A Room Where Executives Go to Get Help from IBM’s Watson

If Watson is good enough at speech and context recognition to accomplish these things IBM can/will sell truckloads of Watson as a Service for the purpose of monitoring employees.

WaaS will read everyone's email and parse conversations recorded by their desktops and phones to identify people who are off-task, leaking information or talking about unions.

That's the sort of thing Executives care about it. When I set up email retention systems they were primarily interested in being exempt from journaling. When I set up physical security systems they wanted to be sure the executive board room cameras weren't mic'd and faced away from the main presentation area.

In practice, both systems were primarily used to keep tabs on employees - who was dumb enough to send an email to the news from work and who's leaving early.

This is how 'intelligent' systems will be used - electronic overseers with distributed eyes and ears - long before it's confined as a guest boardroom showpiece that gets tossed for suggesting the CXO get off his soapbox in a timely manner or correcting his knowingly incorrect assertions.

http://venturefans.org/vbwiki/M.U.T.H.E.R.

> WaaS will read everyone's email and parse conversations recorded by their desktops and phones to identify people who are off-task, leaking information or talking about unions.

This specifically is not a terribly difficult monitoring task. You don't need something like watson to do it. Again, already available, still not heavily deployed.

The truth is people mostly trust each other and don't do shit like that. At some places they will, but watson is not the enabler here.

I'm not sure we're talking about the same things here?

Perhaps in the startup world that is common on HN things are small, lean and trusting enough that this sort of outlook is possible.

The context of the article, Executives at the sort of companies that buy IBM, they absolutely invest in monitoring and retention by choice or by law.

Where I'm sitting now we retain every email, voicemail and internal chat for tens of thousands of people and video from hundreds of cameras. We retain 100% of voice calls for some sections. People who deal with the public have all their calls recorded as well as their screens. Every meaningful door is operated with an access card.

The limiting factor on implementation of these things is not some non-specific altruism, it's money. Money for licensing, infrastructure and operations - it's not cheap, not close.

No, Watson is not the specific enabler for these things to happen as they clearly already do, but the sort of intelligent XaaS that Watson could be is exactly what would make these systems cheaper and more effective.

Responsiveness for specific categories could be determined on the fly leading to lower size of retention and operators/administrators could probably be eliminated entirely.