When the world’s top recording stars cross the red carpet at the 65th Annual GRAMMY Awards®, IBM will be there once again.
IBM Consulting™ builds long-term relationships with clients and 2023 marks the sixth year the Recording Academy® and IBM have collaborated to enrich the digital experience of Music’s Biggest Night®. This year, the Recording Academy partnered with IBM to deliver a solution that can provide unique insights about the lives and accomplishments of popular GRAMMY®-nominated artists.
Introduced at 2020’s event, GRAMMY Insights with IBM Watson® is an AI-powered intelligent search and text-analytics solution that uses the AI and natural language processing (NLP) capabilities of IBM Watson Discovery to dig deep and reveal distinctive information that fuels passionate fan engagement. Putting AI to work in a real-world application like the GRAMMYs® is a powerful demonstration of how AI is changing the way we learn, work and consume content.
When IBM Consulting partners with the GRAMMYs and other premier events—including Wimbledon, the Masters Tournament and the US Open Tennis Championships—our clients rely on us to orchestrate and implement automation, AI, analytics and skills to fundamentally change how work gets done. In collaboration with digital, marketing and technical teams from the Recording Academy, IBM Consulting helps them jumpstart initiatives using IBM Garage Methodology, bringing together an open, seamless set of practices with a human-centric, outcome-first approach, used to create, execute and operate workflows alongside the client. The process delivers an end-to-end model for accelerating digital transformation, which facilitates innovation and develops the practices, technologies and expertise to rapidly turn ideas into business value.
Ultimately, this harnesses intelligent workflows allowing those like the GRAMMY digital team to shift their focus to more critical, run-of-show processes, while AI works in an automated fashion to handle the voluminous tasks otherwise beyond reach, advancing scalability, thereby improving the fan experience.
2018 marked the first time the Recording Academy and IBM used AI to generate award-show content. Then in 2021, in an innovative effort to help fans feel more connected in the COVID-adjusted telecast, GRAMMY Debates with Watson summarized fan opinions through structured and fun debates during the live show. Thousands of fans weighed in on a variety of statements that fueled strong opinions such as the most groundbreaking artist of all time, the top style icon and how virtual concerts compare to live shows. Natural language processing was used to analyze a half-million keywords and summarize music fans’ points of view around lively conversations.
This year, as in 2022, the Recording Academy worked with IBM Consulting to use AI technology delivered by IBM Watson Discovery. IBM Watson Discovery scans more than 20 million articles from the past two months using natural language processing to recommend interesting facts—including some hidden gems—about recording artists. Using these gems, insights are provided to music lovers during the GRAMMY Live Pre-show and on artist pages on GRAMMY.com.
IBM Watson Natural Language Understanding, which works behind a firewall or on any cloud, uses deep learning to extract meaning and metadata from unstructured text data. The analytics from the text data reveals categories, classification, entities, keywords, sentiment, emotion, relations and syntax. This uncovers real-time actionable insights that can be used to pull metadata and patterns from massive troves of data. (For a deep dive into the process, read the IBM developer blog.)
The AI insights unearthed by IBM Watson Discovery contribute to the show’s digital workflow and help streamline the operations and production behind GRAMMY.com. The power of AI and NLP greatly speed data mining and queries that would otherwise take weeks or months to parse can now be accomplished dynamically. Once insights have been harvested the production and curation teams decide which content cascades across TV, social media and digital platforms. As specific high-profile stars arrive, meet with the press and showcase their designer fashions, data will be embedded in red carpet live streams and posted to the artists’ pages on the GRAMMY website.
IBM Consulting teams go far beyond creating a solution and handing it off to the client for implementation. Throughout the planning process for the GRAMMYs, IBM Consulting collaborated with multiple stakeholders across the Recording Academy and frequently met with information technology, marketing and digital teams. And on the big night, IBM will be on-site during the event as an extension of the editorial and production teams.
The powerful combination of IBM Consulting, IBM Garage, IBM Watson Discovery and the Recording Academy digital team delivers an engrossing digital experience to more than 7 million music fans worldwide. Learn how IBM Consulting can help you use market-leading natural language processing to uncover meaningful business insights from documents, webpages and big data.