I spent an hour with Mike Rhodin, senior VP of the Watson group, on Monday night at the new HQ at Cooper Union Square. He seems like the perfect guy to sell artificial intelligence to the masses: He's intense but not too intense, nice suit but no tie, and there was no hint of computer jargon in the whole conversation.

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One thing's for sure: IBM needs a revenue generator. Revenues have declined every year since 2011.

What I wanted to know first was, how much buy-in has there been from the top at IBM? Rhodin says he has complete support, and as evidence he points out that the entire operation is being run as a start-up within IBM. He reports monthly directly to Rometty and a few board members.

He refuses to be drawn into any discussion of how big a business Watson can become. He won't talk revenue projections, noting only that Watson is currently "part of IBM's $20 billion analytics business." He noted that Deloitte estimates the cognitive computing market will expand in five years to $50 billion in the U.S. alone.

There are several headwinds for IBM and Watson:

1) Too big to succeed, and potent competition. IBM is big. Really big, and there's some doubt it can pull off something like this. The current belief is that the only way any technology could advance is if it were invented by a 19-year old in his basement.

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Maybe. But that's an easier call to make for social media than it is for artificial intelligence.

Invention does not always come from kids or small companies. IBM will have 2,000 people working on Watson by year end.

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3 years after 'Jeopardy,' IBM's Watson gets serious