This was a fascinating interview. Not just because it unpacked one of the biggest business bets the 104 year old group is taking with its IBM Watson. But because it confirmed one of the first commercial applications of IBM Watson is in South Africa where Metropolitan Health has embraced the product – because, says IBM’s Vince Kasten, this company’s executives just “got it”. Artificial intelligence has come a long way since IBM turned punch cards into the world’s first computer more than half a century back. Recent progress can be tracked from 1997 when the IBM Deep Blue computer beat world chess champion Garry Kasparov through to 2011 when the IBM Watson beat the best players of the popular US television game Jepoardy. Now the technology promises to help revolutionise healthcare in South Africa. – AH
ALEC HOGG: IBM’s Watson is a groundbreaking computing platform, able to interact in natural language. I’m not so sure, I understand all of that, but I’m sure we’ll be far better informed at the end of this conversation because IBM has announced the first commercial application of this technology in Africa. With us in the studio is Vince Kasten Financial Service Executive Partner at IBM Global Business Services Middle East & Africa. Vince, I was talking a little earlier about Tom Watson Jr. and Tom Watson Sr. – nothing to do with the golfer – but the IBM icons. To take their name and to apply it to a product tells us as people from outside, that this must be some kind of product.
VINCE KASTEN: It very much is. I believe this is actually the first time in IBM’s history that we’ve taken one of the founders’ names, associated it with a product, and associated it with an entirely new business unit, which IBM launched earlier this year with a $1bn investment. Yesterday the reason for the media announcement was that they did the ribbon cutting on new headquarters in Asor Place in New York, down in what they were referring to as Silicon Alley. It definitely seems like a major new thrust for IBM and, honestly, what we think is an introduction into a completely new era of computing.
ALEC HOGG: It’s a well-established company: 104 years, you were telling me off-air.
VINCE KASTEN: Yes, 104 years.
ALEC HOGG: You used to always, wear white shirts…..
VINCE KASTEN: White shirts and blue…it was always blue suits. I think there’s still a lot of that culture, of course. It’s a very established company. It started with hardware and moved into software when Lou Gerstner came in. I heard you guys talking about him a little earlier.
ALEC HOGG: Teaching elephants to dance?
VINCE KASTEN: Yes. Exactly, and he moved the company strongly into services. In South Africa we may be more known for our hardware and our software, we still have a very thriving services business that provides solutions and technology enablement for those solutions.
ALEC HOGG: And the number four brand in the world…
VINCE KASTEN: The number four brand in the world, and I think it depends a bit…. that was Jeremy Sampson and Interbrand’s view on things. I heard you talking about it slipping just a bit. We are a very strong brand and I think, most strongly associated with trust and integrity, which is very important to our clients here and worldwide. Especially Metropolitan Health and healthcare here in South Africa – one of the very important things with healthcare
ALEC HOGG: Why them? Why did you go to MMI, rather than Discovery who are so dominant in this space?
VINCE KASTEN: The Watson announcement… You talked about natural language and cognitive computing and the fact that you’re not sure if you understand all of that.
ALEC HOGG: I don’t.
VINCE KASTEN: Okay, we can talk about that but relatively few people understand that and relatively few people can make the jump from what that is to what it can mean for their business.
What we found in Metropolitan Health was a very, very vibrant client with a very charismatic and forward-looking leadership who actually, very much understood how this could change the complete game for healthcare and actually point the way.
Not just from private healthcare where they work, where Discovery works and some of the others, but actually point the way towards public healthcare as well, which is an evolving story here in South Africa. At the end of the day, with roughly ten million people in private healthcare and another thirty million who are not in that healthcare system, things like IBM’s Watson can provide better advice, more computing advice, and help them with outcomes, can really help move that, downstream.
ALEC HOGG: How’s that going to work, in practical terms: are we going to have Metropolitan salespeople going to potential clients, pulling out an iPad, and using their Watson system’?
VINCE KASTEN: How it hits the business and the way Metropolitan Health’s going to use Watson to start with is in their contact centres, so it’s in their walk-in centres. Right now, Metropolitan Health Supports three million members of about 20 schemes, including GEMS, which is I think, the largest single scheme. They do about 12 million interactions per year with people walking into walk-in centres, people calling in to call centres, or via correspondence. What Metropolitan Health is using Watson for first, is to sit next to call centre or walk-in centre agents to provide virtual coaching, to let those people provide better, more complete, and more targeted information for people who are coming in to ask about their coverage or about their next membership fee.
ALEC HOGG: What makes it different?
VINCE KASTEN: What makes it different is that Watson is a cognitive computing platform. What makes cognitive different and what makes Watson very unique within cognitive is it understands the English language, so that’s what the natural language aspect is.
ALEC HOGG: So it’s listening as the person’s phoning in?
VINCE KASTEN: It can listen, as either the person’s phoning in, or if you were in a walk-in centre, technically the walk-in centre agent would put queries to Watson. That’s on the interaction side. In many ways, the more interesting side is Watson can consume information in the English language.
In healthcare, suppose you had a healthcare worker who read every medical journal, stayed abreast of every medical development, knew everything about every patient that the company had every worked with, and then you come in and ask her a question.
For example, ‘what is the next best thing I should do, because I am pre-diabetic and I am concerned about not becoming diabetic?’ Watson can go back into all of that data and within two or three seconds, it comes with an answer and it tells you exactly why it came up with that answer. If I’m a doctor, I can look at that and I can say ‘this is a nice advisor for me to have, to possibly tell me the next set of tests I should run’. If I’m a nurse, it gives me a doctor in my pocket. If I’m a community care worker, working out in KZN in a rural area where it’s somebody coming into a clinic, what it does is it gives me really good medical advice that I can use to inform how I interact.
ALEC HOGG: You had Deep Blue, the computer that played chess and beat Garry Kasparoff.
VINCE KASTEN: Yes.
ALEC HOGG: That was seen as a breakthrough. That was some years ago. Presumably, Watson is Deep Blue on steroids.
VINCE KASTEN: Deep Blue – yes and no. It’s a reasonably clear lineage from Deep Blue through to Watson, but it’s more of a spiritual/philosophical desire which IBM has actually kept going for the last 30 or 40 years of research. On bringing natural language and then bringing more and more natural interactions with computers that can make more and more evidence-based decisions. Decisions not based on bias or gut feel, but in fact, based on everything it knows about, and bring those more and more to the forefront. What IBM likes to do is set challenges to look at the research, to say ‘does this research make sense’. What Deep Blue did with Garry Kasparov is what Watson did with the Jeopardy game when it went in and beat two Jeopardy champions at their own game, in Jeopardy. That Watson, which is all of the number crunching that came out of Deep Blue plus all the cognitive stuff we were just talking about – the natural language and all that stuff – now commercialised and packaged into a set of products and solutions.
ALEC HOGG: It sounds like science fiction.
VINCE KASTEN: You know, it feels a little bit like it when you’re working with it. In fact, it’s not going to take over your job anytime soon. It’s not going to do that kind of work, but what it really can do is it can sit alongside people and actually make people more informed and better at what they do. That’s really the target in a call centre and in a walk-in centre, which every bank, investment house, and every medical scheme has – tons and tons of people. The turnover is something like 40 percent per year, which means that there’s a good probability that the person you’re sitting in front of asking for advice, just sat down about three months ago.
ALEC HOGG: Just to close off with, is it going to transform the bottom line of IBM? Will it have any impact?
VINCE KASTEN: It is a major bet for IBM. Again, I heard the conversation before about ‘the brand has slipped a little bit’ and maybe we were going through a cycle. Over 104 years, you go through cycles. However, our CEO Ginni Rometty has said over and over again and shown through investment that she is highly committed to Africa as a growth area.
ALEC HOGG: She was here with the top team.
VINCE KASTEN: She was here with the entire top team, which is I think, the first time they’ve ever shown up together outside the United States.
ALEC HOGG: It was Super bowl weekend, if I recall.
VINCE KASTEN: If I recall, that is right.
ALEC HOGG: Which is quite a commitment…
VINCE KASTEN: They’re quite committed to it and this is our major approach to moving back onto a solid growth path, and becoming relevant and essential to our clients here in Africa.
