If you haven’t heard of Watson yet you must be living in a cave. Here’s the scoop: Watson is a cognitive computing system that is not programmed but learns just like you and I. In other words, think baby Skynet from Terminator lore. But Watson’s artificial intelligence is nothing to be afraid of–so they say. There are actually tons of ways Watson can be used for business scenarios.
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For example, the IBM Watson Personality Insights service uses linguistic analytics to extract a spectrum of cognitive and social characteristics from the text data that a person generates through blogs, tweets, forum posts, and more. The Personality Insight app then infers personality and social characteristics, including the Big Five personality characteristics, Needs, and Values from text. These insights help businesses to understand their clients’ preferences and improve customer satisfaction by anticipating customer needs and recommending future actions. Businesses can use these insights to improve client acquisition, retention, and engagement, and to strengthen relations with their clients. The following is a brief description of the three kinds of personality insights that are provided by this service
Personality characteristics: The service can build a portrait of an individual’s personality characteristics and how they engage with the world across five primary  dimensions: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism (also known as Emotional Range).
Needs: The service can infer certain aspects of a product that will resonate with an individual across twelve needs: Excitement, Harmony, Curiosity, Ideal, Closeness, Self-expression, Liberty, Love, Practicality, Stability, Challenge, and Structure.
Values: The service can identify values that describe motivating factors which influence a person’s decision-making across five dimensions: Self-transcendence/Helping others, Conservation/Tradition, Hedonism/Taking pleasure in life, Self-enhancement/Achieving success, and Open to change/Excitement.
Personality Insights is also used in the applications Speak Up, NYC School Finder, and Your Celebrity Match, which can be found on the Watson Developer Cloud App Gallery.
Another Watson app, the Tone Analyzer, can be great for writing emails and texts for business. It also uses linguistic analysis to detect emotional tones, social propensities, and writing styles in written communication. Then it offers suggestions to help the writer improve their intended language tones.
Finally, the Tradeoff Analytics service helps people optimize their decisions while striking a balance between multiple, often conflicting, objectives. The service can be used to help make complex decisions like what mortgage to take or which laptop to purchase.
Try the Personality Insights, Tradeoff Analytics and Tone Analyzer demos out for yourself and tell us what you think.