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“We distinguish between the field of AI [Artificial Intelligence] and the technologies that emanate from the field. The popular press portrays AI as the advent of computers as smart as—or smarter than—humans. The individual technologies, by contrast, are getting better at performing specific tasks that only humans used to be able to do. We call these cognitive technologies… and it is these that business and public sector leaders should focus their attention on.” The most famous public demonstration of the cognitive computing capabilities of AI came in a Jeopardy match in 2011, when the game show’s all-time biggest winners—Ken Jennings (the most wins at 74) and Brad Rutter (the most prize money at $3.25 million)—lost to a new kind of computer, IBM’s Watson. Just to keep things fair, Watson wasn’t permitted to be connected to the Internet. Like the human contestants it had to rely strictly on what it had already learned. After three episodes, IBM’s cognitive computer was the champion with $77,147 in winnings, compared to Jennings at $24,000 and Rutter at $21,600. Since that landmark demonstration, companies big and small have begun adapting AI in general and cognitive computing in particular to their business needs. Their goal is to create machines that augment human intelligence and that can interact with us in a human way. Augmenting human intelligence is at the heart of this new way of computing. Up to this point computers provided tools that let us do things better or faster—they help us with tasks we were already doing. Cognitive computing, on the other hand, can help us do things we hadn’t thought of doing before. 5