Ten years ago, International Business Machine Corp.’s artificial intelligence system, Watson, beat people on the “Jeopardy!”
The achievement was to herald a shift in the way machines answered questions big and small, opening new revenue streams for Big Blue in particular and Big Tech in general. A key target: Healthcare, a trillion-dollar industry, according to many, is saddled with inefficiencies that some tech advocates believe can be remedied by AI.
A decade later, reality has failed to deliver on that promise. IBM is now investigating the sale of Watson Health, a division whose major product was designed to help doctors diagnose and cure cancer.
IBM has spent billions of dollars on acquisitions to build Watson. Former IBM senior executive John Kelly once hailed the initiative as a “ farm bet. ” It didn’t live up to the hype. Watson Health has competed for market share in the US and abroad and is currently unprofitable.
Alphabet Inc.’s Google DeepMind unit, which famously developed a go-playing algorithm that defeated a human champion in 2016, later launched several health-related initiatives targeting chronic conditions. It has also lost money in recent years and has run into privacy concerns about how health data was collected.