This is their business model and their marketing targets exactly the group of people who are clueless enough to continue paying them. Why risk selling to someone who has a nose for bullshit by doing anything that implies you have a real product?

IBM has demonstrated a voice system that can perform as a debater in a lawmaking context. If it is not marketing smoke and mirrors for the C-Suite business lunch or breakfast let's see more of that in ops.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11751267 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14979642 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30046432

Watson won jeopardy by being an expert system with hand coded knowledge (their NLP parser was written in Prolog) and sophisticated QA text search. It wasn't a pure unsupervised/semi supervised deep learning model so it didn't generalize well to other domains like medicine despite it being hyped as a ML trailblazer.

Some other comments here are good but I'll point out that what most people don't understand is that "Watson" is the name of a marketing umbrella, not a technology. Essentially, almost anything at IBM that had AI/ML smell to it got tossed into the "Watson" market bucket. This allowed IBM to push a huge set of technologies that they could then customize and build services around, for a large fee of course.

The problem is that most of the AI/ML technologies IBM used were stock, off the shelf, often not even state of the art. You could literally go to a github page or use scikit_learn out of the box to get equivalent or better performing models without being tied to IBM's proprietary, consultant heavy, solutions.

The marketing of Watson, tied to the Jeopardy performance, made people think it was the first coming of AGI -- a kind of Skynet moment. It was really just a cobbled together basket of unintegrated, nothing special, industry bog standard AI/ML stuff.

Watson as a system was designed specifically to play Jeopardy. After the win it got a lot of global hype behind it and IBM's marketing and sales teams went into overdrive positioning it as some next generation intelligent AI that could help with generic business processes, analytics, medical diagnosis, legal briefs, customer service and every other business area under the sun. Instead, companies that bought into it got the same army of IBM offshore consultants to custom build half-assed solutions for them like before.

"Watson" is ultimately a marketing name for a sub-par IT consulting service, nothing more.