IBM and The Weather Company's Cognitive Council Aims to Shape the Future of AI in Advertising

Nearly two dozen agency and brand execs have joined a newly created group to discuss how artificial intelligence will change marketing. Last month, The Weather Company hosted the first meeting of the Cognitive Media Council, which aims to better understand how AI can apply to marketing strategy. The goal: to identify how cognitive computing can be used in advertising and identify key opportunities and challenges associated with using the emerging technology that's quickly become one of the most hyped areas of modern-day marketing. According to Weather Company CMO Jordan Bitterman, when IBM acquired The Weather Company in January 2016, it came under the umbrella of IBM's Watson division with the mandate to create cognitive solutions. With its Watson supercomputer, IBM has increasingly been varying its use of AI, creating a number of APIs for advertising and matching social influencers with brands. It's also showing how it can branch out into other intersections of art and science, such as when Watson ingested the works of Spanish architect Antonin Gaudí to help design a sculpture at this year's Mobile World Congress tech conference in Barcelona.