The convergence of mobile, cloud, big data, and social technologies is perpetuating continuous transformation across industries of all shapes and sizes, paving the way for numerous revolutionary innovations.
Cognitive systems represent one such innovation and can be defined as a set of technologies that use deep natural language processing and understanding to answer questions and provide recommendations and direction.
These systems hypothesise and formulate possible answers based on available evidence, can be trained through the ingestion of vast amounts of content, and automatically adapt and learn from their mistakes and failures.
Cognitive software platforms are a subset of the overall cognitive systems market and work primarily with unstructured and semi-structured information to build up curated information bases and knowledge graphs that can be mined and analysed by various artificial intelligence (AI) techniques and algorithms such as machine learning, neural networks, and deep learning.
Recommendations, predictions, and advice based on this artificial intelligence provide users with answers and assistance across a wide range of applications and use cases.
There are many opportunities for vendors to offer technologies or product suites that cover cognitive systems. More than 40 per cent of cognitive systems spend is currently going to software that includes cognitive applications and cognitive platforms. And as more companies embrace cognitive, they will naturally increase their spending on cognitive-related services.
While the overall revenue opportunity for vendors operating in cognitive systems space is already in the billions of dollars, and growing at double-digit percentages year on year, it is important to examine precisely where these revenue opportunities lie across the vertical market spectrum.
Indeed, analysing the industry opportunities brought about by cognitive systems is a crucial step in understanding the potential capabilities of this groundbreaking technology to transform business as we know it.
The opportunity for cognitive systems is still in its infancy but is poised to transform business processes across a broad range of industries. For example, a new suite of solutions from automated program advisers for fraud analysis and investigation are changing the way companies interact with customers, manufacture their goods, and move products from one place to another.
Many vertical markets will reflect some level of opportunity; however, the development of this market will vary across industries. The best growth opportunities for cognitive systems exist in industries where an abundance of multistructured data exists, and their implementation can help businesses to create new products and services, optimise their operations, and transform the customer experience.
Health care, retail, and banking are expected to be key areas where cognitive can thrive, collectively representing close to 50 per cent of the market over the coming years. For example, some hospitals are already drawing from various pieces of medical literature and diverse data sets to assist in diagnosing and personalising treatment at the individual patient level.
Meanwhile, retailers are benefiting from more sophisticated automated customer service agents, and bankers are using intelligent systems to match clients with optimal products.
This trend will only accelerate across the banking sector as embedded cognitive computing capabilities mature in capturing and extracting detailed information and insights from enterprise documents and integrate this data with recommendation systems to identify best-matching financial products or services.
Another key sector for cognitive systems is transportation. Building on the existing success of the internet of Things (IoT) in the transportation sector, cognitive systems are already bringing, and will continue to bring, intelligence to the IoT data collected for freight, asset, and fleet management.
These systems will help transportation and logistics companies maximise capacity and improve efficiencies, as well as meet the increasing governmental regulation and compliance requirements.
We see real-time operational intelligence offering route optimisation along with actionable responses to vehicle conditions as key opportunities for cognitive systems in the transportation sector today.
Future growth areas in this space include freight management combined with supply-chain logistics to intelligently monitor and provide end-to-end visibility, while there is also clear potential for cognitive systems to provide intelligent insights to suppliers on the type of product, place, and time of delivery to guarantee best pricing.
As you can see, the potential use cases for cognitive systems are wide, varied, and rich with opportunity. And as the transformative value of these cognitive systems is increasingly being recognised by businesses, governments, and consumers alike, the opportunity for traditional ICT vendors and new emerging businesses will be ripe for the taking.
The columnist is group vice-president and regional managing director for the Middle East, Africa and Turkey at global ICT market intelligence and advisory firm International Data Corporation (IDC). He can be contacted via Twitter @JyotiIDC. Content for this week’s feature leverages global, regional, and local research studies undertaken by IDC.
