Can Watson, the Jeopardy-winning computer whose software enables it to learn from past experience, become of one of the biggest inventions in IBM’s 103-year history? That is the question IBM executives are asking themselves as they consider whether the artificially intelligent computer system named for company co-founder Thomas J. Watson can ever be big business for the company.

The democratisation of artificial intelligence has just taken one giant robotic step further to reality, following IBM’s announcement of a $1 billion (£607 million, AU$1.1 billion) business unit tasked with making the brains of its Watson supercomputer accessible to all. Watson, which rose to fame after beating humans at the television show ‘Jeopardy’ in 2011, uses language capabilities and analytics to process information similar to how people think, which allows it to analyse large amounts of data quickly.