IBM's pitch, of course, is that Watson's utility can keep customers happier and businesses more prosperous. And that's where the monetary value is generated.

Commerce Insights is designed to give online merchants, product managers and marketers a deeper view of customer behavior and business performance, IBM said. This can be done in a couple of ways.

First, a storefront view in Commerce Insights is overlaid with customer and performance data, allowing teams to view their products, categories and landing pages as they appear to shoppers. From there, teams can get a feel for how they are presenting their categories and products to shoppers and identify which ones are underperforming.

Watson can take that a step further by pinpointing the underlying causes of product performance and the best ways to remediate. For example, say an online retailer of sportswear noticed disappointing sales in a new line. The retailer could ask Watson for more details and find out that mobile traffic to those items is limited in certain geographical areas. The merchandiser could immediately send out a promotion targeting mobile shoppers in underperforming regions in an effort to increase conversions and sales.

Commerce Insights also takes advantage of Watson's natural language interaction, which allows users to talk in laymen's terms when exploring trends in their data without requiring expert assistance.