The Internet of Things is about connections and the massive amounts of data that result from those connections. Trouble is, most of the resulting data is not tapped, and that's where IBM and its AI mega-machine Watson come in. During a break in the IBM Genius of Things summit in Boston this week, I sat down with Harriet Green, general manager of Watson IoT and customer engagement and education at IBM, to discuss IBM's IoT and AI strategy. Green sees a market need as an opportunity, noting that 80% of the world's data is not yet searchable. "We've made a big bet ($3 billion) on IoT and bringing AI capabilities to IoT," says Green. "We're seeing this huge drive to connect the world's devices to, in our case, the IBM cloud, the IoT platform. People are understanding that if you connect things to things and things to people, the data flows and the opportunities are very real. "Secondly, we're seeing that the software application to gather this data and apply analytics to it are becoming deeper and richer.

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There is no stronger marketing tool than customer and member insight. The key is applying this insight to move beyond great internal reports to enhance marketing and the consumer experience on a daily basis (or in real time). Two mothers sit on a park bench, watching their offspring on the playground. Mom No. 1 observes to Mom No. 2, "Your son is very intelligent." Mom No. 2 sighs, shakes her head and responds, "Yeah, but he's not interested in learning."

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Every year, companies spend 1.3 trillion dollars on 265 billion customer service calls. On average, the cost to find and hire a call center agent costs $4000 (not including salary), with an additional $4,800 for training -- and with frustrated agents tending to drop like flies in the face of an often brutally stressful job, these costs mount up. AI, or what IBM calls cognitive computing, is changing that. Autodesk began piloting the IBM Watson Conversation Service in June 2016 as a virtual agent called OTTO, later enhancing it and renaming it AVA (Autodesk Virtual Agent) in February 2017. The return on investment has been tremendous, says Rob High, IBM vice president and Watson chief technology officer and one of the featured speakers at VB Summit coming up on October 23 and 25 in Berkeley, CA.

Hollywood is beginning to recast artificial intelligence from being the lead character in movies to becoming the leading technology driving the industry. Producers and directors alike are discovering the power of a new kind of AI assistant: IBM Watson, the cognitive computing system that is enhancing the work of the human imagination and giving artists, filmmakers, and other creative minds the tools to uncover new ways of thinking and problem-solving. Imagine the ultimate "super-assistant" on the set to help make hundreds of decisions and take care of mundane tasks that free you up to concentrate on making the picture a box office success. IBM Watson can do this by pushing the boundaries of what producers and directors can create on the silver screen. It can analyze volumes of data -- think photos, online content, scripts, video -- and then recognize, inform and project from the patterns it identifies.

As if active portfolio managers didn't have enough challenges from computer-driven passive investing strategies, now machines are directly horning in on their territory. San Francisco-based EquBot LLC is launching the first ever exchange-traded fund to use artificial intelligence, according to a company statement on Tuesday. Employing International Business Machines Corp.'s Watson platform, the AI Powered Equity ETF, ticker AIEQ, will attempt to mimic an army of equity research analysts working around the clock, according to Art Amador, co-founder of EquBot. "There has been an explosion of information," Amador said by phone. "AI provides a more informed way of investing."

Since the term Internet of Things, or IoT, was coined in 1999, the industry has had its share of hype, consternation, successes, and now even twitter parody accounts (@InternetOfShit). Although large-scale advertising campaigns for the IoT have become mainstream (seen any IBM Watson, Ring, or GE Digital ads lately?), recent news that GE had throttled growth expectations for its Predix IoT platform begs the following questions. What is the current state of Industrial IoT? Where are the areas of opportunity and what will emerge as winners? As an Entrepreneur in IoT for the last decade helping to find product/market fit for companies like Greenwave Systems and August Home, I believe there are significant opportunities in the Industrial IoT segment, a less visible, but a significantly larger compliment to Consumer IoT.

A recent interview with a former IBM employee who worked in the company's life sciences group shows that the hype of artificial intelligence's impact on healthcare was felt internally too. Severak reported accounts in recent months, including the well-researched piece in Stat News, have documented how IBM Watson's foray in healthcare has been far less noteworthy than advertised. In fact, other companies in the AI space have not hesitated to call out the company for overstating its capabilities. At MedCity News' own cancer innovation conference – CONVERGE – earlier this summer in Philadelphia, Zach Weinberg, co-founder at Flatiron Health, who was a panelist along with an IBM Watson Health representative, took IBM to task as recorded by this tweet. "@IBMWatson not intellectually honest about what it is actually doing; instead using buzz wrds" @zachweinberg @flatironhealth #mcConverge Similarly, this former employee, who declined to speak on the record for fear of angering his powerful former employer, said that large marketing budgets have yielded a lot of advertising but no tangible off-the-shelf product.