Well, what people think of when they hear "AI" is generally pretty different from what academics mean when they say "AI" anyways.

> amazing information retrieval system

Which I imagine still has lots of value on it's own for large, complicated data sets.

Yep. But if your marketing and product management are all focused on selling AI instead of IR, then they're not really working toward finding a way to deliver the IR value they have to the people who need it.

I'd actually like to give Watson a spin for an IR problem I'm looking at, but, thanks to their hype machine being set to overdrive, they've got the thing priced in the "The Bold Leaders of the Future Creating a Bright New Tomorrow Full of People in Glasses Staring Wistfully Toward the Right Edge of the Photograph, While Blue Curvy Streaks Wave Through the Background and Random Zeroes and Ones Float Around Their Heads" tier. Sadly, I've only got a "businesses solving business problems" sized budget.

What is your use case and what are the alternatives you're considering? I'm trying to understand what to imagine here.

IBM BlueMix didn't have the Watson IR tech you were looking for?

Watson is a thing that is good at Jeopardy. Therefore it is not AI. AI is only things that a computer can not do. Nothing that exists is ever AI

Jeopardy is an information retrieval problem in a game show format, with the minor twist that the query is phrased as a declarative sentence and the response is phrased as an interrogative one.

AI is not simply things that a computer can't do yet. But I think most of people who aren't currently trying to sell a piece of software would expect AI to include some things that you don't need to do to play Jeopardy. I'd want to see general-purpose pattern recognition, for example.