For the past several years, CBA had operated as an IBM Business Partner, incorporating IBM software into its solutions to help drive increased value for customers. But roughly three years ago, IBM reached out to the firm with an intriguing recommendation.
“IBM approached us stating that they thought we would be an ideal partner for their new Watson technology,” recalls Christine Bear, Managing Director at CBA. “They told us, ‘You’ve had a strategic IT business for over 15 years, and you’ve had a successful strategic consultancy business for even longer, which would make you a great fit.’”
With its interest piqued, CBA took time to examine this new platform, considering the possibilities of what it could do. In particular, the business was interested in exploiting how much more quickly the Watson platform could parse multiple pools of data to provide actionable business intelligence.
“Where there’s knowledge, there’s power,” explains Bear. “And the ways of imparting knowledge at the moment rely largely on sharing that information from person to person. It’s very inefficient. Right now, over 80 percent of global information is unstructured. But what would change if subject matter experts could spend their time gaining or creating new knowledge rather than just transferring that knowledge?”
Fond of questions, she continues, asking, “How would the world change if we could access and share knowledge in real time—no matter where we worked or were located? What could we do if people were empowered to individually explore information and learn across disciplines in ways that don’t follow pre-set structures? What if we could always support key business decisions with information that was previously inaccessible?”
These questions and many more drove CBA to develop its new Cognitive Artificial Intelligence Technology for Organizations (CAITO) offering.