IBM and Cisco to bring Watson to the workplace

IBM and Cisco have announced they will partner to form a suite of cloud-based workplace tool and applications infused with IBM Watson. Cisco Spark and WebEx collaborative workspace platforms will be integrated with IBM’s cloud collaboration solutions, including Verse and Connections, and underpinned by IBM’s cognitive computing. The companies aim to make collaboration simple by combining IBM’s Watson and email and social offerings with Cisco’s collaboration solutions, including business messaging, meeting and calling offerings. The companies said in a statement that they will design solutions that take advantage of all types of data which will be achieved by providing right insights in the right context. This, say the companies, will be done through tools, apps, documents or actions needed at any given moment based on an individual employee’s role, historical work patterns and current work assignments. The companies speak of emerging new classes of solutions that could maybe have Watson offering real-time advice over a Cisco video meeting between a financial advisor and an investor. They say the goal is for the combined IBM and Cisco offerings to be integrated to connect seamlessly on behalf of users to complete mundane tasks such as scheduling and note-taking, and proactively bring people and content together in the context of specific tasks. “The new solutions will incorporate structured and unstructured data in any form, whether from on-premises, the desktop, or the cloud. With applications to handle hundreds of work-related tasks, they are built to seek, consume and analyse all types of data, uncover meaningful workflow patterns, and provide actionable insights through the course of daily activities and interactions,” says the statement. This partnership has given rise to speculations that they might introduce bots for everyday workplace tasks, thus bringing them in enterprise chatbot playing field. This move will make them better poised to take on Slack, Microsoft (with its Yammer and Skype) and also Facebook at Work, which has made some significant progress with enterprise chatbots.