The central lesson of the show: while IBM’s bets are both massive and risky, it has chosen its bets wisely – hoping to get into the ground floor of world-changing trends that each promise to follow Moore’s Law patterns of exponential growth.
By leveraging deep learning technologies as well as increasingly mature, pre-trained industry ‘assistants,’ Watson has largely overcome these challenges.
The result: today, Watson is finding its way into a broad swath of IBM’s product line, as customers use AI-enhanced technologies for an increasingly wide range of business problems. AI has also infused the IBM Cloud, which is shaping up to be a general purpose ‘cognition platform.’
In other words, Watson has hit the ‘hockey stick’ part of its exponential growth curve as it transitions from an innovative but immature technology to a transformative source of disruption for IBM and its customers.
