Rendezvous with Cameron Clayton, GM, IBM Watson Media & Weather

Hey, I'm doing really well, thanks for joining us. It's a pleasure meeting you and learning so much about the Weather Company. What exactly do you do? So I'm the general manager of the Weather Company, the company that IBM acquired about four years ago. And so I'm ultimately responsible for us helping to predict the future, so everything from the science and data collection and the forecasts that we do, as well as go-to-market and sales and industry solutions we build to help people make better decisions. Great.

The climate challenge we're facing today can be daunting, almost overwhelmingly so. And so I think we try to always instill hope in people that we can make a difference. You can make changes, there's things that we can do. I was really, really pleased to see IBM along with 75 other global companies, including Tata here in India, but Apple and Google and many of the largest companies in the world, all commit last week to clean their hands up and saying, 'Hey, one of the things we can do is put a carbon tax on ourselves or have a carbon tax imposed on us by the government.' You know, as long as it's done appropriately, we think that's a step in the right direction to climate change. And the other big thing we can do is how do we actually drive better yield and better performance from farmers around the world? And so, you know, any government set this goal of doubling the income of farmers over the next five years, we'd love to play a part in that and help make that vision a reality. And we have some solutions that we think can make a difference. Great.

So then I think you're right, most people hear those acronyms and don't fully understand what they mean. I guess what I would say is, simply put, at the Weather Company we're trying to map the atmosphere, right? So every single thing that happens in the hundred kilometers around the earth that we live on, we want to know every single thing that's happening inside that atmosphere. No personal group of people can process all that data. It's literally twelve trillion pieces of data every day that we're mapping to try and do that. And so we've asked and worked with computers to help us do that, but those computers really just augment us as the people. They have to make decisions, right? And so we still believe and will continue to believe that people need to make decisions, and that those terms like AI and ML and NLP are augmenting people to help them make better decisions. And so in our case, that's about making a better decision, right? Yeah, as simple as what to wear today, to as complex as, you know, do we evacuate a region or a state because of a huge tropical event that's coming their way?

Our phone? No, we are the most downloaded weather app in India and the most downloaded weather app in the world. But it's not just that. We actually help businesses in a variety of industries make better decisions. So many people may not know, every time you fly on a commercial airline, we're behind that planning the route, helping predict turbulence, etc. Every time your goods come through a supply chain, whether it's trucking or shipping or rail, we're helping those companies move goods around the world. Your energy and utilities companies for your power, water, etc., partnering with us to help them make better decisions on how to manage supply and demand and things like that. Including your insurance companies impacted by severe weather events. But how do we turn insurance companies into prediction companies? Great.

Yes, so it's GRAF, which stands for Global High-Resolution Atmospheric Forecasting. Okay, to make those acronyms come alive, it's simply put: we are trying to democratize weather for everyone on the planet. We really believe that if everyone has a really good weather forecast, they'll make better decisions personally and professionally, and that will drive big changes. This would give you a sense of the scale of the changes we think about as we develop GRAF. You know, there's six billion people on the planet right now, at least two billion more coming in the next ten years, maybe four. We can't feed the people we have right now, and there's no more land being created. So how do we help farmers have a better yield, drive more output from the land that they're farming today? That is a big part of GRAF. But it's also aviation. How do you, you know, when you fly from Delhi to Mumbai and you hit turbulence without warning, that can be dangerous. And we want to reduce that. Our mission is to map that atmosphere, but it's hot. We want to ultimately try and help people live better lives. Absolutely.

It's my lifelong dream to make that a reality. Before I get out of this business, I would have been determined to make that a reality. No more test matches should ever be decided based on the weather if I have anything to do with it. Absolutely. Thank you.