IBM recently introduced new Watson solutions and services pre-trained for a variety of industries and professions including agriculture, customer service, human resources, supply chain, manufacturing, building management, automotive, marketing, and advertising.
“As data flows continue to increase, people are overwhelmed by the amount of information we have to act on every day, but luckily the information explosion coincides with another key technological advance: artificial intelligence,” said David Kenny, SVP, IBM Cognitive Solutions. “AI is the tool professionals need to take advantage of the data that's now at our fingertips and tailoring general AI for specific industries and professions is a critical way to enable everyone to reach new potential in their daily jobs.”
Watson Decision Platform for Agriculture
This platform gathers data from multiple sources –such as weather, IoT enabled tractors and irrigators, satellite imagery, and more –and provides a single, overarching, predictive view of data as it relates to a farm in an easy-to-use app. For the individual grower, this means support for making more informed decisions to help improve yield. For example, using AI-enabled visual recognition capabilities, growers can identify certain types and severity levels of pest and disease damage and determine where to spray pesticides. Or a grower can forecast water usage, thereby reducing waste and helping to save money. This Fall marks the start of a new era on the 10,000 acres Roric Paulman has under cultivation in Nebraska: using Watson, it's the first time he's using AI to help improve the efficiency of his farm. Farming has always been a data-intensive undertaking, but in recent years, the data sets have exploded. Right now, Paulman's farm produces a terabyte of information every month. The tractor tracks its own movements, the irrigation systems record water flow second by second, and the sprayers register their output. “Until now, nobody has tackled putting all this information into one place,” Paulman says. “I've been waiting for something like this, and IBM is the right company, and trusted company, to do it.”
Manufacturing for Industrial Equipment
IBM is releasing specially-crafted Watson toolsets to help industrial teams reduce product inspection resource requirements significantly using visual and acoustic inspection capabilities. At a time of intense global competition, manufacturers are facing a variety of issues that impact productivity including workforce attrition, skills-gaps and rising raw material costs –all exacerbated by downstream defects and equipment downtime. By combining the Internet of Thing (IoT) and AI, manufacturers can stabilize production costs by pinpointing and predicting areas of loss such as energy waste, equipment failures, and product quality issues.
Buildings that Talk
Combining industrial IoT and AI, IBM IoT Buildings Insights can decode the exabytes of data that commercial properties create so that building managers can leverage that data to help reduce energy costs and understand occupancy dynamics in buildings, allowing them to understand and prepare for different occupancy patterns. It enables property owners and building managers to leverage insights from weather, historical performance, and data from other third-party analytics to maximize real-estate investments.
AI for Vehicles
AI will also play a role on the front lines of product development. Since 47 percent of projects fail due to inaccurate or poorly written requirements, IBM is bringing the power of AI to the next generation of our Requirements Management solution. Watson can now assess the quality of requirements and provide guidance on how to improve their quality.
Additionally, to help businesses in all industries drive industrial size outcomes, IBM is introducing services to accelerate companies' IoT transformations –from strategy, implementation, and security to managed services and ongoing operations.
Supply Chain
Each department in a company is different. Look at the folks responsible for the supply chain: they're dealing with data flows coming in from all over the world. That's why a global technology company is using a tailor-made version of Watson to keep an eye on five aspects of its supply chain. Watson can incorporate weather data, traffic reports, and regulatory reports to provide a fuller picture of global supply issues. And, today, IBM is making this technology available to the world with Watson Supply Chain Insights.
Ken Briodagh is a writer and editor with more than a decade of experience under his belt. He is in love with technology and if he had his druthers would beta test everything from shoe phones to flying cars.Edited by
Ken Briodagh
