Qoints has launched an influencer marketing tool that uses the artificial intelligence of IBM's Watson to unearth the best influencers for your brand. The Qoints AI Social Discovery tool is a self-service tool that helps marketers deal with the problem of finding the right influencers for marketing campaigns. Locating the right micro influencers (those with 5,000 to 50,000 followers) is key to making influencer marketing effective and affordable. But it's a tedious process to manually search for the right influencers. Demand for influencers is growing, as they've been shown to generate higher levels of trust, engagement and purchase intent from their followers (in comparison to celebrity influencers), according to Toronto-based Qoints.

BM and MIT today announced that IBM plans to make a 10-year, $240 million investment to create the MIT–IBM Watson AI Lab in partnership with MIT. The lab will carry out fundamental artificial intelligence (AI) research and seek to propel scientific breakthroughs that unlock the potential of AI. The collaboration aims to advance AI hardware, software, and algorithms related to deep learning and other areas; increase AI's impact on industries, such as health care and cybersecurity; and explore the economic and ethical implications of AI on society. IBM's $240 million investment in the lab will support research by IBM and MIT scientists. The new lab will be one of the largest long-term university-industry AI collaborations to date, mobilizing the talent of more than 100 AI scientists, professors, and students to pursue joint research at IBM's Research Lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts -- co-located with the IBM Watson Health and IBM Security headquarters in Kendall Square -- and on the neighboring MIT campus Read more details at http://news.mit.edu/2017/ibm-mit-join...

Companies today have a customer service problem, and fixing it is more complicated than flashing an eager smile. Consumer-facing businesses are grappling with how best to meet the fickle expectations of real people in an increasingly automated and digital world. At the center of the issue are automated customer service systems, also called "virtual agents." These agents are software programs designed to help customers answer questions, perform basic tasks, or solve problems without talking to an actual person. We've all used them, and in many cases they work great. By answering a few questions from a computer with a friendly voice, you can pay your bill, order a new service, reset your password, process a return, or complete dozens of other tasks without having to "hold for the next available representative."

Watson is IBM's AI platform. This afternoon I tried out IBM Watson's Personality Insights Demo. The service "derives insights about personality characteristics from social media, enterprise data, or other digital communications". You are shrewd, inner-directed and can be perceived as indirect. You are authority-challenging: you prefer to challenge authority and traditional values to help bring about positive changes.

New mobile machine learning capabilities are coming to Apple devices, thanks to IBM Watson and Apple Core ML. Under CEO Tim Cook's leadership, Apple has been angling for an ever-bigger slice of the enterprise pie. Last year we saw the technology giant partner with GE to bring the industrial predictive and analytics capabilities of the Predix IIoT platform to Apple's iOS. But for the past few years Apple has been deepening and extending its ties with IBM too. When the two companies announced their strategic partnership in 2014, Tim Cook and IBM CEO Virginia Rometty claimed that "Apple and IBM are like puzzle pieces that fit perfectly together."

Artificial intelligence is revolutionizing businesses across industries. More than half of the executives surveyed in a 2017 PwC report said that AI solutions were already increasing their companies' productivity. As usual, marketers are at the forefront, embracing AI at a particularly rapid pace. But while any new resource can create excitement in some, it can make others feel uncertain--sometimes even worried about their futures. Many marketers fear that onboarding AI will fundamentally change the way they do business, and not completely for the better.

On Thursday, IBM announced new capabilities for its Watson Data Platform that make it easier for developers and data scientists to analyze and prepare enterprise data for artificial intelligence (AI) applications. By 2018, nearly 75% of developers will build AI functionality into their apps, according to an IDC report. However, this requires wading through increasingly complex data that lives in different places, and must be continually and securely ingested, according to an IBM press release. In response to this challenge, Watson will now include data cataloging and data refining, to improve data visibility and better enforce data security policies so that users can more easily share information across public and private cloud environments. "We are always looking for new ways to gain a more holistic view of our clients' campaign data, and design tailored approaches for each ad and marketing tactic," Michael Kaushansky, chief data officer at global advertising and marketing consultancy Havas, said in the release.

We are pleased to announce that in "The Forrester New Wave: Conversational Computing Platforms, Q2 2018,"[1] IBM Watson Assistant is named as a Leader in conversational computing. It has become increasingly important for businesses to build engaging interactions that deliver value to their customers, and IBM is proud to offer technologies that help developers and enterprises enhance those experiences. The report evaluated the most significant conversational computing platforms, diving into each vendor's current offering and strategy and including customer feedback. IBM was cited for its developer-friendly tools and enterprise expertise requirements, which give developers access to the tools and technologies they need while providing industry and enterprise support for their businesses. Our customers also appreciated IBM's thorough understanding of enterprise requirements and Watson Assistant's readiness for integration into a broader architecture.

Today, we are enhancing our product to accelerate the value of AI in your companies and announcing Watson Studio. IBM Watson Studio is an integrated environment designed to make it easy to develop, train, manage models and deploy AI-powered applications and is a SaaS solution delivered on the IBM Cloud. IBM Services has already been using Watson Studio to train business patterns. In specific client situations, we are able to train business patterns and encode into end user applications in a few hours. Our consultants now embed Watson-powered AI across all processes in our client business with simplicity and speed, so our consultants spend more time creating incremental value, rather then coding applications.

Christina Cardoza is the News Editor of SD Times. She is responsible for the oversight of the daily news published to the website as well as the company's weekly newsletter, News on Monday. She covers agile, DevOps, AI, machine learning, mixed reality and software security. She is an undeniable nerd who loves Marvel comics and Star Wars. On Follow her on Twitter at @chriscatdoza!