GenAI would've built over a bn apps by 2028: IBM CEO Arvind Krishna

Spending on technology is increasing amid uncertainty about USA's threat of tariffs, he says

IBM Chief executive officer (CEO) Arvind Krishna on Tuesday said that over a billion new applications would be built using generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) by 2028.

 

“As GenAI makes its way in (enterprise ecosystem), we are discovering — based on a CEO study IBM did — that our clients are expecting to double or even increase the investments on AI and beyond that,” said Krishna. He was addressing the media virtually before the company’s flagship event IBM THINK.

 

Enterprise clients get the return on investments (RoI) that they expect only about 25 per cent of the times, Krishna said. “[This is due to] a lot of factors such as access to enterprise data, siloed nature of different applications together with the fragmentation that is happening in the infrastructure. That is why IBM is focused on hybrid Cloud and AI and we have made a lot of announcements and innovations on these combined technologies.”

 

 

IBM also announced that it was making it easier for enterprises to deploy agentic AI with watsonx Orchestrate, a GenAI and automation solution tool. It will allow enterprises to build agents in less than five minutes. The agents will integrate in over 80 enterprise applications, from providers like Adobe, AWS, Microsoft, and more.

 

IBM is also introducing the new Agent Catalog in watsonx Orchestrate 4 to simplify access to over 150 agents and pre-built tools from both IBM and its wide ecosystem of partners, which includes Box, MasterCard, Oracle, Salesforce, ServiceNow, Symplistic.ai, 11x and more.

 

Asked if the uncertainty due to tariff war was causing any pause in AI spends, Krishna said it was quite the reverse. “We are actually seeing people doubling down on their AI investments. People are looking for productivity and cost savings. But they are also looking to scale the revenue of their own companies. AI is one of the unique technologies that can hit the intersection of all three of those,” he added.

 

Krishna cited EY’s instance. “EY is building a bot for its tax consultancy work on top of WatsonX and AI models coming from us. This is driving productivity because their consultants can now be more productive. It actually allows them to scale. Also going more downmarket because the cost of providing this consulting is now cheaper, which in turn is making them expand their market reach, too,” he added.

 

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