IBM Watson is an enterprise artificial intelligence platform, created to offer organisations the ability to enhance interactions, accurately estimate possible disruptions, and strengthen research & discovery capabilities. As a result, companies have greater control and visibility over their data, intellectual properties, trainings, and insights.
The platform is sector-agnostic, and can assess multiple data streams, with a focus on accuracy, transparency, timelines and cost management. What’s more, IBM Watson can help companies develop a deeper understanding of their customers, personalising communications with both its internal and external stakeholders. Using the platform, businesses can design chatbots that are near-human, built on robust AI and machine learning.
Interestingly, IBM Watson allows enterprises to gather employee expertise, combining past experiences, and multiple data sources, to create a massive knowledge repository. Businesses can therefore, stay abreast of new regulatory norms, emerging threats, and other possible risks.
Delving a little deeper – inside IBM Watson
Here are the platform’s principal features and key benefits:
- Extended research with domain specificity
- Accelerated discovery
- Enriched interactions
- Improved customer experiences
- Monitoring of system health and disruption estimation
- Recommendations, liabilities assessment, and risk management
- Chatbots, visual recognition, and knowledge management
- Language translations, natural language classifications, speech-to-text-to-speech, with tone analysis
- Insights on personality-focused targeting
It is important to remember that every organisation has its own challenges, goals, and complexities, and a one-size-fits-all model is largely ineffective. While assessing IBM Watson, it would be prudent to consider one’s unique features, such as financial capacities, organisational skill-sets, employee engagement challenges, company size, etc.
However, if building a chatbot is high on your priority list, IBM Watson could be the platform for you. It’s bundled with Watson Assistant, a unique step-by-step guide that lets you create the scope, design the assistant (a customised version of Watson) and implement business rules to handle the conversation context. Here is a full tutorial.
Pricing – is it worth the investment?
As is other cases, the enterprise pricing for IBM Watson is dependent on the situation, or the payment model selected. IBM offers an online estimation, based on the requirements registered.
Here are the two pricing models:
- Plus is at $30 for each user every month, offering 2GB storage, 18 data connectors, IBM Analytics Exchange data, and on-premises and cloud-relational databases
- Professional is billed at $80 for each user every month, and carries all of the Plus features, along with 1+ users, 100 GB storage, and 19 data connectors (including IBM Cognos reports)
Opinions – do you need IBM Watson?
Needless to say, IBM Watson is a solid, competitive product in its space, and offers an exhaustive host of features. As mentioned, it’s important for companies to assess their individual needs, and envision a roster of key impact areas – before investing in the product.
That said, IBM Watson is billed as a problem-solver, for modern enterprises looking to boost customer connectivity and data-driven insights gathering.
Let us know your thoughts on IBM Watson in the comments section below.
