Well, Watson (Watson Q&A) can only "answer" with a set of verbatim selections from the texts it has previously digested and been trained upon. Lots of folks struggle to understand this, and IBM seems not particularly diligent in correcting them, thus the idea that Watson can synthesize novel answers or insights persists.
Given a large body of literature that exists; say, all of IBM's marketing documentation, it's my understanding that Watson is able to parrot an answer to questions on things in there.
Something like "What's the minimum supported number of CPUs to run IBM DB2 on a new system Z?" or another customer-focused question.
Things like that don't require any insight, but would be a boon to the sales/marketing team when the customer has questions of that ilk.
Yes, that's positioning Watson simply as a better search, but what was Google, originally, other than better search than Altavista?
This seems like a case where Watson might be helpful, although the effort to train the system is considerable; out-of-the-box, Watson does not really know how to answer any kinds of questions, so the recommended approach is to (manually) walk it through thousands of Q&As. And even clearing that hurdle, would there be any payoff for the user _or_ for IBM above the Google results for "system z db2 requirements"?
