We're focusing on how IBM is advancing generative AI.
Arvind Krishna. He is IBM chairman and CEO.
He spoke with Wall Street Week host David Westin yesterday at the Milken
Institute Global Conference in Los Angeles.
Exactly a year, I think if I remember right.
David, we announced it. What's the next product at think in May
last year? And since then, the excitement in our
clients embracing the technology, getting the technology deployed, asking
for expertise and getting projects going.
I think all of that has been wonderful. Our inception to date book of business
now exceeds $1,000,000,000. That's pretty good for a year.
And I think that it speaks to the excitement.
And I think what's even more, our clients are excited about what it does
for them. You can see them big to use it for
customer experience, for programming, uploading as it's called, as well as for
helping improve the enterprise. All of this put together is really
exciting in how our enterprise clients are embracing the generative.
One of the things that people anticipate from Geneva is an increase in
productivity. Are you finding that with your
customers, are they increasing productivity?
And how do you measure that increase in productivity?
I think there it is, both. I think increasing productivity is
important, but productivity can be made into just cost category efficiency.
That's not the primary reason. The primary reason I think our clients
that excited tend to get more business done while holding their costs in
somewhat in control. And so it's really about more of a
revenue generator then productivity alone.
Now, of course, it is a revenue generator because it's making you more
productive. And I think that is one of the exciting
things about customer experience. Yeah, you may save a dollar on
somebody's time in a call center, but that's not why.
If you can make the employee more satisfied, they got that answer quicker.
You got a better answer. Are they more likely to come back and do
more repeat business? I think that's far more exciting.
There's a lot of discussion about how generative I will grow and how it will
evolve. You've really staked your claim on an
open architecture, including for IBM, but also with Mehta in your alliance.
Tell us why that's important. Why is open architecture important?
And I know it's always around. How do you drive innovation?
And in a case where people worry a lot about what is the fair use, what is the
copyright, what is the IP protection of the data and methodology used to create
it. You have both those going on.
So in order to drive open, what we are doing is we're taking some of our base
models, as Mira has done, and we are putting them out under an open license
or the Apache license, which means people are free to build upon it.
And what they build upon is that they don't have to give it back to us.
And you care a lot about maybe some proprietary data inside an enterprise,
and you use that to add skills to an ARM model.
And you can now say, oh, because it was is open, it's now mine.
What is that? I think it makes it a lot more
interesting to the Enterprise. So IBM with Watson, XE is really
pursuing enterprise based A.I.. Does that
get around the challenges of intellectual property?
Because there are issues in consumer facing about copyrights, about what
you're going to learn? Is it the way it works for you?
The customer is using their own data to actually educate the model.
Absolutely. And we just putting out so you talked
about open right now, we are also right today and tomorrow putting out a new
technology, a really innovative technology called Instruct Lab.
This allows a client to take one of Osmo, maybe somebody else's model, take
it inside that enterprise, grade it with some data and some methodology of their
own, and then the layer on top inside his lab is theirs.
It does not need to come back to anybody else.
I think that gets rid of the whole question of copyright and fair use.
How does air lines fit with possible government regulation?
We have some moves in Europe. As you know, there's an executive order
in the United States the Biden administration has put out.
How do those two things fit together? Because you talk about standards as part
of the alliance. I think every regulator is worried about
three topics, not just safety and regulation.
They're worried about innovation. They're worried about competition and
they're worried about safety and regulation.
So when you take those three together, the Air Alliance and open really come
together to help you foment innovation. So I think that that actually helps the
regulators to think about what is going on here.
Well, I would caution there would be some guardrails that are always put.
But in my experience, open technologies have always been safer and more secure
than closed technologies is one of the risks that maybe you're obviating with
your emphasis on open architecture, that some of the I'll call the big guys get
an advantage and really have an entrenched position.
Well, I use the concept of a walled garden.
When you have a walled garden, how those areas and technology has been more
innovative or less innovative outside of walled garden has always been less
innovative. And so I think that it actually helps
you create more competition. Does it avoid regulatory locking of a
certain one or two players? Likely.
But isn't that good for all of us? Are you pro regulation?
I am pro. As long as it is light touch and allows
innovation to happen, I absolutely will be pro regulation.
If regulation tries to reduce innovation, I think that's a problem.