Mankind has witnessed two eras of computers and are set to witness the third and the most powerful one. The most important era where computers will be used as cognitive systems is stepping in.

Cognitive computing tends to incorporate and stimulate in a computerised model, thought processes that are similar or close to that of the human brain.

For the computer to act as a cognitive system, it deep dives into various self-learning by mining data, processing natural languages and recognising patterns. The computer can go through these processes, replicate the way a human brain functions.

While there are certainly some functions where the computer has outshone the human mind like when it is asked to do some calculations or tabulations for that matter. Computers have not been able to master tasks that the human beings consider genuinely simple, tasks that are based on ‘common sense’. An example of this could be like trying to comprehend languages that people use to communicate with one another, or even identifying unique features in an object like a human would be able to do. So Artificial intelligence still has a lot to cover up to bring up a fully cognitive computational system in place.

So the cognitive computing processes can be made use of in any field , be it, medical, law, education, or even finance. the essence is that any field that can offer large amount of very complex to be analysed processed and made sense of, to evaluate and solve problems associated with the field.

Not only that, the cognitive systems can be of immense help to foster the cause of marketing function as a whole, particularly, involving consumer behaviour analysis, customer support bots, personal shopping bots etc. it can also be successfully applied by the travel agents, security personnel, tutors and even doctors to boost their respective domains.

Hilton Hotels, for example, recently introduced the first concierge robot, Connie who is a smart robot answering questions about the hotel, the sights in the vicinity of the hotel including local attractions in the natural communicating languages that humans use.

Human-like chatbots, Face Recognition, Face Detection, Object/logo detection, speech to text conversion, personal assistants are examples of Cognitive Computing and Services

One important takeaway from a new report out of MIT’s Center for Information Systems Research recently is that the cognitive computing tools today are best suited for carrying out tasks that are narrowly defined. Some of the use cases of the cognitive computing tools are their roles in helping banks evaluate the credit worthiness of their customers, conducting insurance audits for the health care providers, doing general audits for the finance and accounting firms.

It can act as a limiting factor for the popularity of AI is that any situation which has a high level of uncertainty, creativity or rapid changes cannot help AI flourish.

So to conclude, it can be said that cognitive computing technologies can be applied to such areas that have strong and systematic business rules in place,that can probably train the machines by guiding algorithms based on large volumes of data. It has a great future for almost all businesses. The faster you adopt it, the higher you can grow.