With the arrival of the AI, Watson, at IBM, my team was set with the challenge of how to integrate Watson into the everyday world of email. A particularly compelling use cases was identifying important emails and assisting a user in responding to them.

As we explored various concepts, several things became evident:

• Users were very concerned about Watson snooping on them
• Watson, for as smart as it was, couldn’t always be right. In fact, Watson needed time to learn things, for example, what constituted an important message
• Watson could be particularly helpful in situations where users did not have time or want to compose long emails

As a result, I guided the team toward a model where Watson was more of an assistant rather than an all-knowing answer machine. However, we were always very conscious of the fate of Microsoft’s Clippy and went out of our way to not personify or give Cognitive Mail a personality.

We also chose a Mobile First approach.

This concept deck illustrates the opportunity and design direction.