How Aussies are evolving IBM's Watson

IBM Australia is looking to maintain its first-mover advantage in the burgeoning enterprise artificial intelligence (AI) space by putting more resources behind its cognitive drive. The vendor has spent 2016 arming its commercial operation with a new team that has the industry domain knowledge to drive Watson harder into specific verticals. Its local Research team has revealed involvement in cutting-edge projects for IBM's nascent Watson Health business, as well as around neuromorphic computing, which is seen as the next evolution of Watson. Since IBM created the US 1 billion ( 1.3 billion) Watson Group in 2014, the vendor has been selling business on the benefits of cognitive computing, while at the same time trying to create as many applications and use cases for the technology as it can. While these efforts were initially internally-driven, the growth of Watson over the past two years has increased the number of people and organisations working with the technology, with a growing amount of this work being done behind the scenes.