Well, here’s a couple of things IBM has been up to lately: machine learning and cloud computing. And they recently announced a partnership with Apple to bring those technologies to iOS apps.
Apple and IBM are two names not often mentioned in the same breath. IBM has long focused on the enterprise market, Apple on the consumer market. But this partnership makes sense for both companies:
The partnership’s offering, officially called Watson Services for Core ML, enables iOS app developers to combine Apple’s Core ML framework with machine learning models on IBM’s Watson Services platform and cloud services for model training. The stated goal is to bring more artificial intelligence to enterprise mobile apps.
Suppose, to take a completely hypothetical example, excavation companies want an app to help job site supervisors quickly identify whether objects being dug up might be important anthropological or paleontological artifacts, so they can make on-the-spot decisions to stop work if something of probable scientific or historical value is found. An app developer, using Watson Services for Core ML, could develop a machine learning-enabled app using this process:
Among the advantages for developers is that they don’t need to be AI experts—they bring the business problem and the proposed solution, and the Watson service does the AI heavy lifting. Watson already has pre-trained image recognition models for many familiar categories of objects, so it’s possible that for many apps, the developer doesn’t even need to provide a training database. (In the example above, the customer probably would need to provide such a database, because it’s such a specialized area of knowledge.)
It turns out that IBM and Apple have been in cahoots for some years, developing hundreds of enterprise applications for the iOS platform. This new partnership takes that collaboration to the next level by incorporating machine learning and enabling third-party app developers to build the apps. As machine learning technology matures, more enterprise customers will see the potential benefits of the technology. With this new partnership, IBM and Apple are poised to take full advantage in filling this demand. This partnership is the only one of its kind so far, but it’s a safe bet that other initiatives are in the works. If IBM and Apple are doing it, can Google be far behind?