IBM didn’t put Watson on Jeopardy! for entertainment. It was a proving ground.
Jeopardy! is a high-speed quiz show built on wordplay, riddles, and cultural references, basically language under pressure, and in 2011, Watson faced two of the show’s greatest human champions on the televised stage.
The bet was bigger than a TV win: force breakthroughs in how machines handle human language and meaning, then apply that intelligence to decision-making in worlds flooded with information, from healthcare to finance.
To mark that moment, we created the hero film and dedicated website that carried Watson out of the lab and onto the stage.
Positioned as the successor to Deep Blue, Watson wasn’t framed as a cold machine, but as a thinking system under pressure.
We turned a complex engineering milestone into a public story you could actually feel, and pointed beyond the spectacle toward the real measure of success: what this kind of intelligence could mean for society.