IBM's Watson Won Jeopardy! But Can It Win the New AI Biz?

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.