For decades, IBM’s slogan was one word: think. Now the company’s CEO wants to replace thousands of human workers with AI.
talk bloombergCEO Arvind Krishna said he believes up to 30% of IBM’s back-office operations — about 7,800 roles — could be replaced by AI.
Krishna said Big Blue believes hiring for these roles will slow down over the next five years as AI emerges that can replace staff who are leaving.
The CEO didn’t specify what kind of AI he thinks could replace humans. That is, people who often need to perform defined activities rather than performing more abstract thoughts.
Enterprise software often aims to streamline such processes. These days, AI is often used to achieve that.
Thus, Krishna’s remarks are not evoking the potential of HR bots using large-scale language models and generative AI to review the performance of Big Blue’s staff, but rather the impact of improvements in other tools. It may be.
The CEO’s plans appear to be limited to the back office. They are not research or customer-facing staff who are expected to exhibit creative and/or abstract thinking. The slogan probably emerges intact.
But Big Blue still struggles to replace humans with AI. After all, this is the company that named its annual leadership gabfest “Think” and celebrates “A Culture of Think.”
“At IBM, one of the key elements of its culture and one of its survival is the willingness to not only tolerate but encourage radical thinking,” said the tech giant. As stated in the article celebrating the 100th anniversary.
“IBM celebrates the so-called wild duck,” the article continues. “Bernard Meyerson, an IBM Research Fellow who joined IBM in 1980, said, ‘Most places have a history of destructive people like me being shot. No, but if you’re willing to fight, you can argue with data and you can win.”
Krishan’s remarks suggest that IBM already has the data it needs about the comparative costs and productivity of humans and AI, and that it’s trying to hit people who aren’t disruptive by design.
Such thinking is not entirely radical in the current AI frenzy. ®
