See the downtown Manhattan office where a fraction of IBM's global team works on technology of the future

Hollis Johnson

This is what it's like to work at IBM.

In a chic Manhattan office building, around 600 people work on the future.

It's the global headquarters of IBM Watson, the cognitive technology that the company says "can think like a human." You may have read that it has partnered with hospitals to help better read X-rays, or watched it win on Jeopardy in 2011.

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"It's technology that is able to look at information in a manner that's similar to us," Watson Manager Jonas Nwuke explained to Business Insider. "It can grasp nuance and context, and learns by example over time."

The same office is also the home of IBM's Cloud, which focuses on cloud computing for business.

The tech giant, which was founded in 1911 and is based in Armonk, New York, is one of the world's largest employers, with almost 380,000 workers. Business Insider visited IBM's Astor Place office to see what life is like for the teams at the forefront of the company's AI and Cloud technologies.