What are Cognitive Business Operations?

Speaker 1: So, John, this video is gonna be about Cognitive Business Operations. So let's start with, what are Cognitive Business Operations?



John: A Cognitive Business Operation, as opposed to a regular business operation, it really is just that, now, in the 21st century, machine intelligence, deep-learning systems, are at the stage to where we can use those to help make your business operations more efficient.



John: Now, in a cognitive system, what we do is we set up the system to mine the data of your operations, monitor your operations, gather information about everything that goes on in your business, and then we use that as a training set to train the system on how to respond to particular situations.



John: And when you think about it, it's much, much more applicable to building more robust situations because every time there's a new situation in your business, there's a different set of criteria. We can then take that set of criteria and use it to adjust the system's learning.



Speaker 1: So, you're talking about training and learning, but we're software developers. So, how does software development differ when you're building a Cognitive Business Operation?



John: Okay, that's a really good question. What is different? Okay. So, the thing is, when you have a Cognitive system that is able to determine what the next best action is ... In a traditional BPM approach, we would have defined what the workflow was. So, we would have come up with tailored steps for each operation that takes place in a particular sequence. And we would have coded this in such a way that we were expecting the first, second, and third operation.



John: In a cognitive system, the system itself is gonna determine what the next best action is. If you look at that, it's kinda like the difference between building a solution today for a structured process versus building a solution today for a case management system.



John: In a case management system, a human takes a look at the current state of the case and they determine what the next best thing is to do, and then they go and they execute that operation. Well, now, with the Cognitive Business Operation, it's kinda the same thing except instead of a person, the system is determining the next best thing to do.



John: So it's much more about pre-conditions before something can be done, rather than an absolute sequence of operations.