Thread regarding IBM layoffs

Back when Watson was young and we were all innocent I was discussing it with a DE colleague and I predicted, "You'll know Watson has failed if they start 'branding' ordinary analytics as Watson to make the success look broader than it really is and to attribute more revenue to it."

Fast forward to today...

After a couple years or so of chewing on 30-odd years of Medstat/Truven data, I do remember the Watson folks showing us results. The best predictor of a patient being high risk (meaning, Expensive, to Payers) was that the patient had... a lot of health care claims.

Yup, that was presented to the exec team of the "traditional" payer analytic products as a top finding.

I worked for one of the companies (Merge HC) that IBM acquired to make this non-product.

I have no idea what they got for the money they spent. Merge Healthcare was the most miserable work experience I have ever had. They had patents, I guess, but the actual technology was garbage. And the owner was…a piece of work, let's say that.

Ansible is just as bad

@cpm+1eWRPIBH is correct. Watson Health is a healthcare analytics portfolio. No Watson AI is used for the core part of products. Horrible branding mistake.

At least on that one, IBM is actually getting some money back and not having to pay another company to take this thing away!!

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

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.

I could be mistaken because it’s been a while, but I read that Watson’s diagnostic capabilities turned out to be mostly marketing and that eventually IBM ended up hiring teams of doctors to process the diagnosis requests that were coming into Watson.

I'm excited by this.
I recently left Red Hat for greener pastures. From where I sat, IBM was slowly turning toward wisdom again, having been run aground by its previous few CEOs. I was skeptical when IBM bought Red Hat, but after several years of not screwing it up, I'm pretty hopeful. Now, Krishna is working on streamlining the business and making the rest of IBM more like Red Hat. Splitting off the low performing Kyndryl, and selling Watson, are part of this by cutting obsolete sectors; focusing on getting Red Hat the resources it needs to rapidly accelerate, and on building the talent pool by hiring more junior engineers, are the positive changes working to turn IBM back into a powerhouse.

I worked for a large e-commerce company.

I wanted to investigate putting all our support data into Watson and see what sort of recommendations it could provide, maybe a sort of auto-suggestion to help our customers. Three really funny points stand out from the experience:

1. To apply for Watson access you needed to show C-level approval, so our CEO put his name and phone number on the application (trying Watson was somewhat his idea). A few months later, an IBM marketing team called HIS CELL and asked for ME. Imagine how it felt to have the CEO walk up to me, deadpan hand me his personal iphone and say "It's for you."..

2. They told me they'd help me with the support data idea, and every meeting we set up they tried to pitch "what if we put Watson on all of your customer's storefronts, we could add a 'powered by watson' banner on every page, and you give us a cut of GMV?". I pivoted them to our plugin framework and told them to build it themselves.

3. To demo the technology, the first step was to buy a $250k server from IBM. To demo it.

Big LOLs all around, never trust big blue.