[absoluteharam]

Watson became a marketing term after the company spent hundreds of millions to brand Watson to be synonymous with AI. The term Watson then got appended to existing businesses as it allowed them all to benefit from the brand equity and Watson ads. This unfortunately happened even if there wasn’t any AI capabilities, so it eventually backfired.

Watson Health seems to have been focused on selling the narrative of AI in healthcare, even though the technology wasn’t there.

The divestiture is only for IP also, and it seems most people in the group will be laid off.

[deelowe]

As someone with no inside knowledge, it seemed to me that watson started as a technology (or maybe solution/set of solutions) and as time went on, it was pivoted to be a brand? Hard to tell for sure with how difficult it is to get IBM to answer questions about what they actually do...

[HumanReadable]

Worked for IBM for three years, this is accurate. To solve some clients problem we would build an ML solution from scratch just like everyone else, and then try to shoehorn some Watson service into it so we could use the Watson Brand to distinguish our product.

The solutions we built were generally pretty good and our clients were happy, but the Watson part was never anything more than marketing,