IBM Watson Experience

Step into a curved room wrapped in 93 million pixels. You're not watching a demo—you’re inside it. Welcome to the Watson Experience Center, IBM’s boldest attempt to turn the abstract promise of AI into something tactile, visceral, and impossible to ignore.

From 2014 to 2020, I led interaction design and engineering for these spaces—flagship locations in New York, San Francisco, Cambridge, and Munich—each built to make C-suite execs not just understand Watson, but believe in it. The results? $6B in influenced deals, 15,000 visitors a year, and a full-stack reinvention of how enterprise AI is communicated.

The Challenge

IBM had a problem: everyone knew Watson, but no one knew what it actually did. Expectations were sky-high, thanks to marketing hype and a historic Jeopardy win, but practical understanding lagged. Our challenge: show, don’t sell. Let users touch, question, and navigate real AI use cases—live, interactive, and tailored to industry.

Plausible futures, powered by real tech

We embedded with IBM’s AI teams and SMEs to shape scenario-based storytelling: natural disasters, global supply chains, financial forensics, cloud orchestration. Each narrative was grounded in actual Watson APIs and IBM infrastructure. No vaporware.

Spatial computing, before it was cool

Each center included a 290° Immersion Room with HD displays, directional audio, and gestural input. Our team built on g-speak—a spatial OS that locates UI and data in physical space. Interfaces responded to movement, pointing, and proximity, creating a computing environment that felt more like a sci-fi film than an enterprise pitch deck.

Beyond the demo loop

These were more than click-throughs. They were choreographed experiences guided by live facilitators, branching based on visitor choices, and rendered in real-time. Think Choose Your Own Adventure, but powered by machine learning and visualized across 45 high-res displays.

Why It Mattered

The Watson Experience Centers weren’t about spectacle. They were precision-built tools to bridge the gap between myth and method in enterprise AI. These spaces gave clients a visceral understanding of what data science and machine learning can actually do when paired with the right interface.

As Director of Interaction Design, I helped IBM reframe its most misunderstood product. More importantly, I helped redefine what enterprise UX could be: spatial, collaborative, and unforgettable.