"Arvind Krishna, chief executive of International Business Machines Corp., has focused the company on areas including hybrid cloud computing, artificial intelligence, blockchain and quantum computing since taking the top job in 2020.
Mr. Krishna, who has spent more than three decades at IBM, expects AI to become significantly more important and more useful in the next 10 years.
Before becoming CEO, he was senior vice president for cloud and cognitive software. One of his key accomplishments was driving IBM's $34 billion acquisition of open-source enterprise-software company Red Hat Inc., which closed in 2019.
As part of that new focus, he led the spinoff of IBM's $19 billion information-technology-services business last year into a new company, Kyndryl Holdings Inc.
Here are edited highlights of a Wall Street Journal conversation with Mr. Krishna.
WSJ: How has the relationship between business and technology changed during the last 10 years?
Mr. Krishna: If we take maybe three to five years as a backdrop, demographics have changed. Both the nature of work, and where people want to work and how many people want to work and could work, is dramatically different today than some years ago.
The role of the pandemic, of globalization, of climate change, sustainability -- all play a role in how and where we work. You combine that with the need for omnichannel . . . with that backdrop, I would say technology has gone from being a cost of doing business to one of the fundamental sources of competitive advantage.
If I look at the sources of competitive advantage, 2,000 years ago it was physical resources. Then it was trading . . . the things you got from the land, gold, wheat, grain. Then it went to money. You then go to knowledge. Through the last century we talked about knowledge workers. Today, I think it's technology. I think tech is the fundamental source of competitive advantage today.
WSJ: Which technologies are you referring to?
Mr. Krishna: Hybrid cloud. You have to have a place where you deploy your technology, and the cloud has given us a better answer than many before. That goes back to scale, and ease, and flexibility and frictionless.
The second that is upon us, but we are only probably 10% of the journey in, is artificial intelligence. With the amount of data today, we know there is no way we as human beings can process it all. Techniques like analytics and traditional databases can only go so far.
The only technique we know that can harvest insight from the data, is artificial intelligence. The consumer has kind of embraced it first. The bigger impact will come as enterprises embrace it. We've got some issues. We've got to solve ethics. We've got to make sure that all of the mistakes of the past don't repeat themselves. We have got to understand the life science of AI. Otherwise we are going to create a monster. I am really optimistic that if we pay attention, we can solve all of those issues.
WSJ: Over what time frame?
Mr. Krishna: 10 years.
WSJ: How have the roles of chief information officer and technology leader evolved?
Mr. Krishna: I think 10 years ago, many business leaders would feel perfectly competent to make a decision, and then the CIO would [execute it]. Now, even in my own process -- I am a reasonable technologist -- I would not make a decision without asking my CIO, "What do you think? What does your team think? What do you and your team think is the best answer?"
Ten years ago, we were all looking to optimize that [IT budget], squeeze it down by 10%. Now I actually don't care if you spend more, if that makes everyone else more productive. If you can do something that lets me scale revenue faster -- because I can't hire more people, they just aren't available to hire -- then that is incredibly useful and valuable. So the CIO is really a partner now, no longer the cost function that I have got to irritatingly pay heed to.
I talk to other CEOs, they are much more facile now with the technologies. They have a much better intuitive sense of what technologies can do. So they can really be a good partner for the CIO.
WSJ: What is the biggest challenge facing the CIO and enterprise technology going forward?
Mr. Krishna: Cybersecurity is the issue of the decade. I think that is the single biggest issue we all are going to face. You have to take an enterprise approach, layered defenses. You have got to encrypt your data. You have got to worry about access control. You have got to believe you will get broken into. You make sure that you can recover really quickly, especially when it comes to critical systems.” [1]
1. Big Blue Looks to Big Changes --- Computing giant's CEO Krishna sees growing role for AI, but warns against 'creating a monster'
Rosenbush, Steven.
Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]. 20 Apr 2022: B.4.
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