IBM Security executives today revealed a beta effort it is launching with 40 organizations from wide swathe of industry, healthcare, education, finance and other sectors to test Watson’s capability when it comes to protecting them against cybercrime.

Among the 40 participants are the University of Rochester Medical Center, Sun Life Financial, Avnet, SCANA Corporation, Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation, California Polytechnic State University, University of New Brunswick and Smarttech.

Their mission: Test Watson’s ability to help fight cybercrime.

Watson for Cyber Security uses intelligent technologies like machine learning and natural language processing, which can help security analysts make better, faster decisions from vast amounts of data.

IBM executives were perhaps encouraged to take this route on the cybersecurity front when they saw the results of a recent study from the IBM Institute for Business Value that showed  nearly 60 percent of security professionals believe emerging cognitive technologies will be a critical part of changing the tides in the war on cybercrime.

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“Customers are in the early stages of implementing cognitive security technologies,” Sandy Bird, chief technology officer, IBM Security, said. “Our research suggests this adoption will increase threefold over the next three years, as tools like Watson for Cyber Security mature and become pervasive in security operations centers. Currently, only seven percent of security professionals claim to be using cognitive solutions.”

Watson for Cyber Security takes advantage of IBM’s leading cognitive technology, which is being trained to understand the unique language of security. As IBM executives see it, by applying intelligent technologies like machine learning and natural language processing, Watson can help security analysts make better decisions from structured data, as well as the massive amount of unstructured data that has been inaccessible until now.

Working with these beta customers, IBM is continuing to enhance Watson’s understanding of the cybersecurity data and refine how Watson can seamlessly integrate into day to day security operations.

The IBM Institute for Business Value recently surveyed more than 700 security professionals to gauge how they view cognitive security technologies.

Nearly 60 percent of those surveyed believe that cognitive technologies will mature soon enough to significantly slow down cybercriminals in the near future. While only 7 percent said their organizations are currently in the process of implementing cognitive security solutions, 21 percent said they will implement these solutions over the next 2-3 years, representing a 3x increase in adoption.