International Business Machines Corp. (NYSE:IBM) CEO Ginni Rometty shared her views about big data era in her first public speech since taking the tech giant’s reins last years.
Addressing more than 170 business leaders at the Council on Foreign Relations, a New York-based think tank specializing in U.S. foreign policy and international affairs, Rometty explained how the dynamic manner of their future billion dollar decisions “will decide the winners and the losers” of the future.
Rometty shed light over International Business Machines Corp. (NYSE:IBM)’s efforts to make money out of its Watson supercomputer that the Armonk, N.Y.-based firm unveiled earlier this year.
“We have been working with financial services and telcos on call centers,” she said. “In the call centers in the world, typical call center, the operator or adviser you speak to spends 60% of their time trying to find the information to answer your question, looking for documentation. In the pilots we have done, we have been able to cut this in half and more.”
Rometty explained the company’s focus to work on “big data” services that let customers mine vast troves of information to make better decisions.
“It’s certainly everything around big data and analytics,” Rometty said in a brief interview last night when asked about IBM’s priority in 2013
Citing the example of Memphis Police, an IBM customer that used a program called CRUSH (Crime Reduction Utilizing Statistical History) to cut short citywide crimes, Rometty explained that “Many more decisions in your company or entity will be based on predictive analytics, not gut instincts or experience… because they can be based on all this data.”
According to the first female leader of global technology giant International Business Machines Corp. (NYSE:IBM), corporate decisions will no longer be “decided by intuition and experience, by gut reactions” but by “predictive analysis” “because they can be based on all this data.”
Instead of mentioning talking about big data and its impact on modern corporate decision making, Rometty pointedly avoided mentions of products or particular technologies during her remarks. However, when asked to speak about technology during a Q & A session, Rometty said that International Business Machines Corp. (NYSE:IBM) is now entering a third wave of computing.
“The third era will be about computers that learn,” she said. “It has to be because information is too big and growing too fast, so you can’t program it. The computer has to learn, by itself.”
