You've probably seen the Watson commercials, where what looks like a sentient box interacts with celebrities like Bob Dylan, Carrie Fisher, and Serena Williams; or doctors; or a young cancer survivor. Maybe you caught the IBM artificial intelligence technology's appearance in H&R Block's Super Bowl commercial starring Jon Hamm. "It is one of the most powerful tools our species has created. It helps doctors fight disease," Hamm says. "It can predict global weather patterns. It improves education for children everywhere. And now we unleash it on your taxes."

Deliver lightening fast customer support at scale requires a lot of resources and this is why you want your end users or employee to be able to self serve as much as possible. Bots have been around for a long time, but recent advances in natural language processing drove huge adoption over the last year. They are now being used to enhance a broad set of experiences with customer service being one of the most relevant. In this article we're going to learn what does it take to save time to our customer support team. To do this we'll build a chatbot to automate answers to frequently asked questions, eventually saving precious time to your customer support operators so they can focus on more complex requests.

Machine learning is everywhere these days. Whether it's recommending your next movie on Netflix or beating Ken Jennings at Jeopardy, ML is here to stay. But how do you get in on this wave? IBM has just made their new Watson Machine Learning (WML) service generally available this week. I do have to point out that you will need to create an account with Bluemix to start playing around with the service, but there's a 30 day free trial and it's pretty fun.

Over the last couple of days, I have seen a bunch of articles on my social media feed that are based on a research report from Jefferies' James Kisner criticizing IBM Watson. I am a big fan of criticism of technology – and as folks who have known me over time can vouch, I seldom hold back what is in my mind on any topic. I strongly believe that criticism is healthy for all of us – including businesses, and without it we cannot grow. If you go through my previous blogs, you can see first hand how I throw cold water on hype. Unlike my usual posts, I cannot claim to be an impartial observer in this case.

IBM's Watson supercomputer is one of the world's best-known artificial intelligence systems. But fame, it turns out, doesn't mean fortune. A scathing report from investment bank Jefferies claims that from an earnings per share perspective "it seems unlikely to us under almost any scenario that Watson will generate meaningful earnings results over the next few years". IBM Watson made its debut as a research project in 2006 and later gained fame after beating two human champions on classic US quiz show Jeopardy!. IBM has since spent a lot of time and money promoting its flagship product, posting more than 200 press releases on Watson, according to Jefferies.

In retrospect, there was much more at stake than a mere $1 million when IBM's Watson computer faced off against two Jeopardy! The bot's victory gave Big Blue a shot at conjuring up a new line of business at the perfect possible moment. A series of advances in image and speech recognition was about to trigger a frenzy of investment and excitement about the money-making potential of artificial intelligence. Six years later, it's fair to ask whether that plan could have been better executed. IBM today is even more urgently in need of new business, with quarterly results released earlier this week showing that revenues have declined for 21 consecutive quarters.

AI may not be able to lead us just yet, but it can judge how well we lead. New findings suggest Apple's CEO, Tim Cook, may just be Silicon Valley's "most imaginative" leader, reported CNBC, citing data from job search firm Paysa. It examined their "speeches, essays, books, transcripts of interviews and other forms of communication" to generate a Personality Insights report. Cook emerged as the industry's "most imaginative" leader, followed by Amazon's Jeff Bezos. Advances in AI mean IBM's Watson can do more than just read your personality.

In 2011, people witnessed an interesting competition on the television quiz show Jeopardy. It featured the two best players in the history of the show, Ken Jennings, who had the longest unbeaten run of 74 winning appearances, and Brad Rutter, earner of the biggest prize of $3.25 million. Their opponent was a huge computer with over 750 servers and a cooling system stored at a location so as not to disturb the players. The room–sized machine was made by IBM and named after the company's founder, Thomas J. Watson. It did not smile or show emotion, but it kept on giving good answers.

Helping Wimbledon in their pursuit of greatness For 28 years IBM has been the official supplier of Information Technology and consultant to the All England Club and The Championships, Wimbledon. By analysing millions of data points and thousands of pages of unstructured text you can understand, reason and learn what it takes to pursue greatness within a sporting arena. For a business wanting to understand how to deliver a great customer experience or differentiate their services they must look beyond pure historic structured data to the vast volumes of unstructured data created every day. IBM's cognitive and cloud solutions businesses can understand and respond to their customer needs in ways never possible before. This year IBM has used these technologies to determine what makes a great Wimbledon Champion (watch video above).

Today's most advanced cognitive technology users offer a glimpse into the possibilities and tangible benefits of creating intelligent businesses. While scientists and engineers have been exploring cognitive and AI technologies in labs for decades, the big data explosion and recent advances in computing power have propelled them into mainstream applications. We wanted to find out exactly how businesses are applying these technologies across their organizations, and what tangible benefits they're beginning to realize. We surveyed 600 early adopters of cognitive technologies and wanted to share our learnings through an interactive visual. Did you know that 77% of organizations that already implemented cognitive and artificial intelligence technologies use them to innovate products and services, more than for any other business goal?