When life sciences companies develop new drug therapies or biomedical interventions, what typically attracts the most attention is news about the success or failure of clinical trials. But a lot of work goes on behind the scenes before these efforts ever reach the clinical trial stage. In fact, as life sciences companies decide what promising therapies should receive development resources, it’s often rigorous fact finding and research that determines a go or no-go decision.
We’ve been posting lately about all the ways cognitive search can help make your business more successful and its employees more productive. The working definition we use for cognitive search is: “Cognitive search allows people to find hidden knowledge.”
Now, “hidden” can mean you don’t know where something is, but it can also mean that it’s not accessible. You know where a certain piece of knowledge is, but you can’t get to it because it’s in a place you can’t connect to. Or you can only connect to it when you’re in the office — not when you’re working from home or on the road.
Customer support is probably one of the most challenging elements of business. Your support team is on the front-line working hard to help customers resolve their issues as quickly as possible.
Customers expect - and often demand – answers, and fast, whether it’s from a support rep or a self-service support solution. If their issues aren’t resolved in the time they think it should take, frustration kicks in and plans to move to the competitive solution start to take hold.
What exactly is cognitive computing? Well, if you ask 10 academics or scientists, you’re likely to get 10 different answers. Look it up on Wikipedia. You’ll see that in the academic and scientific community, there is no agreed upon definition. It’s just marketing jargon. Ouch.
On the commercial side though, we may not have a precise definition for cognitive computing, but we’re very aware of its potential to help our businesses.
Cognitive computing and AI have increased the tools in our toolbox. Machine learning, deep learning, neural nets, natural language processing. These technologies are the foundation on which companies are building new capabilities that affect top-line revenue and bottom-line profitability.
You could Google cognitive search and find a lot of definitions. But the simplest one is this, “Cognitive search allows people to find hidden knowledge.” That knowledge, that gem could be anything and this applies to every vertical and job function. It can help you find a needle in a haystack or a particular needle in a stack of needles. And finding a particular needle in a stack of needles is often what customer service reps have to do.
In a recent blog, we talked about Attivio’s “Sherlock” cognitive search campaign, which takes aim at IBM’s Watson. We noted that organizations deploy cognitive search platforms to boost employee productivity, foster innovation, and gain greater insight from their data. But to achieve those goals, they often take on huge professional services from “mega vendors” like IBM that don’t deliver an effective cognitive solution.
So, of course, we were very pleased to see in the just released Forrester Wave™ for Cognitive Search And Knowledge Discovery Solutions (Q2 2017) that we were in the leader category. And well, Watson didn’t make it.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1886 fictional “consulting detective,” Sherlock Holmes, was a great mind renowned for his highly advanced powers of observation and reasoning. He was often assisted by Dr Watson, who was unfailingly loyal, if noticeably less bright. At the end of each thrilling tale starring the duo, the anxious reader would always be delighted to hear Sherlock announce that he had solved the latest mind-bending riddle, inevitably characterizing the solution to his trusty helper as, “Elementary, my dear Watson!”
