The use of AI, or artificial intelligence, has increased in businesses worldwide through technological solutions such as voice search and recommendation engines. Cognitive computing may be a bit less known but it’s increasingly important. Cognitive computing vs AI is a discussion that has been troubling many minds, however, these technologies are easy to understand.
While voice search is an example of AI, cognitive computing can be seen in processes such as natural-language understanding, something that helps computers know what users mean when searching.
Let’s delve deeper into what cognitive computing is.
What is Cognitive Computing?
A bit trickier to define, cognitive computing refers to an advanced level of computing when it comes to comprehending and reasoning. This technology is similar to human cognition, in which it can make high-level decisions in complex scenarios. It can handle both symbolic and conceptual data instead of only focusing on sensor streams or pure data.
AI gives computers intelligence but it’s cognitive computing that compose the variety of technologies allowing computers to undertake the specific tasks. Based on AI and signal processing disciplines, cognitive computing systems often have the following features:
- Contextual. Cognitive computing technology might identify, understand, and extract elements like syntax, meaning, and process from multiple information sources. These can include unstructured and structured digital information and other sensory input.
- Interactive. This technology has the ability to easily interact with users so that their needs are comfortably defined. Other devices, processors, cloud services, and even people may also be interacted with.
- Adaptive. Cognitive computing may be able to learn as information suffers changes, being able to tolerate unpredictability and resolve ambiguity.
- Iterative and stateful. Defining problems can be made easier by these systems finding other source input or asking questions should they face an incomplete or ambiguous problem. Previous interactions may be remembered so that specific situations are adapted to.
Cognitive Computing vs AI
The big difference in the cognitive computing vs AI fight is in human interaction. The way AI works isn’t to try and copy human thought processes; instead, it makes use of the best possible algorithms in order to solve a problem. AI is all about results for solutions, not trying to achieve machines that think like humans. This can be seen in the natural language processing in Amazon’s Echo and in Netflix’s recommendation engine.
Cognitive computing, however, simulates human reasoning behaviour by gathering inputs from either sensor streams or data systems. It also makes use of conceptual and symbolic information on its focus for understanding and reasoning, just like humans.
This technology is meant to interact like humans and keep a record of current contexts so that it can deduce from events occurring with humans. It might sound scary but cognitive computing systems don’t make decisions – AI does. Cognitive computing systems merely supplement or complement humans’ cognitive abilities in decision-making.
Developing an Improved Business Model
Cognitive technologies can help companies to generate higher revenue and increase volume. They can be applied for product innovation alongside operations, structural, process, and business model innovation.
Superior performance can be achieved by the differentiation on value and not price, in addition to revenue growth before cutting costs. These technologies are already helping us to future-proof our clients, ensuring that they can compete effectively in the future.
For our financial clients, cognitive computing is allowing us to use machine intelligence for first-contact interactions with leads. We then proceed to qualify, follow up, and sustain leads, as the technology helps to deconstruct customers’ natural language.
This allows us to deeply understand thousands of customers’ conversational questions, providing marketing automation that helps our clients to focus on business growth. We provide precise decision-making for sales and marketing, for example, which will only improve as the technology evolves.
What’s the Verdict on Cognitive Computing vs AI?
Computers haven’t (yet) achieved full cognition; cognitive systems think, remember, and reason like humans, but they’re restricted in comparison to humans. A “real” cognitive system is based on other human-like features, such as the subconscious. Cognitive computing is artificial augmented intelligence, helping us to deal with large data volumes and to find new solutions to problems within that data.
Although intrinsically intertwined, cognitive computing and AI are easily distinguishable from each other. We can only expect to see similar technologies evolving and expanding in the future, which will allow us to keep providing cutting-edge solutions for our clients.
