IBM Watson To Replace Salespeople and Cold-Callers

An anonymous reader writes "After conquering Jeopardy! and making inroads into the diagnosis of medical maladies, IBM's next application for Watson is improving sales and customer support. Companies will be able to simply fill Watson (or rather, DeepQA) with domain-specific information about products and services, and sit back as it uses its natural language processing skills to answer the queries of potential customers. The potential benefits are huge. Watson could either augment existing sales and support teams, or replace them entirely. Also, in a beautiful and self-fulfilling twist, the first application of this re-purposed Watson will be be internally, at IBM, to help sell more IBM Watsons to other companies."

Comments

Jobs killer

[jaymzter]

Mark my words, this will kill the economy, just like ATMs did.

Re:Jobs killer

[Billly Gates]

You know these sales and marketing people were all behind the outsourcing and devaluing I.T. jobs because the sales and marketing people made money, not computer geeks. As a testament to their success they convinced accountants to label them as "profit centers" while I.T. was labeled a "cost center". Guess which one the executives choose to fund more of vs cutting the other?

Now these same people are being outsourced and it is genius.

Re:Jobs killer

[Riceballsan]

Twice as awesome, to be replaced by machines, that will have to be supported by IT.

Re:Jobs killer

[geekoid]

A fork of Watson will support Watson.

Re:Jobs killer

[CRCulver]

When automation reduced industrial jobs, people could move into the service economy. But now automation is reducing service economy jobs. Where will they move to? While there's always some room for innovation, it's not impossible that we may reach a point where the majority of unemployed people simply cannot "move somewhere else".

Re:Jobs killer

[scamper_22]

Mark my words... this is what computers were meant to do:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2218882&cid=36363480

I work with computers all day.
I often wonder what people think computers are all about.

They're all about replacing human labor. I find it odd working in this field and talking to people outside it.

People outside the field seem to think that every age has a 'new economy' but everything else stays the same... as if nothing has changed in history. So they talk as if the 'green' economy will provide everyone with jobs... just 'green' jobs. Or they think we'll all be doing analytical work.

The problem is typically these people lack an understanding of scale. It's odd how so many academics lack an understanding of scale as well. All the 'good' jobs of the future are jobs that do not scale with the population. They are for small groups of highly skilled people.

So Google can do all it does with a mere 30K people or so. That is enough to serve the whole world. Just to put it in context. BlockBuster employed 60K people and it represents just a sliver of what Google can do (content delivery).

The single biggest problem is that the private sector is increasingly not scaling with population. Small highly efficient operations are there.

The public sector typically does scale with population. More nurses, doctors, police officers, teachers... are needed as the population grows. Now we can certainly try and automate parts of these jobs (online class delivery...), but in general we're not there technologically or the unions won't allow it.

So we have a structural imbalance. The only way out of it... is to go to the start... computers are doing what they were meant to do... kill human labor. We should all be working less... job sharing. the result is a much more egalitarian society... with potentially a very rich upper class at the top of some of the automation companies.

However that would kill people's position of privilege in society. Public sector workers expect a premium over the average person. Ditto for bankers...

IMHO, we need to embrace deflation and the lack of work and redirect people to the jobs that still need doing. Maybe we need vast numbers of people to work on the farms 2 weeks a year. Other need to go mine for rechargeable batteries.

One of the biggest problem we still face is the emphasis on 'educated' labor. Just as the industrial revolution automated manufacturing jobs. The information revolution automates so much educated labor. We need a few experts, but computing can do the rest.

So we need to get rid of the idea that just because you're educated, you should be paid more. Most of the legal and financial jobs are unproductive today. Just there to keep educated people in a premium position over society. We could for example automate and simplify the entire tax field and get rid of most accountants.

But as I said, people are used to their position of privilege. Egalitarianism is a hard concept... even though people talk about it. When people talk about good jobs, they mean jobs better than someone else.

It's definitely going to be a rough time... especially since technology is deflationary... but governments and banks are inflationary. We certainly can't embrace deflation as governments have so much debt and banks are dependent on people taking loans... and guess who is in charge of most countries (bankers and governments...)

Expect a rough time.

Re:Jobs killer

[Overzeetop]

No, that will never be the case. Just as they predicted that computers would make for a 10-20 hour workweek.

You see, we currently pay people in return for their time. $40,000 (or $80k, or $120k) buys you a person for a year. Now, whether they do 40 hours of work a week to produce TPS reports, or you give them a computer so they can produce the equivalent of 80 hours worth of TPS reports in a week, the market is for a week of time. Business owners understand this, and their income is based on then number of TPS reports.

Let's say you've got 100 employees each making 10 TPS reports a week. Lets assume you are "right-sized" and there is only a market for 1000TPS reports in a week. Now you buy a Watson that can produce 100 TPS reports per person employed. Would you keep everybody on and let them work 4 hours a week, or would you fire 90 employees, keep the ten you need, pay the cost of Watson* with the savings in payroll, and pocket the extra?

That's exactly what has happened over the past 40 years. We are getting more efficient, but it's not leading to shorter weeks - it's leading to higher unemployment, and higher unemployability. As things get more complex, fewer humans have the mental capacity to operate the machines of business efficiently.

The more machines do, the "expendable" end of the human capability bell curve moves further to the right.

*note: if at all possible, IBM will charge for Watson the annual sum of about 85 employees, including maintenance and upgrades, for licensing.

Re:Jobs killer

[Telvin_3d]

No, that will never be the case. Just as they predicted that computers would make for a 10-20 hour workweek... We are getting more efficient, but it's not leading to shorter weeks

A large part of this is a failure to adequately account for human nature, consumer culture and changes in wealth distribution. Back in the 60s and 70s and 80s when each new revolution in automation hit all the magazines and news programs were full of news that, since this wold double our productivity, in another decade everyone would have to work half as much.

And it's true. As a society we could provide everyone from top to bottom with an 60's upper-middleclass lifestyle for only a day or two of work each week. Why didn't this happen? First, it relies on the idea that there is some fixed goal that everyone is working towards. That once everyone has filled their checklist of stuff they are done. Instead, there is always more stuff being made and marketed. Consumer culture is as much a moving target as productivity is. The supply expands to fill the available capital.

More importantly, the people who enjoyed increased productivity are very rarely the people who benefit from it. If a factory doubles its output the owners don't double wages. It is the same across every industry. Word processing and e-mail didn't free up time for office workers. It just spelled the end of their secretaries.

This is reflected in the real wages and income distribution of the last 40 years or so. Adjusted for inflation, real wages have actually fallen by about ten percent since the 60s. We are being paid less for higher efficiency. At one point the top 1% of the population received roughly 15% of the national income. Now the top 1% receives 24%. One quarter of every dollar earned in the USA goes to the top 1% every year. In the 50s CEO's salaries averaged about 30x what their average employee made. Now the ratio is often several thousand times.

So massive gains in efficiency have been made. But those who enjoy the resulting gains are never those who are generating more work.

Re:Great,

[ColdWetDog]

Now voice-response menu systems are artificially intelligent. This is not an improvement.

Think an unholy union of Skynet and QVC.

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

The last barrier to immediately hanging up

[SpiralSpirit]

The only reason I don't hang up right away on sales/survey calls is because deep down I don't like being rude, even to strangers. The minute I hear a machine or recording I hang up, though. For support, if I can't talk to a human that speaks the same language as I do within a reasonable time frame, I don't use the service. Replace humans at your peril.

Might work

[khendron]

Customer: Can you tell me the location of your office in the United States?
Watson: Toronto?????

Re:Might work

[sortadan]

Watson: What is Toronto?

Now, finally ...

[foobsr]

(drum fill) REAL sales droids. All you ever wanted. Yuck.

CC.

"Dear Aunt.

[0100010001010011]

Let's set so double the killer delete select all."

Now searching.

"The best way to commit a double homicide would be to..."

AI salesman vs the law

[Fractal Dice]

What are the legal implications of Watson lying? of providing false or misleading information?

Re:Support Calls == Compicated

[ColdWetDog]

You haven't done much tech support recently, have you? Much of it is still at 'are you sure the computer is plugged in' level.

Again, this isn't pitched at you, it's for them.

Then they'll either drop you as a customer...

[rsilvergun]

...(because you cost too much to maintain) or you'll adapt to their systems. And for Pete's sake, stop trotting out that overused ATM bit. It's called an EXAMPLE. It's how you illustrate a broad trend. ATMs are one of many, many ways that people are lost jobs to automation. There's lots more examples. My favorite is the sleeping bag factory that cranked out 1 million + bags/yr with just 300 employees. Then there's all the small craft businesses (like closet makers) that used to be highly specialized and now are being replaced by a few expert systems.

I don't know if you're old enough to remember, but back in the 80s were promised expert systems that would do these things and free us up for leisure time. Trouble is, instead of leisure time we're getting pink slips and a one way ticket to the gutter we're schedule to die in. Thing is, I've yet to hear a compelling solution to the problem of automation that doesn't just boil down to 1) Anyone w/o jobs dies of starvation or 2) Some form of socialism. What I do hear a lot of is attempts to ignore / downplay the problem. Remember Biotech? Where are the jobs? And even if we had them, how the hell would anyone get trained for them when we're cutting back on education budgets left and right?

Re:Then they'll either drop you as a customer...

[ultranova]

Thing is, I've yet to hear a compelling solution to the problem of automation that doesn't just boil down to 1) Anyone w/o jobs dies of starvation or 2) Some form of socialism.

That's because there isn't any. Either the society takes care of the weak, which is socialism, or it doesn't, in which case they die. And since power tends to accumulate - the more you have the easier it is to get yet more - almost all are weak.

Also, I find it interesting that a society that's so big on democracy - distribution of political power to everyone - is nonetheless perfectly okay with the concentration of economic power into just a few hands. It seems your local robber barons certainly used Cold War effectively.

Such a disappointment

[antifoidulus]

Come on IBM, finally, finally, FINALLY we have an opportunity to actually create a talking car a la Knight Rider and you let it go to waste on such frivolous tasks as winning a game show, doing medical diagnoses, and selling people stuff. This must make David Hasselhoff so mad that he is rolling around half-naked on the floor unable to even eat a simple cheeseburger.

wrong wrong wrong wrong, and wrong

[decora]

nobody who controls the machines is going to just give food and housing and water to people.

example? health care. if you are a wal-mart part-time employee, and you get cancer, which something like 1/3 of people will, you have to declare bankruptcy. if you get a splinter in your foot and it gets infected, and you need time off work, you will probably get fired. and wal-mart can make a profit if you die on the job, because of something called 'dead peasant insurance'.

wal-mart, with one of the most advanced IT departments in the world, did not use this new found wealth from machine automation to improve the lives of the people. it used it to cut costs, slash benefits, destroy unions, outsource production to military dictatorships, and so forth and so on.

there are countless other examples.

if these examples keep being ignored, we will be where we were in the early 1900s in europe . . . masses of starving people who had nothing to lose, and so joined revolutionary movements to overthrow the existing governments and try bizarre social experiments that ended in horror.