Goldman Sachs Talks

Arvind Krishna, CEO of IBM

In this episode of Talks at GS, IBM CEO Arvind Krishna discusses the perspective he brings to IBM as a technologist chief executive officer, how the pandemic is accelerating digital transformation and IBM’s strategic focus on artificial intelligence and the hybrid cloud.

On how the pandemic is accelerating digital transformation: “I think that all of our companies are embarked on digital journeys… It’s not that humans become less important, but I do fundamentally believe that a lot of the interactions that we have that are of a mundane nature are going to get digitized. What would have taken five to ten years, I believe is going to take two.”

On IBM’s strategic focus on AI and the hybrid cloud: “We are now at the beginning of the cloud journey. You can call this a third wave… The other thing that is upon us is massive amounts of data – more data than we all know what to do with. We can debate, do we use 5% of it, 10% of it, maybe 20%, if we are lucky? The only technology we know that can harness the insight from all that data is artificial intelligence. So those are the two tectonic forces.”