Unconventionals Podcast | Season 6 Episode 5

IBM’s Watson: the Making of an AI Brand

Artificial Intelligence may be all the rage, but that doesn’t make it easy to market. The voices on AI range from Alexa (powered by) to Zuckerberg (defender of), which means it’s hard to get a bead on what AI means. And AI gets a bad rap, branded as a job killer or more ominously, a threat to the human race. 

How do you launch an AI brand in this environment? What responsibility does a company have for taking on some of the big questions about artificial intelligence? How do you help navigate a market through change, especially when that change is such high stakes? And what should an AI brand look, sound, and act like? We tackle all of that and more in our conversation with Jon Iwata, who heads up brand marketing at IBM. 

Take a listen to our talk with Jon and find out what’s next for IBM be sure to sign up for future updates from The Unconventionals.

Video Highlights

PODCAST TRANSCRIPT


Michael O Toole:
I'm Michael O'Toole. The Unconvetionals is a podcast series produced and distributed by PJA Advertising. Along with our academic partners at Colombia Business School, we're proud to bring you the Unconvetionals. The companies we feature aren't clients. There is no financial relationship, no promotional agenda. Just the stories of companies and entrepreneurs that remind us that the biggest risk in marketing is being like everyone else.

Speaker 2:
Next on PJA radio's the Unconventionals.

Jon Iwata:
We saw a lot of stories that said we should be very concerned about a machine like this. In fact, one story the headline was be afraid, be very afraid and it showed a picture of this black with blinking lights deep blue. It was named Deep Blue, the iconic photograph was this black super computer and Garry-

Michael O Toole:
A little sinister.

Jon Iwata:
Yeah, absolutely. It looked a lot like the black obelisk from 2001. Absolutely did and the picture was Garry Kasparov being defeated grabbing his head.

Michael O Toole:
Our story today is about artificial intelligence and we've had a lot of big sea changes in technology over the past 20 years, the internet, social media, the cloud. As big as this changes have been, AI is bigger and it's confusing. It's not easy to find one clear definition out there. There is a lot of using the word in the definition like artificial intelligence is the science of making intelligent machines. That's actually from John McCarthy, the mathematician coined the term.


Artificial intelligence is also charged. Definitions quickly become judgements or pronouncements. Like AI is a job killer or more ominously a human race killer. That isn't just from crack pots, that's from people like Elon Musk and Bill Gates. How do you launch products in this environment? What responsibilities does a companies brand have for taking on some of the big questions about artificial intelligence? All of this makes it a particularly fun topic to talk about on the Uncoventionals.


My guest today is Jon Iwata, Senior Vice President and Chief Brand Officer at IBM. We met at IBM's headquarters Armonk New York. Commercializing AI is in large part a story of how you navigate through change. How do you treat that change when the stakes are really high? How do you prepare a market for something new? These are big questions and IBM is a good place to look for answers. IBM's business is innovating new technology and this is the company that brought us the relational database, dynamic random access memory, the ATM, the sabre reservation system for airlines, the personal computer for God's sake.

Jon Iwata:
We wish that AI did not stand for artificial intelligence. If people had to use the letters A and I, we prefer something like augmented intelligence because unfortunately a lot of people's perceptions and concerns and hopes for AI are shaped by movies and novels and TV shows. Invaluably the depiction of AI is in artificial intelligence that has human like qualities. Whether it's ability to think and to reason and to have consciousness, or there are expressed through robotics like in AI that it can actually look like a human and walk around and so forth.


Unfortunately a lot of what's been depicted in movies is to portray AI as not a force for good and I can't tell you how many times that people ... It also tells you what their age is will say health or skynet or terminator and more recently there are many more nuance portrayals of AI in the movies less dark, less malevolent. We're always encountering like what is AI because it comes with this baggage and these perceptions. We think of artificial intelligence and cognitive technology as human like in its ability to learn, it's ability to sense. A lot since started off understanding language and now it's learning how to see and to sense through internet of things sensors.


It has the ability to reason meaning it creates hypothesis and weights them with confidence, which is why it was able to play jeopardy successfully. In that regard, it has human like capability, but this is where anthropomorphism runs out I guess. Because we have created a whole range of words to describe us and we're borrowing from that vocabulary and assigning it to technology. You can misuse a whole range of terms and it causes either too much optimism and hope or unnecessary concerns and fear.

Michael O Toole:
Why is AI important then? In your mind why is this not just the next big thing in computing, why is it more than that?

Jon Iwata:
It's because of the phenomenon of data. If you think about what's happened here with the ... Let me put it this way, we, all of us in the industry are putting computing into things that we would never refer as computers. We're taking it for granted that we could put because it's so small and so inexpensive, we can put a little computation into everything. We can put them into every product. We can put them into man-made and national systems like roadways and water ways. We can instrument the planet. We can instrument supply chains. Instrument our buildings and instrument ourselves.


Whether it's through social media or literally our bodies. All of this is data. What used to be unknowable like what are people talking about or what are people thinking or what are your sleep patterns or where is that one container as traverse of the Pacific Ocean and what is its temperature. It's now being captured as data, but we as people we cannot read everything, see everything, understand everything. It's necessarily in order for us to capitalize on this data to have assistance and what is mostly called artificial provides a broad category of technology. Provides that capability. It's not because of AI itself is needed, I believe it's because of the potential of data.

Michael O Toole:
What Jon is saying is data is not human scaled anymore. In AI, it helps us makes sense of and make better use out of that data. The reason this is intelligence and not just raw processing power, is that AI can understand context. It can prioritize. It learns. I think an example here will help. Take cancer, Watson does a lot of work in oncology and Jon talked about the work Watson's doing with the University of North Carolina Oncology Center. To Jon's point about data, there's way more data when it come to studying cancer, clinical studies, peer reviewed research, clinical experience in other countries, new therapies than any oncologist can keep on top of.


North Carolina has a cancer tumor board. With tough cases they gather all their oncologists together, collectively tapping into each others' knowledge to decide what they should do. Watson is being used to augment the work of this tumor board because Watson can keep up with all that data I talked about earlier. Watson can also understand. It's been trained by the very same experts on that tumor board to understand the complex technical vocabulary, but also courseality, syntax, context. These are the things that Watson is particularly good at.

Jon Iwata:
In the case of University of North Carolina, they tried Watson out and they said, "First of all let's feed it 1,000 patients and see whether it reaches the same conclusions as the humans." They were delighted to see that it was about 99% correlation. What Watson saw and recommended matched the doctors, but the thing that really impressed Doctor Sharpless and his colleagues, is Watson found 30% more actionable items than the doctors had. We're just talking about patients lives that's really important.

Michael O Toole:
We would all want that.

Jon Iwata:
We would all want that.

Michael O Toole:
It is still early days for artificial intelligence and when markets are in the midst of evolution, there are gaps. Buyers are a little behind the technology or there are expectations, sometimes shaped by popular cultures Jon talked about earlier are outsized. There are all these kinds of mismatches with AI, but there is also another one call it AI's fear gap. Concerns about AI's potential gone wrong. All of these gaps and blind spots set particular challenges for anyone who is trying to bring artificial intelligence technology to the market.

Jon Iwata:
AI, people already think they know what it is because of popular culture and so we actually have to combat that. That's not helped when have people like Elon Mask and Hawking and even Bill Gates make comments like AI is summoning the demon. That it is the end civilization.

Michael O Toole:
Acts as [inaudible 00:10:07] threat.

Jon Iwata:
Right. We do not believe that and so we have to deal with that. Also, there are some legitimate concerns about the impact on jobs, and we have to be very thoughtful about that. Because we are a 106 years old this year, and we've always been a technology company. When the first clocks that were able to record time and scales and punch machines came on, the same questions about job displacement, job impact, we're familiar with.


We do not say, "Don't worry about it." We think through it very carefully, and we're doing that right now with AI, 'cause we being humankind we have not seen a technology quite like it and it is different. Our belief in a nutshell on jobs is that few occupations will go away, but almost every job will be changed by it.

Michael O Toole:
I think jobs is a legitimate question, but I think it's fair to ask questions about the other problems too. Like even just in preparation for this, I might have been embarrassed to ask you about sci-fi stuff like the singularity, but then you hear Elon Musk talk about it or Bill Gates and you say, "Well, there are not crack pots, right?" Do you think it's fair to be worried about some of those things that we're unleashing something bigger and darker and if so, how do you participate in those conversations or do you?

Jon Iwata:
We do. We do it in constant with others and we do it ourselves. In the case of ourselves, earlier this year we went through a very interesting effort to first of all the side up on principles that will guide our creation and use of artificial intelligence and we made that public. It has three really important components, transparency around whether or not you're actually interacting with AI in some way, which will increasingly need to do all of us. Secondly, transparency of the data sources that the AI has ingested.


If for example in oncology, you as a doctor will want to know if I'm turning to Watson, what data has it drawn upon to make its recommendation. Who trained it? We need to be transparent about that. Another part of our principles is the purpose. We articulated the purpose is not to displace what humans do, but to augment it. Lastly skills and that has to do with job impact. We want to have a role in creating the skills that people will need in order to continue to have employment and there will be changes necessarily.

Michael O Toole:
AI means certain things. It means maybe those dark things in popular culture, but from a technology perspective it does mean things like Alexa and jackpots. I'm curious whether that's ever hard to get people to understand, "No, this AI can be applied to serious business challenges and has serious applications."

Jon Iwata:
It is a very difficult challenge for a company like IBM because people can experience everyday Alexa and Siri and by a large and as "consumers" we can't experience Watson every day. If can experience firsthand this consumer AI versions, you think that Watson should be compared to the same thing. As we often encounter in IBM, what Watson can do is many more things than a consumer AI can do, but if you can't experience it, then you don't think Watson is as relevant to you or perhaps as competitive as say these consumer AIs.


That's a challenge. You can't experience it firsthand, which is a very powerful driver of your belief and perceptions. The other thing is you might think that Watson is great at the most complex, hard and maybe expensive things in the world and if I am not one of those businesses or institutions trying to cure cancer or dealing with banking regulation, Watson isn't for me.

Michael O Toole:
It's over killer.

Jon Iwata:
We have to work hard to show a range of examples. You can get Watson working for you in hours all the way to years of work [inaudible 00:14:37] or Watson for oncology.

Michael O Toole:
How do you get people to accept change? Well, you can just push your product as the best innovation out there. Plenty of technology companies do this. You can try to scare people into buying and this is actually really big in the internet security space. You can throw data at people. Retirement companies love to do this. Or you can really try to tackle the issue, make the argument, make the rational and emotional case to frame how people are thinking about all the potential, good and bad of something new. This requires taking the long view in picking a platform that is bigger than what you sell. This approach as it turns out is what IBM is particularly good at.

Jon Iwata:
Starting in 1911, IBM started selling clocks and scales and cheese slicers. Right? Then we went to punch cards and type writers and vacuum tube calculators and personal computers, photocopiers, ATM machines, the mainframes. Either you can say IBM hasn't done the same thing 106 years or you can say IBM has done exactly the same thing for a 106 years and that's what defining the company. Obviously, I prefer the later. We get out of things because they commoditize. We don't like technologies or services or frankly ideas that you can get from any other company. It's hard to reinvent yourself. Believe me, we're going through that right now. It's hard to leave behind things that you created and that were sources of great business and pride.

Michael O Toole:
Personal computer.

Jon Iwata:
Personal computer, the dynamic random access memory, the magnetic disk drive and yet we move on. From a marketing perspective, it's really logical with challenges. If a commodity by definition is something people know what they're looking for, the opposite of that is something they've never heard of. If as a business we're always remixing ourselves into things that are not commodities, by definition we're trying to bring to market products, services and ideas that you probably haven't heard of, don't realize you need, don't have money for, don't see anybody else applying it yet and don't know why you should bother with it. That is a peculiar marketing task.

Michael O Toole:
Yeah, it's all about change. Right? We have this belief that brands should drivers of change and brands don't always want to do that work. It's curious to me that IBM maybe always has.

Jon Iwata:
I think that our best marketing over the decades has been and I normally say this to my colleagues within IBM. Some of them say, "I wish you wouldn't use that term 'cause it's so dull." I think the best marketing we have done over the decades has been at its core a form of education. I don't mean the dry, fall asleep at your desk education. I mean when you learned about something that changed your life, when you learned about something that changed what you decided to do with your life that stirs the blood. That's what I mean.


I think our best you mentioned a few that I've worked on. Probably my first one was e-business when the internet first came on the scene in the 90s, smarter planet and now AI and Watson. What they all have in common to me was, firstly they were not talking about IBM at all.

Michael O Toole:
'Cause education doesn't have an agenda. If you think about education, it doesn't have a promotional agenda. It shouldn't have.

Jon Iwata:
It has to have a different authority to it and that's really hard for marketers and communicators who like sound bites and sparklers and funny viral videos.

Michael O Toole:
Maybe have to move products pretty quickly, right?

Jon Iwata:
They do and I don't think they can go together. In fact, I think that what we've experienced with e-business, with smarter planet, now with Watson, is if you open the eyes of people to the possibilities of what will be, in fact if you can create an argument that is so persuasive that it causes people to say, "This inevitable." I could choose not to move. I can choose not to embrace the internet. I can choose not to think about the instrumentation of the planet and the data and I can choose not to use AI, but others will and I will get left behind.


That's the work that we're trying to do here, is to persuade with such credibility that people act. Again, it's the opposite of a ... like most of us think marketers and communicators are trained about. Our instinct is to talk about ourselves, is to talk about our products, to talk about our companies or our purpose. Well, of course we have to in the end have people choose us. Whether it's to invest in us or to buy from us or working for us. I think the most power in a business like IBM is to persuade them to see something that will be in the world and they want to be a part of that.

Michael O Toole:
If that's a company you're shedding commodities and always aiming to be a leader in the next thing, it raises the question of who you're really selling to. Or in pilonts of the Unconventionals, who are your crazies? Who are your 30% who are open to new possibilities who see themselves as change makers?

Jon Iwata:
I think it's partially because of how our brand is seen. There is Silicon Valley and if you've done the crawl up and down Silicon Valley, everyone you talk to a VC or an entrepreneur says that their thing is going to change the world and render obsolete all that has come before. Sometimes that's true, most times it's not. In our case whether it's coming out of our labs or coming out of the industry and we don't discriminate the two. Whether it's Watson coming out of our labs or blockchain coming out of bitcoin.


Our brand stands for, we've really examined something we believe you should pay attention to it. This one has staying power, this one you should invest in or at least look at. The internet no, it is not chat rooms and silly things. It's going to be revolutionary for business transactions. Blockchain will change trusted transactions for all time. Artificial intelligence is not from the movies, it's something that you will need in order to take advantage of data.


That part of it is that creation of the new, which I think our brand stands for. Therefore, the people who tend to resonate with us are people who aren't just chasing the next new thing, they want to make bets. Often bold and risky bets, but they want to do so with some confidence. Those people they look in the mirror and you'll see a fast mover or they look in the mirror and they see somebody who is a little paranoid even to say, "I don't want to be left behind or 'disrupted'."


I find that whatever the motivation is the people that we have the strongest relationships with have that in common. They do not want to be caught off guard, but they do want to have some confidence that what they make bets on technology or business models, is based on something.

Michael O Toole:
They might look at IBM or what IBM is placing its bets in.

Jon Iwata:
Yeah. I think that at our best we're very good guides in that regard.

Michael O Toole:
Coming up after the break. Watson wasn't always the finished persona we see today. At one point in his development, it took Watson four hours to answer a jeopardy question. We'll listen to a few options for Watson's voice that hit the cutting room floor.

Speaker 2:
You're listening to the Unconventionals, a podcast produced and distributed by PJA Advertising. We're always on the hunt for great business stories, not about share price or scale but the element of surprise. To find out how to apply the best practices and behaviors of companies like GE, Warby Parker and Big Ass Fans to your business, visit our website agencypja.com. Our academic sponsor is the Center on Global Brand Leadership at Colombia Business School, which turns the research of academias foremost thinkers on branding into practical tools and insight for real world application. Learn more at globalbrands.org.

Speaker 4:
I like [inaudible 00:23:30] he is on off splits are the best here.

Speaker 5:
Yeah, but he often [inaudible 00:23:34] she didn't even bring forward.

Speaker 4:
Come on.

Speaker 5:
Check out that stop and pop.

Speaker 4:
What do you think?

Speaker 6:
My trait of analytics indicate no one creates more space on offense. This allows him to nail a jumper from a densely populated urban area.

Speaker 4:
What you're trying to say is from way down town.

Speaker 6:
I am still learning.

Speaker 4:
I can see that.

Michael O Toole:
This is one of IBMs Watson at work commercials, which was released in May. Turns out that Toronto Raptors are using Watson to help them evaluate talent and this spot brings the notion of Watson as scout to life. You got two coaches evaluating players at a basketball practice. Watson is able to interpret players stats and give analysis, but obviously has a little trouble with the slang. It's light hearted kind of a fun spot, but it's also deliberate. The coaches and IBM are putting Watson in its place.


Watson is the voice of IBM's AI solution and you better believe people are paying attention at how his positioned visa vis his human counterparts. Here he is smart, he honest, but a little clueless when it comes to basketball culture. We'll listen to another ad a bit later for Watson cyber security solution, which to my ear strikes a different balance. I'm curious how you'll hear it. Regardless, how to bring Watson to life is a really high stakes and important decision for IBM.

Jon Iwata:
I guess most companies have R&D. We have R separate from D. It's really crown jewel of IBM that we have the IBM research is I would say liberated from ...

Michael O Toole:
Application all the time.

Jon Iwata:
... product development. They're into exploration. There is always something out there that they're trying to figure out, understand or to concur. They talk a lot about grand challenges a lot. One example of that we've talked about is Deep Blue beating Garry Kasparov 20 years ago. We didn't get into the chess game machine business, right? They chose chess because it turned out to be a grand challenge that would force the advancement of computer science in that particular way.


A different team of researcher came by here at corporate headquarters probably in 2009. They said, "We're going after a grand challenge. We want to talk to you folks in marketing and communications 'cause it involves television." We were like, "What is this?" They start talking about in the future there's going to be this explosion of data, most of the data will be unstructured. "What is that?" They explained it. It will be things like natural language and videos and images. Computers can move it around and store it and process it, but they don't understand unstrutured data.


We want to build a system that understands natural language and can generate hypothesis with confidence. The best challenge for that will force us to innovate is ... drum roll please, I was waiting for this I'm thinking something chess, going to the moon, cancer, ... playing jeopardy on TV.

Michael O Toole:
That came from the minds of researchers?

Jon Iwata:
It did. Frankly I was let down. I was expecting a moon shine. Right? I'm not a fan of jeopardy or I should say I wasn't and I thought of jeopardy as wheel of fortune or the dating game or something. I'm like, "What?" I have since come to appreciate that in order to be a champion on jeopardy it's pretty amazing what we as humans do very, very quickly. We have to understand pannery, metaphor. It is not a challenge for search engines. It is not just looking for an answer. It is to understand something that's difficult to understand. Then quickly within three seconds it turns out to have confidence in your answer.

Michael O Toole:
By the way I think it's really interesting that the jeopardy idea came from the engineers and scientists not the marketers, but the marketers were the skeptics. I think we're all better of if we don't code north the creative tasks for the ad men.

Jon Iwata:
I said, "Have you built this thing?" The reason why they were talking to us is because they said Deep Blue got a lot of attention and this one will get even more attention because we want to play jeopardy and it's on television and it's going to expose the brand. Naturally as steward to the brand you think about brand risk. You say, "Have you built this thing and is it capable of winning?" When they told me about this project, they said, "We'll get there but today it's not." I said, "Well, how long does it take to answer a question and is it accurate?" "Four hours."


It was almost like, "Okay, come back in a decade when this thing is a little closer to reality." They said, "No, no." 'Cause the scaling effects were getting in very, very quickly. Four hours to answer a question and the accuracy was not good, but of course they were right. What became Watson grew in capability pretty quickly. One thing we did is we went back and looked at the public reaction to Deep Blue beating Garry Kasparov. Well, that was a very proud moment for computer science and for IBM. We saw a lot of stories that said we should be very concerned about a machine like this.


In fact, one story the headline ... I've put up on the wall of my conference room ... the headline was be afraid, be very afraid. It showed a picture of this black box with blinking lights deep blue. It was named Deep Blue, the iconic photograph was this black super computer and Garry-

Michael O Toole:
A little sinister.

Jon Iwata:
Yeah, absolutely. It looked a lot like the black obelisk from 2001. Absolutely did and the picture was Garry Kasparov being defeated grabbing his head. We looked at the name. We looked at the iconic image and the positioning man versus machine. We said we're not going to make those mistakes with this and the researches deserve a lot of credit for being incredibly collaborative with us. We created the name Watson, which is named after ... contrary to what some people say is Sherlock Holmes and so forth, it's named after Thomas J. Watson the founder of the company.


We tested Watson's voice, which seems like obvious too today when we're all talking to our systems, but we test his voice. I will tell you that one voice in our focus groups, the first thing immediate within a second, the first word, which is the most popular word was creepy.

Michael O Toole:
Cutting room floor for that.

Jon Iwata:
Absolutely and by the way that was a child's voice, which makes sense if you think about something that smart and having a voice of a child it makes you a little an easy. We chose the voice and then the avatar. We were not going to lead with a big super computer box, we were going to lead with something, which we now see everywhere.

Michael O Toole:
We're going to play some of the voices that were auditioned for Watson. They're fun to listen to. The child's voice is first by the way. See if you agree with Jon on creepy.

Speaker 7:
This island that was home to a notorious prison is part of the Golden Gate National Recreation area in San Francisco.

Speaker 8:
What is Alcatraz?

Speaker 7:
Right. This states only national memorial honors clergy man Roger Williams.

Speaker 9:
What is Rode Island?

Speaker 7:
That's it. In a rhyming phrase it means to move with a prevailing trend.

Speaker 10:
What is go with the flow?

Speaker 7:
That's it.

Speaker 9:
For a 1600.

Speaker 7:
Answer. The daily double. Here is the clue for you at noon on April 22, 1889, settlers rushed to claim land in this new territory. Many entered sooner that noon.

Speaker 11:
What is Oklahoma?

Speaker 7:
That's why it's called the soonest state. You're right.

Michael O Toole:
The journey to the right voice, not a simple thing. With the voice that you chose what was it about that voice that felt right?

Jon Iwata:
Well, in truth at the time there weren't a lot of libraries of voices and so of the choices that we had, the voice of Watson that we selected was the one that people found to be friendly. I guess it didn't have problems with it. By the way since then we've learned a lot and we've curated and stewarded Watson very carefully since 2011. Does Watson use contractions? Does Watson use certain phrases? I think an advantage of the voice of Watson, which we have not changed since the jeopardy match, it's a little mechanical. Little bland baby, it's okay but it's like I want people to know that you're interacting with technology not a human.

Michael O Toole:
Remember the Watson ad we played a few minutes ago, where the coaches taught Watson what way down town meant in basketball. I'm going to play another ad. This is for a Watson cyber security application. As you listen ask yourself what roles is Watson playing? Voice is a big signify for sure, but it isn't the only one. What does Watson look like also what role does Watson and its applications play in our lives, when in fact you can't even buy Watson directly as a consumer?

Speaker 12:
Excuse me, are you aware of what's happening right now? We're facing 20 billion security events every day. D doors campaign, ransom ware, malware attacks.

Speaker 13:
Actually we've just handled all the priority threats.

Speaker 12:
You did that?

Speaker 15:
We did that.

Speaker 12:
Really?

Speaker 14:
We analyze millions of articles and reports.

Speaker 15:
We can identify threats 50% faster.

Speaker 12:
You can do that?

Speaker 15:
We can do that.

Speaker 12:
Then do that.

Speaker 16:
Can we do that?

Speaker 15:
We can do that.

Michael O Toole:
There is that kind of endless debate among marketers about B2B marketing and how it's different, whether it's different than consumer marketing. Most of the debate is how business decision makers are really human beings, which of course is right on. But Jon makes a different point that as people as individuals when we interact with brands, you shouldn't reduce this just to our consumer or buying selves.

Jon Iwata:
Where I come out on this is, Watson should never be the mascot of IBM. Watson is not our talking gecko fictional character. Watson should not be a mascot. At the other extreme, Watson should not be so awesome that people feel that, that's the subject of adoration and amazement is this technology of Watson. Where we want to be is, back where I started when you asked a question about how do we define AI. We want Watson always to be portrayed as partnership and hopefully enhancing what we do.


If had a few of reactions that said, no, Watson was the big star and we're the meat bag here having to turn to the super intelligence, that was not right. However, you got that impression was not intended at our end. The best is to show that partnership and the enhancement of what we do.

Michael O Toole:
I'm curious, you had said IBM is not selling to consumers, so often times it's hard for AI 'cause as consumers we can't see Watson. It occurs to me that choosing jeopardy was a great technical challenge but also smart, 'cause we all know jeopardy. There's also applications for Watson that we're just more intimate with as consumers. Like teaching or helping third grade math teachers do a better job or augmenting a visit to an art museum. Curious though Jon whether you'd pick one of those that feel more scaled applications, a story that you like to tell that you think really makes Watson more accessible.

Jon Iwata:
This gets to I think a bigger also debate, which is B2B and B2C. This where the vocabulary gets in the way here. It's what you mentioned smarter planet, which I think did a lot of work was very successful in many regards. As human beings, there is a part of us that are "consumers." If I say, "As a consumer what are the things you care about?" You say, "Well, I care about my movies and my devices and my car and my beverages." But I say, "Yes, but as a father what do you care about?" "Well, I care about my children's education and their health." As a commuter, as citizen, as a worker, as a neighbor, as a patient, you care a lot of things.


I would say to you that within the market share of the things you care about, we're more relevant than that pie slice called the consumer. Through our clients, through the healthcare providers and the retailers and the insurance companies and the public sector and the government and the educators of the world and the public safety people that we work with, we're improving through them and we're in partnership with them. More of the things that we each care about as human beings. Smarter planet looked that up and I hope Watson also starts to hit those keys too.

Michael O Toole:
We say goodbye to the tune of one my favorite Unconventionals. Rest in peace Tom Petty.

Speaker 2:
The Uncoventionals is written and produced by Micheal O'Toole and Reid Mangen with Graham Spector. Production and technical direction by Reid Mangen. Additional media Anthony Gentles. Our executive producer is Phil Johnson with PJA Advertising and Marketing. I'm Japhile Leheir. To listen to more episodes of the Uncoventionals visit agencypja.com/theuncoventionals.

Michael O Toole:
This is PJA radio.

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