IBM touts Jeopardy winner Watson for enterprise decision making

IBM has said that its Watson supercomputer will become a vital tool for enterprises, helping them to analyse unstructured data and make better business decisions.

Watson has been in development for over four years and came to prominence after beating human champions of the US game show Jeopardy earlier this year to win a $1m prize.

This was seen as a successful test of Watson's analytical capabilities, and the system is now to be rolled out in a number of industries including the medical and financial sectors.

A number of IBM tools used within Watson are already employed by enterprises, such as the IBM Content Analytics software.

Watson's aim will be to enhance analysts' capabilities, explained Craig Rhinehart, director of market development and strategy for enterprise content management at IBM.

"Watson is much more than a Q&A machine. It is able to analyse vast quantities of unstructured data, so it will help businesses to make more informed decisions and solve problems," he told V3.

"In real life, humans are generally overloaded with information and at times it can be difficult to find answers. The Jeopardy test proved that Watson is able to understand natural language so it will be able to help tackle business problems."

Rhinehart went on to clarify that Watson has not been designed to replace humans, but rather to assist in the decision-making process by allowing employees to interact with content in a different way.