Ten years ago, International Business Machine Corp.’s artificial intelligence system, Watson, defeated people in the “Jeopardy!”
That should have heralded a shift in the way cars have served answers to big and small questions, opening up new revenue streams for Big Blue specifically and Big Tech more generally. A key target: healthcare, a billion-dollar industry, many say is fraught with inefficiencies that some tech advocates say AI could cure.
A decade later, reality did not live up to that promise. IBM is now exploring the sale of Watson Health, a unit whose branded product was supposed to help doctors diagnose and cure cancer.
IBM has spent billions of dollars on acquisitions to build Watson. Former IBM senior executive John Kelly once promoted the initiative as a “farm bet” move. It didn’t live up to the hype. Watson Health has fought for market share in the US and abroad and is currently not profitable.
Alphabet Inc.’s Google DeepMind unit, which famously developed a Go-playing algorithm that defeated a champion human player in 2016, later launched several healthcare-related initiatives focused on chronic conditions. It has also lost money in recent years and faced privacy issues over how health data was collected.