[sgt101]

IBM reps have been pitching Watson to me for years, but never have we seen an implementation or a commercial offer, much less a demonstration of something of value to us. Weirdly it clearly exists, or did exist, but I think marketing and sales have robbed R&D of the budget required to create a product and until they sell the non existent I think this will continue to be the case. If I was an IBM stockholder I would be pissed off.

[AndrewKemendo]

>IBM reps have been pitching Watson to me for years, but never have we seen an implementation or a commercial offer, much less a demonstration of something of value to us.

What exactly have they been pitching you?

[sgt101]

Watson for CRM.

The pitches are at the level of "a pipeline off tools" + "a new level of automation", getting to detail elicits a "call with the team" which involves a discussion about "the pipeline of tools" and a possible POC, which has not happened.

We actually had a Question Answering system research strand ourselves which we couldn't really get anywhere with and I killed (mea-culpa) because of Watson, Google and Siri. I thought that we had no chance of making any headway against such strong competition and imagined that QA tech would be available in the contact centre and on the Intranet in short order.

More fool me! I've been embarrassed ever since.

[AndrewKemendo]

Sounds like they don't really know what Watson would be best for and are hoping their customers can tell them. Not a terrible strategy but really doesn't look right coming from IBM.