Getting started with Cognitive Computing
Cognitive is being touted as a boon to business. You may have seen the IBM commercial where Watson Cognitive solutions helps North Face clients select the appropriate merchandise.
Cognitive computing can provide you real-time insight into very complex data from many sources and then decisions can be made to act on that data. Business processes can be automated to make your organization more agile with the ability to capitalize on emerging business opportunities.
Where to Begin Your Cognitive Computing Journey?
Most companies do not start out by deploying a large, multi-million-dollar cognitive project. You begin your organization-wide journey with business intelligence and then move towards data analytics. This requires you to bring your data together into a single place and use it to gain valuable insights. It forces you to make sure you have quality and complete data.
At the same time, your individual business units will start implementing technology that helps them operate. You might turn to IBM Watson Language Translator service to help your customer service team reply to emails and requests from customers who speak other languages.
Then your team sees an opportunity to automatically sort those incoming support messages to make sure they are directed to the right resources who can resolve any issues promptly. To do that you use IBM’s Natural Language Understanding processing.
Machine-Learning to Automate Your Business Operations
Now you can start to analyze your business processes and rules to uncover opportunities for automation. You may want to automate claims processing or improve retail product recommendations. So you seclect IBM’s Business Process Manager coupled with Watson Visual Recognition.
There are two primary keys to success when you apply machine learning. First is that you need to start with excellent data. When a machine is helping you make decisions, it is critical that your data be high quality, clean, and complete. If your data is skewed in certain direction, so will the results.
The second key is to work with a skilled data scientist that works with you to train the machine-learning system. Data scientists can be difficult to find due to their high demand. IBM is also here to help. IBM has developed a Cognitive and Adaptive Business Processes Workshop.