IBM Watson to Support Fluor in Large Projects

On September 13, Fluor (FLR) made a deal with IBM (IBM) to use IBM Watson, which offers predictive analytics support to enterprises, for large projects. According to the deal, Fluor will implement Watson AI to forecast, analyze, and compute the EPC (engineering, procurement, and construction) status of large projects from commencement to completion.

Woodside, an Australian oil and gas company, also implemented Watson AI technology to do predictive analysis. Companies dealing with heavy machinery, engineering, mining, energy, and chemicals deal with huge amounts of complex data. Thus, AI tools can be extremely useful to gain valuable insights, assess risk, analyze budgets, and estimate project completion. Thus, these AI tools can save both time and money in highly capital-intensive organizations.

The Watson AI business, which is a part of IBM’s Cognitive Solutions segment, remains a key driver for the company. The graph above shows IBM’s revenue trend in the last five quarters. In fiscal Q2 2018, the revenue from the segment inched up 0.9% YoY (year-over-year) to $4.6 billion. However, on a CC (constant currency) basis, it fell 1% YoY.

Thus, the higher adoption of Watson AI technology across industries could continue to boost IBM’s Cognitive Solutions segment going forward.