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

Arvind Krishna, chief executive officer of IBM, has said that generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) by 2028 would have built more than a billion new applications, prompting CEOs to double their investments in the technology.

“As GenAI makes their way in [the 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 speaking at a virtual media briefing before his company’s flagship event IBM THINK. GenAI is a type of AI that can create new content like text, images, music, and more, based on inputs or prompts, according to one definition.

Krishna added that it’s just about 25 per cent of the time that enterprise clients are getting the return on investment that they expect from Cloud computing and AI.

“[This is] driven by 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 announced that its tool called watsonx Orchestrate will allow enterprises to deploy agentic agents — AI systems that are designed to make decisions autonomously — in less than five minutes. The agents can be integrated in more than 80 enterprise applications of providers like Adobe, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft.

Asked if uncertainty due to US President Donald Trump’s threat of tariffs is holding up spending on AI, Krishna said the trend is opposite. “We are actually seeing people double down on their AI investments. As people are looking for productivity, cost savings but they’re 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, the global professional services company, as an example. “EY is building a bot for their tax consultancy work on top of WatsonX and AI models coming from us. This is driving productivity because now their consultants can be more productive. It actually allows them to scale. …the cost of providing this consulting is now cheaper, which in turn is making them expand their market reach too.”

IBM is launching IBM LinuxONE 5, a Linux platform for data, applications and trusted AI, with the capability to process up to 450 billion AI inference operations daily.