Ultimately, knowledge worker performance comes down to the behaviors of individual knowledge workers. - Thomas H. Davenport

It takes about twelve years for a pharmaceutical firm to research, develop, test, and launch a product. Several firms, including Pfizer, Novartis, and Celgene, are working with IBM Watson to try to identify and bring new drugs to market faster.

Some organizations are attempting to predict the nature of future jobs and the skills they will require. This is, of course, difficult or impossible to do with any precision.

UPS are replacing fixed daily routes with dynamic ones adjusted in real time for weather and traffic — again with machine learning. Only cognitive technologies can handle all the necessary data. And at some point supply chains may be powered by autonomously driven trucks, which will bring enormous changes to that domain.