To no ones great surprise, IBM's Watson question answering (QA) system triumphed over a couple of guys you normally wouldn't want to get into a Trivial Pursuit contest with on the Jeopardy! TV game show last week.
Watson went up against Jeopardy's two greatest human players, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, and destroyed them. The fact that Watson won wasn't surprising. After all, IBM's Big Blue computer beat grandmaster Garry Kasparov in chess.
But Watson did it in such a way that was almost chilling. He made Jennings, who once won 74 Jeopardy! games in a row, adopt the facial expressions that his opponents once wore; a look of complete and total frustration.
After watching the shows I asked Jamie Bisker of IBM's insurance group about Watson and what such technology can do for the insurance industry. Bisker wrote:
"Watson's performance when playing Jeopardy! demonstrates a more general range of knowledge, but the natural-language (i.e., everyday language) aspect combined with a specific set of information like claims, underwriting or products, will be game altering for carriers.
For instance, the trend toward greater use of self-service to control costs for claims and policy information updating (servicing) has been throttled by the quality of the interactions. A Watson-like QA system could support a given self-service interaction regardless of the mechanism used (face-to-face, voice, IM, text, hard copy, Web site, etc.) because it would provide a consistent source of information and knowledge."
Technology adoption is so fast today that it's easy to imagine a QA system like Watson in place for insurance carriers before this decade comes to an end. When you think of what insurers are doing with business intelligence, predictive analytics, and predictive modeling these days—tasks they weren't doing 10 years ago—having a computer answer simple questions doesn't seem so far-fetched.
I don't want to get into the whole man vs. machine debate (Jennings wrote on his final Jeopardy response, "I, for one, welcome our new computer overlords."), but the march to technology is inevitable, if not a little scary.
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