IBM's Watson now powers Lucy, a cognitive computing system built specifically for marketers

Suppose that, someday in the future, a data-besieged marketer could use menu commands or plain English text to ask questions about any data. That future, according to a company called Equals 3, is here, and it's called Lucy. Launched recently, she is the first marketing-focus portal built on services provided by IBM's now-legendary cognitive supercomputer, Watson. "There is nothing in the marketplace like Lucy," Equals 3 Managing Partner Scott Litman told me. "She is a user interface for all my marketing systems." The name of his company, which was founded last year, derives from the idea that a person plus a computer can equal something bigger than their sum.