Cognitive technologies: The real opportunities for business

But increasingly, they can do things only humans were able to do. It is now possible to automate tasks that require human perceptual skills, such as recognizing handwriting or identifying faces, and those that require cognitive skills, such as planning, reasoning from partial or uncertain information, and learning. Technologies able to perform tasks such as these, traditionally assumed to require human intelligence, are known as cognitive technologies.1 Want to learn more about cognitive technologies? A product of the field of research known as artificial intelligence, cognitive technologies have been evolving over decades. Businesses are taking a new look at them because some have improved dramatically in recent years, with impressive gains in computer vision, natural language processing, speech recognition, and robotics, among other areas. Because cognitive technologies extend the power of information technology to tasks traditionally performed by humans, they have the potential to enable organizations to break prevailing tradeoffs between speed, cost, and quality. We know this first hand: The authors of this article have been aggressively experimenting with cognitive technologies in our own business and deploying multiple solutions based on them with great effect. And our colleagues are working with numerous clients to apply these technologies to diverse business challenges. Over the next five years we expect the impact of cognitive technologies on organizations to grow substantially.