IBM says customers are doubling down on AI amid economic uncertainty
IBM is seeing clients doubling down on investments in artificial intelligence despite economic uncertainty, chief executive Arvind Krishna said.The US technology major is not seeing any decline in investments, Krishna said during a virtual media briefing. Rather, he said, clients are increasing investments in AI as they look for productivity gains and cost savings, while also seeking to grow revenue.'The only change that we are seeing in the last 12 months is that people are stopping experimentation and focusing very much on where the value of business is,' he said.IBM has been stepping up investments in research and development. While the firm did not disclose the investment amount, Krishna said its R&D budget has increased almost 60% from where it was four years ago.The investment comes on the back of the scale of agentic AI applications that companies are expected to be created by 2028. According to Krishna, about a billion applications are expected to emerge by 2028.Enterprises, meanwhile, are seeing slow return on AI investments — just around 25% — hurt by barriers to enterprise data, the siloed nature of different applications and fragmented infrastructure.To cater to this growing need, at IBM Think event, the company is launching hybrid technologies to accelerate AI adoption in enterprises This includes Watsonx Orchestrate that helps build enterprise AI agents in under five minutes. It is integrated with 80 business applications such as Microsoft, Oracle , Agentforce and ServiceNow and offers domain agents specialised in areas such as human resources, sales and procurement.On the infrastructure front, the company launched IBM LinuxOne 5 , a platform for data and applications that can process close to 450 billion AI inference operations per day.IBM has also expanded its collaborations with companies such as AMD, CoreWeave, Intel and Nvidia for GPU access and storage, it said in a news release.
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