IBM has touted the business credentials of its number-crunching Watson platform by announcing a raft of commercial clients around the world.
Big Blue has also opened a bespoke New York office dedicated to showcasing Watson’s powers, which will be home to 600 staff and situated at 51 Astor Place in New York's so-called Silicon Alley.
Among the clients announced by IBM were hospitals in Thailand and banks in Australia, as well as a Spanish bank, CaixaBank. The latter will work with IBM to teach Watson Spanish.
In the UK, mobile retail specialist Red Ant is using Watson to underpin its service that gives sales staff more insight into customer buying patterns, demographics and product information.
IBM pumped $1bn into its Watson division at the start of the year to help grow its presence in the market. The unit is clearly keen to start generating strong returns to justify this investment.
Mike Rhodin, senior vice president at IBM Watson Group, said that the number of organisations using Watson is a clear indication that there is wide business scope for its use.
"Watson is bringing forward a new era of computing, enabling organisations around the globe to launch new businesses, redefine markets and transform industries," he said.
"The next great innovations will come from people who are able to make connections that others don't see and Watson is making possible."
IBM also underlined the benefits to developers of using Watson to underpin web and mobile apps by offering cognitive computing power to deliver more powerful tools.
The benefits include user modelling to understand more about a customer's personality based on their web presence, language identification to provide translations, question and answer capabilities and data visualisation rendering.
IBM updated Watson in August to tackle big data project demands with its new Watson Discovery Advisor that will hunt for hint connections in data.
IBM also revealed that Watson is learning legal and scientific vocabulary and sentence constructions to help scan documents worded in unique ways.
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