It’s been over eight years since IBM Corp’s natural language question-answering computer system, known as Watson, wowed the world by winning the Jeopardy! Challenge.

Beating the show’s human champions was an entertaining demonstration of the potential of artificial intelligence and machine learning. However, Watson’s purpose is much greater than answering trivia questions.

Today, Watson is focused on solving enterprise-level problems. Healthcare, building codes, education, weather forecasting, tax preparation, and advertising are all industries that are currently benefiting from the computer system’s natural language, hypothesis generation, and evidence-based learning capabilities.

“Watson is tuned to business enterprise, how to help people operationalize AI so they can get the full benefit,” said Beth Smith (pictured), general manager of IBM Watson AI. “Because at the end of the day, it’s about those business outcomes.

Smith spoke with Dave Vellante (@dvellante), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the IBM Data and AI Forum in Miami, Florida. They discussed how Watson’s abilities are expanding to serve businesses operating in a multicloud environment (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

[Editor’s note: The following content has been condensed for clarity.]

Furrier: You talk about the AI ladder. The first version of the AI ladder was building blocks. It was data and information architecture, then analytics, then ML and AI on the top. Now you use verbs to  describe it, which is actually more powerful: collect, organize, analyze and infuse. Infuse is like the Holy Grail because that’s operationalizing and being able to scale. What can you tell us about how successful companies are infusing AI and what IBM is doing to help? 

Smith: Yes, infuse is the Holy Grail of the whole thing because that’s about injecting it into business processes, into workflows, into how things are done. So you can then see examples of how attorneys may be able to get through their legal prep process in just a few minutes versus 10 to 15 hours on certain things. You can see conversion rates, from a sales standpoint, improve significantly.

We’ve also got it as a part of supply chain optimization, understanding a little bit more about both inventory, but also where the goods are along the way — especially when there could be a lot of different goods in various points of transit.

Furrier: Watson Assistant is one of the key offerings on the infuse rung of the ladder. What are some of the ways you’re seeing organizations put Watson Assistant to work?

Smith: Watson Assistant is our flagship around customer care. To give you a little bit of a data point, Watson Assistant, through our public cloud SaaS version, converses with 82 million end users a month. This is enabling customers, the customers of our customers, to be able to get self-service help in what they’re doing.

A lot of people want to talk about it being a chatbot. You can do simple chatbots with it, but it’s sophisticated assistance as well. It’s there to do a task. It’s to help you deal with your bank account or whatever it is you’re trying to do and whatever company you’re interacting with.

Furrier: Market forecasts predict that by 2025 there’s going to be more money spent on chatbot development or digital assistance than there is on mobile development. Now there’s this superbot category that provides sophisticated assistance. Can you discuss that?

Smith: Earlier today, I was with a customer and talking about their email customer relationship management system and how Watson Assistant is behind that. So, chatbots aren’t just about what you may see in a little window. They’re really about understanding user intent, guiding the user through what they’re trying to either find out or do, and taking the action as a part of it. And that’s why we talk about it being more than chatbots, because it’s more than “frequently asked questions” interchange.

Furrier: So, it’s software that performs tasks and can call other software to take action? We think of this as systems of agency, actually making decisions. 

Smith: Absolutely, yes.

Furrier: What do you see in terms of infusing humans into the equation?

Smith: One of the things that Watson Assistant will do is if it realizes that it’s not the expert on whatever it is, then it will pass over to an expert. So, think of that expert as a human agent. But you may be in the queue because that human person is tied up, so you can continue to do other things with Watson Assistant while you’re waiting to actually talk to the person. So that’s one way that the human is in the loop.

There are also examples of how customer-service agents are being assisted in the background. So they have the interaction directly with the user, but Watson Assistant is helping them get information quicker and narrow in on what the topic is.

Furrier: We’ve been hearing the phrase Watson Anywhere. My understanding is that means you could bring Watson anywhere to the data so you don’t have to move the data around. Can you give us the update on that?  

Smith: The biggest requirement I had when I joined the Watson team three-and-a-half years ago was can I have Watson on-premise? Can I have Watson in my company data center? Thanks to Cloud Pak for Data and the underlying Red Hat OpenShift container platform, we now are enabled to truly take Watson anywhere. So now you can have it on-premise. You can have it on the other public clouds.

This is important because it’s important Watson is where your data is. But it’s also important because the workloads of today and tomorrow are very complex. And what’s on cloud today maybe on-premise tomorrow. May be in a different cloud. As that moves around, you want to protect the investment of what you’re doing as you have Watson customized for what your business needs are.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the IBM Data and AI Forum. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the IBM Data and AI Forum. Neither IBM Corp., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE