Cognition as a Service: An Industry Perspective

From chips to smart phones to public and private clouds, industrial strength "cognition as a service" is beginning to appear at all scales in business and society. Furthermore, in the age of zettabytes on the way to yottabytes, the designers, engineers, and managers of future smart systems will depend on cognition as a service. Cognition as a service can help unlock the mysteries of big data and ultimately boost the creativity and productivity of professionals and their teams, the productive output of industries and organizations, as well as the GDP (gross domestic product) of regions and nations. In this and the next decade, cognition as a service will allow us to reimage work practices, augmenting and scaling expertise to transform professions, industries, and regions. Gartner, the technology industry analyst firm, projects that by 2017, 10 percent of all computers will be learning (Plummer 2013).