IBM Archives - NevilleHobson.com

Understanding the four types of AI, from reactive robots to self-aware beings

The common, and recurring, view of the latest breakthroughs in artificial intelligence research is that sentient and intelligent machines are just on the horizon. Machines understand verbal commands, distinguish pictures, drive cars and play games better than we do. How much longer can it be before they walk among us? By Arend Hintze, Michigan State University The new White House report on artificial intelligence takes an appropriately skeptical view of that dream. It says the next 20 years likely won’t see…

Meet the omni-channel experience that is Wimbledon 2016

The Championships, Wimbledon 2016 started yesterday, June 27, and run until July 10. During these two weeks of intense competition, Wimbledon and the competing players will be names and brands in an event that will not only be on television screens large and small across the globe in real time and recorded, but also available and accessible on myriad devices, from smartwatches to big-screen PCs, almost anything that can connect to the global internet any time anywhere. To be sure, there’s…

The rise of the cognitive PR machines

Within two years, 20 percent of business content will be authored by machines or “robo writers,” as Gartner puts it in its list of ten predictions of an algorithmic and smart machine-driven world that the analyst firm published last October. It was a topic I used as a focal point in my presentation about PR measurement and how it’s getting smarter partly through automation that captured close attention from the 50+ PR pros in the audience at a CIPR event…

The journey of Convergence

Recently, I wrote about email as one of the elements in transforming an organization into a social, collaborative enterprise. A classic example is the role Atos’ zero-email program plays in such an exercise. While I cited Atos in my post as part of the concluding point I wanted to make that email is (or can be) an enabler for social business – and which must have the “it depends…” filter added – the conclusion isn’t the key point here. What…

Changing gears with IBM

I’ve been thinking a lot about social business lately. About what it is – broadly, focused on people (behaviours, mindsets) and organizations (culture, vision, leadership) – and about what it isn’t (an extension of, or level up from, social media). For the past dozen years, I’ve been directly and actively involved in one way or another in social media and social business, as a consultant, as a client, as an experimenter, as an early adopter (and leaver), as an…