Artificial Intelligence, Real Food

Chef Watson can’t chop, dice, or julienne. “He” has no taste buds or appetite. But ask the chef for a recommendation on cooking with green olives, and his knowledge is vast, incorporating data points from a library of recipes and an encyclopedia of flavor profiles.

One of the early applications of IBM’s Watson technology, Chef Watson’s intelligence is in food. Specifically, how ingredients can come together to form new, never-before-tried recipes. The goal for Chef Watson, IBM says, is to “surprise and delight human chefs.”

HBR enlisted two cooks to partner with Watson in the kitchen: Ming Tsai, a renowned professional chef, and Gretchen Gavett, an HBR editor and kitchen novice. We asked each of them to cook with Watson as an experiment in how humans and machines work together. Was it surprising and delightful? Or a recipe for disaster? Watch and find out.

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