Despite healthcare success, IBM's Watson efforts no small expense

While IBM has invested heavily in Watson, and the artificial intelligence technology is paying off in innovations within healthcare and other sectors, it's performing less brilliantly for the company's bottom line, at least so far. "IBM has pursued big, bespoke moonshot initiatives that can take years and are extremely expensive," Gartner research fellow Tom Austin told The New York Times. "It seems like they're swimming upstream with that." According to the article, the company believes more lucrative times lie ahead. IBM points to a collaboration announced Oct. 18 with Quest Diagnostics, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard as an example.