Bangalore:  IBM’s Watson, the cognitive computing system modeled after the human brain that beat two human contestants in 2011, is a long way from the achieving  its target of $1 billion . IBM is working on how to get a return on the amount invested on the champion computer which has made just $10million since its inception, reports the Wall Street Journal. Since the introduction of Watson, IBM has targeted healthcare, financial and services industries. Watson is also being offered as a general analytics product for business’ customer service, sales and marketing functions. In 2012, IBM signed up pilot projects with US health care providers Wellpoint and Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, while Citigroup is yet to examine if the cognitive computing system Watson could be used for their customer service. 

In a discussion with ZDNet last year, the head of IBM’s cognitive computing unit, Manoj Saxena, said that the healthcare domain was the first step for Watson’s commercialization, while any “information-intensive” industry could be considered too.