Cognitive computing. Ready for business.

Artificial intelligence, long just a promise, is finally here. In the last few years cognitive systems have emerged as practical and powerful platforms to be deployed in business, government and healthcare worldwide.The Cognitive Computing for Business Forum, held in Auckland in April, brought local and international developers, vendors, users and academic experts together to explore this rapidly emerging opportunity, foster deeper understanding and to highlight how cognitive systems are rapidly entering the business mainstream.Businesses in New Zealand and around the world are not just using cognitive technology to automate mundane tasks and reduce costs, but also to scale the business, increase speed, boost agility, ensure compliance and consistency, improve service and, vitally, increase customer satisfaction.

It has been a long wait for the arrival of cognitive computing and artificial intelligence, but real-world applications are here and they are transformative.

“Watson helps people access information and also helps machines understand humans. That’s where the true cognitive system happens.”

Dev Mookerjee, IBM Asia Pacific Watson executive

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Cognitive computing. Ready for business.

Right here, right nowEarly adopters such as Westpac NZ, UK utility npower, Auckland-based Transaction Services Group and Western Australia’s Woodside Petroleum are some leading the cognitive charge.Woodside earlier this year inked an alliance with NASA to help develop real physical robots. The company is deploying the NASA-developed Robonaut in high-risk, remote environments using cognitive capabilities it developed using IBM’s cognitive system Watson.UK utility npower deployed software robots as part of its robotic process automation (RPA) project to free up the equivalent of 40 full-time staff to perform higher value work. The company now operates over 200 software robots, the equivalent of 400 full-time staff.So why is this flowering of cognitive computing happening now?

Leaving aside the seemingly inexorable growth in computer power, the platform components needed to support the emergence of cognitive computing as a practical application have fallen into place only fairly recently.There are three clear forces driving this, IBM Asia Pacific Watson executive Dev Mookerjee says. First, the sheer amount and different types of data being created has proliferated. Second, we have much greater ability to access this data quickly and easily through technologies such as the cloud, smartphones and the API economy. Finally, the unique capability of cognitive computing to deal with both structured data (for example, databases) and unstructured data, such as text and video, is a game-changer.“Human beings don’t work in structured form,” Mookerjee says. “We don’t create or consume structured data. We all have our own cognitive frameworks – that’s what we use.“IBM’s own cognitive computing platform, Watson, helps people access information and also helps machines understand humans.”

Page 3 Cognitive computing. Ready for business.

Machines and humans working together to come to a common outcome is what cognitive computing is all about, he says. Using natural language processing, machines can look at and process massive amounts and different types of data while people have moral frameworks, gut instincts, and the ability to generalise and guess. Similarly, Patrick Geary, chief marketing officer of robotic automation technology company Blue Prism, says electronic workers do the boring, repetitive, rules-based tasks. Geary says cognitive technology can “take the robot out of the human”, give hours back to the business and allowing humans to do what they are best at – making judgments, seeing patterns, building relationships, innovating and creating.A cognitive system, Mookerjee says, is one that can understand the context of an interaction and can reason for itself the best outcome. A cognitive business is one that has systems that can enhance digital intelligence exponentially to understand, reason, learn and interact.

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Cognitive computing. Ready for business.

For David Kennedy, chief information officer for New Zealand subscription management software company Transaction Services Group, the early wins come from focusing on the mundane, commodity tasks people are burdened with.So far the group’s analytics team has created 10,000 hours of time within the business, freeing people to do more innovative tasks.“Work out the repetitive tasks people are doing and you can create time in people’s lives.“You have to, as leaders, take the business strategy and ask: ‘How can we meet this strategy using these technologies?’ ” he says.The goal is to automate the generation of revenue to allow humans to think about building the business.Simon Page, Westpac NZ’s efficiency value stream lead for information technology, has been at the forefront of Westpac’s RPA journey, deploying an ever-growing number of software

robots to automate the bank’s processes and customer interactions.RPA is a continual improvement project, Page says, and it’s all about the customer.“Our customers are the most important thing for us. The only reason we are in business is because of our customers. If all we are doing is adding value for our customers then we are doing an outstanding job.”Humans can become friction points when they have to extract information from one system and put it into another. Straight through processing is key to making that customer interaction seamless, he says.

Page 5 Cognitive computing. Ready for business.

Robots, ready and willing 24x7 to assist staff and improve customer experience

“Work out the repetitive tasks people are doing and you can create time in people’s lives.”David Kennedy, chief information officer, Transaction Services Group

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Cognitive computing. Ready for business.

Vikash Kumar, artificial intelligence and analytics team leader of Auckland based wine information service Wine-Searcher.com, is deploying a series of tools to allow customers to find the data and help they need.The latest of these is the company’s Sommelier Bot. This smart chat bot will answer text queries using open source natural language processing technologies and an artificial intelligence capability built in-house. Ask for a suggestion and Sommelier Bot will come back with an answer: where to buy at what price, the nearest merchant and suggestions for good food/wine matches. The bot integrates information from multiple browseable web pages and databases to support natural language queries.Bots and avatars are two ways that human-machine interaction is changing and improving the customer service experience.

Soul Machines founder Mark Sagar demonstrated his company’s emotionally intelligent avatars, including version 4 of Baby X, who reacts in human-like ways to the people she sees through a camera.Australia’s National Disability Insurance Service is now implementing a new avatar, Nadia, to deliver human-like conversations or text interactions to help disabled clients.

“If all we are doing is adding value for our customers then we are doing an outstanding job.”

Simon Page, Westpac NZ efficiency value stream lead for information technology

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Cognitive computing. Ready for business.

Already there are indications of the kinds of business transformations cognitive computing will foster.New Zealand-based building, manufacturing and retailing company Fletcher Building is emerging from a large transformation project which among other things, has seen the deployment of global shared IT services.Thomas Willig, head of security at Fletcher, says one of the forces at play for the company is the so-called fourth industrial revolution – the creation of ‘cyber-physical’ production environments. Fletcher Building has already begun investing in fully robotic manufacturing equipment that monitors its own usage and performance and schedules its own maintenance.

Within the global IT security group that Willig leads, cognitive computing is also being used.“We are using technologies that allow us to sift through enormous amounts of data,” he says. In the past, people had to physically look at log files for false positives generated by security systems such as intrusion detection technology and firewalls“That’s no longer feasible,” Willig says. “Besides the extremely boring nature of that job it’s just not doable from a sheer perspective of volume.”Attacks such as phishing and other advanced persistent threats are becoming increasingly difficult to detect. To do so, companies need to be able to differentiate legitimate communications from fraudulent ones.

Toward transformation

“We are using technologies that allow us to sift through enormous amounts of data.”

Thomas Willig, head of security, Fletcher Building

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Cognitive computing. Ready for business.

Throughout the conference, speakers emphasised that cognitive projects are not technology projects – they must be owned by the business and supported by technology. That’s certainly the case at Westpac.Where Westpac’s RPA is concerned, Page says the focus is on the customer and on releasing value at velocity. Project steering committees are no more, replaced by value management meetings.Technology teams now sit alongside the business to create value streams, he says. The business, not IT, owns benefit definition.Shayne Edmondson, ANZ’s head of technology for retail, business banking, wealth and digital, adds a more cautionary note saying there is still a long journey ahead.

The implementation of cognitive systems will change over time, as will the skills needed. Initially the focus will be on understanding how processes might change as a result of cognitive augmentation, he says.A big part of that will be data – getting data into a format that can be used and of a quality that can be trusted. After that comes augmentation, an area where new skills will arguably be required.The experience of early adopters, both Kiwi and others from offshore, is that cognitive systems are being deployed now. In some cases these are embedded into the existing processes of traditional organisations, and in others, cognitive forms the underlying business model. In all these cases cognitive is expected to have a profound impact not only on the individual organisations but on their respective value chain and wider industry.

Again the answer is cognitive technology.

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