Today IBM opened its Amplify conference focusing on IBM Commerce, Marketing and Digital Experience products. This year is IBM’s 20th anniversary of their commerce product. IBM customers now sell $100b annually through their commerce systems. Gartner has listed IBM Commerce as a leader in this space yet again this year.
The opening video focused on predictive analytics and how that can affect your customer’s engagement and experience with your brand. At a fictional bank, the analyst used social media data to uncover new trends in the coffee market and then focused offers for new credit to the coffee shop that was offering the hot products.
Harriett Green, IBM’s GM for Commerce, Watson IoT and Education talked about how we now have the ability to know more and more about our customers. This data can be used to create extraordinary customer experiences. However, there is now so much data that too often it is overwhelming and goes to waste.
Watson, Watson, Watson is on center stage. Cognitive computing – did I mention Watson? – is able to look through all this massive amount of data and discover patterns and insight. Watson is especially good at looking at multiple sources of data and combines them to provide us with predictions based on that data. These predications and insights have a tremendous potential to impact marketing, commerce and our customer experiences.
Here is an example. IBM recently acquired The Weather Company, who produces weather forecasts for 2 billion locations around the world every 15 minutes. IBM acquired this company because weather is a critical factor in our behaviors – we buy when the weather is good, we need certain products when the weather turns bad. IBM wants this weather data to combine with other customer data to help predict buying behavior. And Watson is the engine that looks for those patterns.
