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?

The potential for artificial intelligence in precision medicine is big, according to conclusions of a new study by the New York Genome Center and IBM. The results, published in the July 11 issue of Neurology Genetics, a journal of the American Academy of Neurology, showed that researchers at the New York Genome Center, Rockefeller University and other institutions – along with IBM – verified the potential of IBM Watson for Genomics to analyze complex genomic data from state-of-the-art DNA sequencing of whole genomes. "This study documents the strong potential of Watson for Genomics to help clinicians scale precision oncology more broadly," Vanessa Michelini, Watson for Genomics Innovation Leader for IBM Watson Health, said in a statement. "Clinical and research leaders in cancer genomics are making tremendous progress towards bringing precision medicine to cancer patients, but genomic data interpretation is a significant obstacle, and that's where Watson can help." The proof of concept study compared multiple techniques used to analyze genomic data from a glioblastoma patient's tumor cells and normal healthy cells, putting to work a beta version of Watson for Genomics technology to help interpret whole genome sequencing data for one patient.

IBM's Watson unit is receiving heat today in the form of a scathing equity research report from Jefferies' James Kisner. The group believes that IBM's investment into Watson will struggle to return value to shareholders. In recent years, IBM has increasingly leaned on Watson as one of its core growth units -- a unit that sits as a proxy for projecting IBM's future value. In the early days, IBM's competitive advantage was its longstanding relationships with Fortune 500 companies. IBM Watson effectively operates as a consultancy where the company engages in high-value contracts with corporates to implement Watson technology for specific business cases.

Watson started as a follow-on project to IBM DeepBlue, the computer and AI program that defeated world chess champion Gary Kasparov. DeepBlue demonstrated that a computer could defeat a human in chess, a game with well-defined rules and limited, fully visible solutions. The real world, however, is much more complicated: information often is unstructured, problems ill defined, and solutions probabilistic at best. To equip AI to deal with the real world, IBM challenged its computer and data scientists to create a program that could defeat human contestants at Jeopardy!, a quiz show requiring answers to natural language questions over broad domains of knowledge otherwise known as unstructured data. As a quick refresher, artificial intelligence can be divided into three categories, as shown above.1The