collaboration

“What may set IBM apart is the sheer number of IoT playing fields it engages in addition to AI and analytics, including cloud, development tool set, services, device management, storage and security. Add to that its longstanding reach into enterprise and industrial IT.

"Where public clouds [such as Microsoft IoT Hub and AWS] have APIs, Watson has whole solutions," said Bret Greenstein, IBM's global vice president of Watson IoT offerings, which is not to say that IBM insists on provisioning end-to-end IoT deployments; certainly, as part of the IBM Cloud, the Watson IoT platform is all about cross-vendor integration.” Everyone plays with everyone else.

“The pattern in IoT is the same as the pattern in cloud; we're containerizing everything.”

It doesn’t take much forward thinking to realize that today’s jobs are becoming automated. Robots? Check. Artificial intelligence combined with Internet of Things devices? Check. They are coming and in ways we never thought possible 10 years ago. Who would have thought we’d be talking to chat boxes for customer service, for example?

In general, automation is riding a wave as employers perceive better productivity and lower costs as benefits. Does this move toward a digital workforce mean fewer jobs? Leading economists argue the opposite, that automation will actually increase jobs.

What is different than in the days of weavers and ATMs is that the jobs required now and in the future require higher-level skills. If an argument is to be made against digital transformation, it is that the divide between high-level skills and low-level skills will become wider, with little or no middle ground.