IBM is unleashing its artificial intelligence engine on the social sphere with new data integration options that offer to provide an unprecedented view of how consumers behave. The update is the first fruit of a partnership with Twitter Inc. that was originally announced last year.

The alliance was unveiled at the end of October with grand promises of taming the ebb and flow of sentiment across the more than 500 million tweets crossing the wire every day to give organizations a more authentic understanding of their audiences. The launch represents a first step towards reaching that goal.

Twitter’s firehose of data has been hooked up to Watson Analytics, a cloud-based implementation of the algorithms behind the Jeopardy!-winning supercomputer introduced shortly before the announcement of the partnership, to help business users listen into the social conversation. The service curates high-level patterns of interest in a visual format and makes predictions on where the discussion is moving.

More complicated operations, such as correlating tweets with historical information from internal systems to identify factors that influence sales, can be run in IBM’s batch processing platform. The Hadoop distribution now comes in new configurations that are integrated with Twitter out of the box to enable such advanced analysis.

One of the use cases for the service is factoring localized changes such as rainfall or traffic bottlenecks into the customer acquisition calculus for specific regions to take actions that can reduce the subsequent churn. Another application is analyzing what commentators tweet about a certain type of product for insights into sought-after features that can help improve demand.

All told, over 100 companies are taking advantage of the new integrations, a number that IBM hopes to increase significantly through its consultancy business. The company has trained some 4,000 employees in using the functionality to help organizations identify engagement trends and plans to certify another 6,000 as part of a two-pronged effort to boost demand and prop up faltering professional services revenue.