by Tina Marron-Partridge, Talent & Engagement Global Leader, IBM (@Tina_Marron)

The past few months have been a whirlwind of activity for IBM’s Talent & Engagement team. We’ve had the opportunity to meet with enthusiastic conference audiences around the world who are all contending with unprecedented disruption in their enterprises and market spaces. Talent leaders are eager to learn how they can digitally transform, enhance the employee experience, become more agile and more customer-centric to address the continued enterprise opportunities and challenges ahead with greater insight and effectiveness.

On Monday, October 24 my colleague Andi Britt (@AndiBritt) and I will mark a homecoming of sorts at IBM World of Watson in Las Vegas, where we can’t wait to gather with 20,000 fellow cognitive enthusiasts and the industry’s top thought leaders and analysts to discuss current and emerging solutions. During our talk on How Cognitive Solutions will Transform HR we’ll explore these topics:

- What’s keeping HR leaders and the C-suite up at night, leading to today’s focus on Talent and employee experience as drivers of bottom line results. For example: workforce skills challenges caused by digital transformation are expected to be the number one issue facing HR organizations.

- Recent IBM research indicates that two out of three HR leaders believe cognitive has the power to transform key HR dimensions, and more than half think cognitive will affect key roles within the organization. We’ll discuss why cognitive computing is uniquely suited to augment human intelligence to achieve rapid, sustainable transformation.

- Examples of IBM cognitive applications for Talent that are available and running today, in addition to illustrating how to a series of cognitive apps can be deployed to help launch a new digital venture from the ground up with speed and scale.
Did you notice that the social hashtag for World of Watson is #IBMWoW? It’s fitting, as I do believe you’re going to think, “Wow!” when you see our Watson cognitive solutions for Talent in action.To learn more about how IBM Watson cognitive solutions are expanding human expertise, empowering HR to improve, and speeding positive impact on the entire enterprise stay tuned to IBM World of Watson, October 24-27 (@IBMWow and www.01.ibm.com/software/events/wow/).