At the same time, IDC predicts that by 2018, half of all consumers will interact with services based on cognitive computing on a regular basis. The developers here will be allowed to try out the new techniques under supervision of IBM engineers. “Marketers can use personality data to further enrich their audience profiles and begin to build proactive marketing strategies”. Financial details of the link were not announced, but Bloomfire says it is tapping into data insight APIs from IBM Watson for auto tagging corporate knowledge repositories and posts, to improve searchability of that content for its customers. Companies that use them in commercial applications pay IBM a share of revenue, while businesses that use them internally pay by the number of API calls they make. The Nike Oregon Track Club Elite will use Coach Watson to individualize the training load and inform planning around competition, travel schedules and recovery plans.

In the years since Watson’s famous 2011 defeat of the world’s-best Jeopardy players, IBM has worked hard to turn the platform into a powerful business machine.

IBM has also made improvements to the Speech to Text and Text to Speech APIs, which would be useful for developing digital personal assistants such as Apple’s Siri and Microsoft’s Cortana. The Veterans Health Administration is using iDAvatars in its Virtual Medical Center for patients with diabetes, PTSD, and other conditions that require long term management and access to educational content.

With the release of Visual Insights in experimental mode, the tech giant boasted it has grown its Watson API portfolio to over 25 offerings powered by more than 50 technologies in 20 months.

IBM Watson Retrieve and Rank helps Watson to answers tricky questions by looking for “signals” in data, while IBM Concept Insights enables an application to detect correlations.

Athletes are under intense pressure to excel, constantly risking injury, illness and time on the sidelines. The company is also focusing on selling Watson products into areas such as education and healthcare.

“The business is based on data”.

It can process huge volumes of data in minutes, understands complex questions posed in natural language, and suggests evidence-based answers. With this, a user could ask the kiosk for a “wine for under $10 that goes well with salmon”, and would be shown a list of suggestions.

According to Saft, Watson West will operate much like the company’s Astor Place Watson facility, and the new team will be led by IBM Cognitive Commerce general manager Deepak Advani.