to the underlying ideas and that computers were having a hard time with that. Fifty years later, key words are still dominating the thoughts of people who try to get computers to deal with language.

IT departments are currently plagued by gaps between data collection, insights and action. They constantly find themselves hand-holding non-technical teams like marketing, sales and HR. And often times, they have a limited number of information sources at their disposal. That is, if they haven't empowered their company with cognitive technologies. Many business leaders already understand that cognitive computing is going to be a major disrupter.

Cognitive computing represents the third era of computing. In the first era, (19th century) Charles Babbage, also known as'father of the computer' introduced the concept of a programmable computer. The second era (1950) experienced digital programming computers such as ENIAC and ushered an era of modern computing and programmable systems. And now to cognitive computing which works on deep learning algorithms and big data analytics to provide insights.