How Cognitive Computing Can Change the Nature of Business Operations – A Conversation with Praful Krishna

At the most fundamental levels of reality, unstructured data is everywhere. Human beings interact with unstructured data on a daily basis; our senses, for example – we speak in language, see objects around us, hear sounds, have a sense of beauty, develop likes and dislikes. All of this information, which we often take for granted, is unstructured; there are no 1s and 0s underlying our most immediate realities. By its very nature, unstructured information is subject to subjective context.
Making sense of patterns clearly has an abstract sense of value, but what is the tangible benefit or yield of using cognitive technologies to help make better business decisions? Most of the time, people get into a debate over whether AI is just a productivity tool, whether the direction that data science is moving is really just taking what humans do and handing it to machines. But the kind of projects that Coseer is working on, for example, have the potential to fundamentally “change the way business is done” at client organizations.
For example, Coseer worked with a healthcare organization that deals with 10 million SKUs for a range of medical equipment and devices. Each SKU in turn had several attached and in-depth informational elements, such as brochures, white papers, and surgical protocols. “None of that (information) is structured, it’s not even all in English, but technology like ours allows us to help them say things like ‘Hey, SKU 256 is the same as SKU 375 but it’s 20% cheaper’; having that type of information transforms how you do business in that niche.”