CEO Arvind Krishna of IBM is relying on a recent turn of events to propel the company towards its goal of becoming an AI success story.
Reintroducing the Watson brand has been a part of the company’s bigger strategy move to make its AI offerings for businesses more profitable since May. A development company called WatsonX helps businesses “train, tune, and deploy” machine learning models. Krishna claims that sales of the product reached “low hundreds of millions of dollars” in the third quarter and that they may reach $1 billion annually.
However, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and other companies all have comparable products, so IBM faces fierce competition in the business AI space. Furthermore, the business has long faced criticism for lagging behind in the AI race, especially in terms of generating revenue from its offerings.
The private equity firm Francisco Partners purchased IBM’s Watson Health division over two years ago for an unknown sum. For an undisclosed amount, the corporation is currently in the process of selling its weather division, which includes The Weather Channel mobile app and websites Weather.com, Weather Underground, and Storm Radar.
The world was not ready to absorb the big, monolithic answers that IBM CEO Arvind Krishna claimed were the mistake, saying in an interview with CNBC that “I think that’s a fair criticism, that we were slow to monetize and slow to make really consumable the learnings from Watson winning Jeopardy.”
Krishna discussed his own regulatory viewpoints, the generative AI industry, IBM’s errors, and its future strategy with CNBC.
To improve clarity and duration, this interview has been slightly altered.
In an email to staff members the morning after you became CEO in 2020, you stated that artificial intelligence (AI) and hybrid cloud computing will be your main areas of concentration. How has your perspective on the application of AI in business—including real-world use cases and saturation—changed since that day?
I think that when I first referred to cloud and artificial intelligence (AI), people understood those terms to mean “Well, he’s talking about it, but is that a market, is it big, is it small, is it really that important?” If you don’t mind, I’ll use a baseball example just to sort of explain. Ten times larger is the cloud. Using a baseball analogy, that meant that cloud was perhaps in the third inning, and AI had not yet even made it into the field.
If we move back to the present day, I would say that Cloud is likely in the fifth or sixth inning of a game. This means that you are aware of how it is progressing, that it is an advanced game, and you can predict how it will end. AI is only in its first inning, so it’s still uncertain who will advance and who won’t, among other things. It’s a major league game, so that’s the difference. It’s on the pitch. It’s unclear who will win specifically; that might be the only uncertainty.
Source (CNBC)
