IBM Hosted a Big Party for Watson With its CEO as the Star

IBM Hosted a Big Party for Watson With its CEO as the Star By Darryl K. Taft Posted 2016-10-28 Print NEWS ANALYSIS: IBM CEO Ginni Rometty keynoted the company's World of Watson conference in Las Vegas and drove home that Watson is the AI platform for business. LAS VEGAS–IBM held a big party for its Watson cognitive computing technology here this week in the form of the IBM World of Watson (IBM WoW) 2016 conference. Originally known as IBM Insight, the company augmented the name of the event to focus on Watson and the importance of cognitive technology to the company's future. Indeed, IBM CEO Ginni Rometty said hundreds of millions of users interact with Watson-powered systems today and, by the end of next year, she expects there to be more than 1 billion Watson users. If nothing else, the World of Watson event was a paean to the continuing adoption of Watson across a broad variety of industries and technology areas, including medicine and health care, financial services, retail, manufacturing and travel, as well as technology areas such as cloud computing, the internet of things (IoT), software development and more.