IBM Watson now has its own group dedicated to moving Watson beyond the game show world and into the commercial markets.

“We want to correct the notion that it is a question and answer technology,” said Manoj Saxena, general manager of Watson Solutions.

It comes down to the science of the conversation. Conversations flow from large generalities to granular detail and on to different topics with different forms of context. The goal is to make Watson a service that can follow the depth of a discussion and provide recommendations.

“Watson is a reasoning and learning system,” Saxena said.

The Watson Solutions group now has about 100 people, Saxena said.  The group will eventually grow to the size of the IBM analytics group but that will take quite some time.  The group will need people with a new class of skills in statistics and machine learning.  Those people are not easy to find.

“People don’t know how to train machines for learning,” Saxena said.

Content lifecycle management skills will be needed to keep the data relevant that Watson ingests. It needs updating with the ability to manage Wikipedia information, health libraries, etc.

IBM will create a commercial platform around Jeopardy Watson and will add what Saxena called “industry perspective cartridges.” These will be comprised of tooling and content for:

• Content ingestion
• Content training
• Versioning and lifecycle management
• Testing and scripting

Services Angle

IBM will deliver Watson as an on-premise or a hosted solution. It won’t be multi-tenant in the short-term. But over time it will have uses that allow for a shared, cloud environment. He said the privacy and security needs will need to be figured out first.

In the meantime, here’s a video I shot with Saxena, explaining how Watson is being piloted with Wellpoint as a doctor’s assistant.