If you believe that artificial intelligence is going to influence everyday business decisions in the future, you have a lot in common with IBM CEO Ginni Rometty.
Speaking in an interview with Kara Swisher at the Code Conference on Wednesday morning, Rometty declared that "within five years ... cognitive AI will impact every decision made."
"It can be everyday stuff," she continued. "Just look at health care, education, financial services — there's so much room" where insights by a computer can lead to decisions that can help businesses make or save money.
But please don't call it AI, she says; her preferred terminology is a "cognitive system."
Rometty has staked her tenure at IBM around its cognitive computing system, known as Watson. Apple, Google and Amazon have also staked their future tech on AI for consumers with Siri, Google Now and Alexa, which runs on Echo.
Rometty plans to shift the 105-year-old technology giant's business away from computing hardware and toward software and services.
Watson is designed to answer questions; so far, it's been most widely used in medical settings helping doctors and cancer researchers. But "you will experience Watson in different ways," she said. Watson's capabilities will touch The Weather Company's app, recently acquired by IBM. "We’ll be adding things. ... Health and weather intersect in a lot of ways, for example."
Rometty said that since it made Watson's capabilities available for use on its SoftLayer cloud computing service, between 60 percent and 70 percent of cloud customers are using it. "We want the world to use it," she said.
Yet despite its importance to Big Blue's strategy, Watson sales figures aren't yet disclosed in its financial statements. Right now, those figures are reported within a larger Cognitive business unit that include software for analyzing data as well as security software.
"We're nurturing it," Rometty said. "There would be no value in disclosing it. ... It's not meant to be any one thing, but more of a silver thread that runs through a lot of things. If it's digital, it will be cognitive."
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This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
