IBM bets on ‘Watson’ for growth in India

BENGALURU: International Business Machines, the world’s largest technology services firm, is betting that its cognitive computing system, Watson, can take off in a big way in India and is in the process of taking it live with two clients here, a company executive said.

Weeks after Chief Executive and Chairman Virginia M Rometty pitched Watson to IBM’s top Indian customers such as Bharti Airtel and Vodafone India, the company is also conducting pilot runs of the artificially intelligent system with some of its customers in India. The two clients that are set to go live with the system are from the healthcare and banking industries.

“There are different stages in every client engagement that we have,” said Kaushik Bhaskar, vice president of India Software Labs at IBM India. “There are some engagements where we are about to go live and some engagements where we are at an early stage and everybody wants to see how they can use it as a differentiator in their own industry.”

Armonk, New York-based IBM, which has invested nearly $19 billion on research and development (R&D) globally over the past three years, has a team of developers in Bengaluru working on Watson – the only such team outside its US headquarters.