It's a pretty open secret in the community that what IBM pitches that Watson can do, versus what it (or any state of the art system) really does is pretty much bunk. This author calls it fraud, but a more charitable interpretation would be extreme marketing. We've seen a lot of failures with Watson, particularly in the medical space - MD Anderson's Cancer work for example (https://www.forbes.com/sites/matthewherper/2017/02/19/md-and...) where MD Anderson payed around $40 million (on a original contract deal somewhere near $4 million) and eventually abandoned it.

I do think Watson may be a fake it until you make it thing - in particular, they still have access to a incredible amount of data, and data determines destiny on a lot of AI.