Note from the Publisher: Hopefully the reference to Hal, the nice but ultimately scary AI being inside the spaceship from "2001: A Space Odyssey" is fairly self-evident, but if not, just rent the movie. I actually saw that film with my family when I was a kid (oops, I'm giving away my age), and it scared the crap out of me. Which is apparently the exact same effect that the cost of IBM's artificial intelligence program Watson is having on would-be customers. Bank operating budgets have been tightening for several years now. It's really the ultimate irony that cost-saving technologies like Watson are just too darned expensive upfront to implement.
"NEW YORK, Aug 11 (Reuters) - International Business Machines Corp is in an unusual fix in telling big U.S. banks they can use its Watson software of Jeopardy-winning fame as a cost-saving solution: bankers say they like it, but cannot afford it.
IBM is in good company. Banks are in the fifth year of their belt-tightening campaigns that began in 2011, chasing billions of dollars' worth of savings, and vendors that offer everything from technology to janitorial services are getting squeezed."
Read Full Article at Reuters