Ten years ago, International Business Machine Corp.’s artificial intelligence system, Watson, defeated humans in the “Jeopardy!”
The feat was supposed to herald a shift in the way machines served answers to big and small questions, opening up new revenue streams for Big Blue specifically and Big Tech in general. A key goal: healthcare, a billion-dollar industry that many say is full of inefficiencies that some proponents of technology say AI could cure.
A decade later, reality has fallen short of that promise. IBM is exploring the sale of Watson Health, a unit that was supposed to help doctors diagnose and cure cancer.
IBM spent several million dollars on acquisitions to build Watson. Former IBM senior executive John Kelly once announced the initiative as a “ranch bet.” He was not up to the hype. Watson Health has struggled to gain market share in the U.S. and abroad and is currently unprofitable.
Alphabet Inc.’s Google DeepMind unit, which famously developed a Go-playing algorithm that defeated a champion human player in 2016, subsequently launched several health-related initiatives focused on chronic conditions. He has also lost money in recent years and has had privacy issues over how health data was collected.