IBM Envisions Watson As Supercharged Siri For Businesses
International Business Machines Corp. (IBM) researchers spent four years developing Watson, the computer smart enough to beat the champions of the quiz show “Jeopardy!” Now they're trying to figure out how to get those capabilities into the phone in your pocket.
Context & Ripple Effects
Four years after starting the project that produced the machine which beat Jeopardy!'s champions, IBM is now trying to shrink Watson's question-answering capability into the phone in your pocket, with Bloomberg reporting the target customer is business rather than consumers — a 'supercharged Siri' framing that puts IBM's research bet directly against the assistant category Apple popularized. The story traveled widely on pickup, with VentureBeat and ZDNet both running versions on or about August 28, 2012.
The mobile push sits inside a broader 2012 pattern at IBM: the same period brought a new zEnterprise EC12 mainframe line extending that platform's longevity and a confirmed $42 million contract supplying massive computing power for the world's largest telescope. Watson is the research side of the same equation — proven capability now hunting for a commercial channel.
First-order effects
- IBM's Watson team shifts from demonstration to productization, working out how to deliver Jeopardy-grade natural-language answers through mobile devices aimed at enterprise users rather than quiz-show audiences.
Second-order effects
- Apple's Siri and other consumer assistants gain an enterprise-flanked rival: if Watson lands in business phones, vendors selling mobile productivity tools face pressure to add comparable question-answering over corporate data.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, enterprise computing adds a conversational layer over corporate databases — with IBM positioned to license Watson as a platform across industries rather than sell it as a single-purpose machine.
The trend: Voice and natural-language assistants born as consumer features are being repositioned as enterprise front ends to corporate data, with IBM's Watson the first large-scale attempt.