There is an estimated 2 trillion-dollar market for unstructured data. Unstructured data is in the form of emails, social media, blogs, documents, images, and videos.
With Ariba for Procurement, I have explained that buyers and suppliers have real time cloud-based E- Procurement solutions with advanced analytics and automatic Cloud updates. The Ariba network is nearing 3 million companies now.
As a next step, how do we explore unstructured Procurement Supply Chain data in the future? How do you set your company up for the Digital and data driven future? The IBM Ariba and Watson alliance is a pathway to a Digital future without jumping into the latest Digital fad, but taking a more thoughtful and pragmatic approach.
I think Ariba is a good starting point. Data and Digital intelligence is the next key step and will be a serious business disrupter.
A cognitive business combines a digital business with digital intelligence. This is not just AI and “If this, do that” statements and programming. This is understanding, reasoning, learning and interacting.
- Cognitive systems like Watson understand imagery, language and unstructured data like humans do.
- Cognitive systems reason, grasp underlying concepts, form hypotheses, and infer and extract ideas.
- With each data point, interaction and outcome, Watson develops and sharpens expertise, so they never stop learning.
- Cognitive systems have the abilities to see, talk and hear, and interact with humans in a natural way.
- Cognitive systems are NOT independent robots making decisions for humans. They are advisors, providing insight and guiding clients to decisions.
The thoughtful and pragmatic approach to your Procurement and Supply Chain transformation is to not jump into the latest fad. Think about creating knowledge from unstructured data to grow virtually everyone’s skill to learn, adapt, and out think the market place. Design for the future.
A few examples of Digital intelligence with cognitive systems.
- Watson for Genomics has gone through 23 million journal articles (in minutes) currently in the medical literature, government listings of clinical trials, and other existing data sources without requiring someone to reformat the information and make it digestible.
- Watson uses natural language processing to parse tax documents and relate statements back to the 74,000-page federal tax code for H&R Block. Watson focuses on identifying deductions and credits!
- Watson was tasked with analyzing 600,000 publicly available fashion images from 2006 to 2017, spanning the ‘Big Four’ fashion weeks – London, Paris, Milan and New York. What took a month before, took 2 days.
- Watson Discovery Service is using 22 years of unstructured data to analyze an estimated 53,713,514 tennis data points. Players can get information sent to their mobile phones in 20 minutes to watch in the car on their way home to assess their play.
How do you plan to create knowledge from this data to grow your ability to learn, adapt faster, and increase marketplace skillsets?
References:
IBM Watson meets Ariba and SAP Leonardo for cognitive procurement
The ABC`s of IBM cognitive solutions.
As well as being a former Managing IBM consultant in the Source to Pay Practice, Terry Vermeylen is the founder of Mylifechanges.com and Worldclasssupplychain.com and President of Terry Vermeylen Enterprises Inc.