Cloud computing is now part of our life. Everywhere and everyday: whether it be sharing the kids’ pictures or our latest powerpoint, we all rely on the cloud. iCloud and Dropbox are our new best friends!
Like every innovation cloud computing will provide new capabilities everyday. It’s a maturing commodity and the pace of innovation is huge!
Can you believe that 90% of entire world’s data was created in the last two years? (IBM Watson conference Sept 2015, Paris). Or that 80 % is unstructured? So, what could we do with it all? Two things you can do in this ocean of information are: find lots of business opportunities to help your clients and find clues to improve your services, but how?
The cognitive cloud is part of this next computing revolution.How can we be clever about this,and put all this information to good use? A new area is coming: The Cognitive Cloud.
Cognitive, is like the cloud or medicine ;). It’s a broad area. Let’s use the IBM Watson definition – It seems to me like in cloud computing in 2010 🙂 , no clear definition, but let’s try this one:
“Today we are in the “programmable era” of computers, in which all the possible actions that a computer can take must be programmed in advance, [Rometty] explained. In contrast, Watson is “a new species,” [that] is taught—it is not programmed. It runs by experience and from interaction. By design, it gets smarter over time and gives better judgments over time,” Rometty said.”
Behind all this learning behaviour, we can find various artificial intelligence topics like, natural language processing (NLP), machine learning, sentiment analysis, classification, and a lot more.
Harvard Business Review says “Artificial Intelligence is almost ready for business”, this is due to multiple factors.
I can count three:
– computing is cheap, thanks to the cloud! We can compute with more and more efficient machines everyday at commodity prices!
– we have enough data to train the system, more and more data every day, thanks again to the cloud and big data and their ability to store information easily.
– algorithms have been making outstanding progress in the last 5 years. Deep learning is the key to taking Artificial intelligence to the next level.
Be prepared! Just imagine the world 10 years ago : no iPhone! It will be the same in 10 years. Cognitive will be everywhere in our lives like smartphones today. Let’s look at some examples.
Scheduling a meeting? Juliedesk.com is doing this already, leveraging AI to help you in your everyday life. No more pain scheduling those meetings. I have been using Juliedesk.com since February, it’s magic!
Want to buy something? An app can suggest the best products based on your preferences, purchase history, favorite brand, color all the best options for you!
A weekend trip? No more searching to plan your trip, a virtual travel agent will build a perfect journey for you at the best price!
Banking in the Cognitive world? Everyone could have access at the best product like wealth management or retirement plans, your personal virtual banker will be here, 24/7 at your service!
In a nutshell, any work task you repeat more than three times will be replaced by an AI based agent within the next decade. Are you ready for the next cognitive computing era?