Developing intelligent solutions requires a comprehensive understanding and management of the data. Intelligent semantic systems provide the smart technologies to harvest large amounts of data and insight in order to find solutions to the problems in various application areas. Typical challenges are: data acquisition from different types of sources; establishing links among different data types using both structure and content; dynamic, real-time processing of data; scalability for analytics and query processing, just to name a few. These challenges often prevent a business from even starting to look at the information and make sense out of it. At the same time, advances in cognitive computing offer new possibilities in analyzing unstructured information for richer insights. In this talk, we will use applications to discuss the use of semantic technologies, point out the research challenges, and highlight the business benefit from these technologies. We will conclude with a view on future research directions.