Who Wins in a Digital World? by MIT Sloan Management Review

Author:MIT Sloan Management Review
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BUS041000 Business & Economics / Management
Publisher: The MIT Press

Key Levers of Cognitive Strategy

Companies we have worked with are developing cognitive technology strategies that address a variety of issues, including content, technology components, people, change management, and ambitions.

Leveraging content Companies that own proprietary content, be it data or knowledge, should look for ways to incorporate that content in their products and processes, as well as in a cognitive system. This requires finding or creating a “knowledge graph” the company wants to license or own. This is particularly critical for natural language processing applications, such as intelligent agents or chatbots. A knowledge graph describes the relationships between key entities and terms used in the business and in its relationships. Google Inc. pioneered the idea of the knowledge graph when it began collecting billions of facts about internet searches and representing how they relate to each other on a graph.5 Other companies, such as IBM Corp. in its Watson division, have obtained their knowledge graphs from outside partners or through acquisitions (as IBM did through its purchase of The Weather Co. LLC for weather data). Although Watson is known for ingesting medical journals, perhaps it’s more noteworthy for its ability to convert content into “question/answer pairs” that can be used in interactions with clinicians.6

Companies should think carefully before turning over content ownership and usage rights regarding core customers and products, or proprietary process information, to other organizations—even if the would-be users are able to add significant value to what they receive. Unless the information relates to tactical processes like facilities management or maintenance, companies should treat their information as a valuable corporate asset and seek ways to add value themselves. A pharmaceuticals company, for example, will probably want to own the content and models related to drug development, though it may be less intent on owning the knowledge graph for clinical trial processes, which are often outsourced anyway.

Technology components Cognitive technology isn’t one technology but a collection of them. It includes statistical machine learning, neural networks, and natural language processing and generation. Beyond selecting specific technologies, companies need to decide whether to build or buy the capabilities, whether to use proprietary or open-source software, whether to use one vendor’s tools or employ “best of breed,” and whether to use stand-alone applications or a broad platform.

There are no right answers—only decisions to make about what aligns best with an organization’s capabilities, business strategy, and overall cognitive strategy.7 Organizations with voluminous and rapidly changing structured data about customers may find that machine learning provides insight into customer preferences. However, if the need is to identify and sort unstructured information (such as sounds and images), deep-learning neural networks will work better.

Clearly, some companies are more knowledgeable about the powers of cognitive technology than others. Procter & Gamble and American Express Co., for example, have been involved with artificial intelligence since the 1980s. They have the ability to build their own cognitive applications and cobble together solutions using open-source tools. For companies with less experience and less-seasoned developers and data scientists, undertaking such challenges would be unthinkable.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.