It wasn't an expensive disaster for IBM, but it was for MD Anderson Cancer Center, which spent $62 million on a project using Watson that didn't work: https://

It wasn't an expensive disaster for IBM, but it was for MD Anderson Cancer Center, which spent $62 million on a project using Watson that didn't work: https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/876070 https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/876070 Certainly, not all projects work and institutions need to take risk. However, there is a big financial and opportunity cost to this. Rather than spending $62 million on Watson, and assuming a $100k salary with a a cost multiplier of 2 ($200k for 1 FTE), that amount of money could have paid for 77.5 FTEs over the 4 year duration of the Watson contract (62e6/200e3/4). I suspect that the overall scientific contribution of those researchers would have been higher.