Brain transplant: Watson AI to make Slack's chatbot smarter

IBM's Watson supercomputing AI, which previously beat human competitors at Jeopardy and even edited its own magazine, is set to impart some of its wisdom to another automated system: Slack's chatbot. It's all part of IBM's new Watson Virtual Agent effort, which allows Watson's intelligence to be imparted to all sorts of human interface scenarios. While the idea of having conversations with artificial intelligence might seem like a gateway to a Skynet future, chatbots are seen as a massive growth industry in the coming years. Watson is ahead of the curve in this area, so applying its level of conversational ability to something like Slack makes a lot of sense. As it stands, Slack's helper bot is rather simplistic.