Former IBM Watson Health employee on AI: The truth needs to come out - MedCity News

A recent interview with a former IBM employee who worked in the company's life sciences group shows that the hype of artificial intelligence's impact on healthcare was felt internally too. Severak reported accounts in recent months, including the well-researched piece in Stat News, have documented how IBM Watson's foray in healthcare has been far less noteworthy than advertised. In fact, other companies in the AI space have not hesitated to call out the company for overstating its capabilities. At MedCity News' own cancer innovation conference – CONVERGE – earlier this summer in Philadelphia, Zach Weinberg, co-founder at Flatiron Health, who was a panelist along with an IBM Watson Health representative, took IBM to task as recorded by this tweet. "@IBMWatson not intellectually honest about what it is actually doing; instead using buzz wrds" @zachweinberg @flatironhealth #mcConverge Similarly, this former employee, who declined to speak on the record for fear of angering his powerful former employer, said that large marketing budgets have yielded a lot of advertising but no tangible off-the-shelf product.