In a bid to reach out to more retail companies, IBM’s cognitive computing platform Watson might be utilised to fabricate ‘fashion’ apps that overlay structured and unstructured data to help people decide what to wear.
While at the Melbourne Spring Fashion Week, IBM Watson’s global retail transformation leader Keith Mercier spoke of data from social media, current weather, the clothes in a persons wardrobe, events in their calendar, and access to online shopping that could be analysed by custom apps to provide clothing suggestions to the user.
“If you know the places where consumers are getting data today, when it comes to shopping, it is weather, it is inspiration from social, it might be what is in my closet, it might be my purchase history. You could use Watson in other technologies to bring all those together, and then have that dialogue around the data,” Mercier pointed out to ZDNet.
However, the final decision lies with the user. What the AI-like Watson does is provide the user with the collated data that was previously unstructured to help choose better.
Building on its technology and data capabilities, IBM has signed into a three year partnership with Melbourne Spring Fashion Week to track trends in the show. IBM is assisting the organisers monitor the social posts on the events digital site in order to use the “unstructured input” to plan next year’s event.
Mercier explained, “We believe cognitive computing really is where the world is moving to and we’re one of the first movers in this space. We’re getting to a point that it can start to be commercialised.”
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