Channel needs to prepare for cognitive boom - IBM CEO
AI will impact every decision we make "in some way" five years from now, claims Ginni Rometty
Channel partners need to think past digital transformation and be planning for the mainstream adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) and cognitive, according to IBM CEO Ginni Rometty.
Delegates at IBM's PartnerWorld Leadership Conference in Las Vegas yesterday heard from Rometty that focusing only on digital is not enough to give partners the edge over the competition.
"Everyone wants to be digital - and still to this day there are great business opportunities there, but I say to every client 'digital is not the destination', because when you get to digital, everybody's digital, so who wins? You're going to be differentiated by cognitive - it will be the competitive advantage."
She also said that AI will impact every decision we make "in some way" five years from now. "To me, this is the future," the CEO said.
She was also keen to highlight IBM's credentials in the space, noting that the vendor was the first to embrace the technology.
"I think you could say AI has burst onto the scene full throttle. And we have been there for a long time - we were the first - but everybody that can say anything about AI is out there and now the studies say that in just a couple of years the spending on cognitive will be about $33bn," the CEO pointed out. "Why is that? It's been about data…, it's digital resource and if you refine it, the value goes to you. And so it will be the essence of competitive advantage - not the data alone, but with cognitive."
The CEO also told the audience of IBM business partners that client architecture decisions are going to be playing a significant role in partners' business in the coming months and years.
"I actually think that we're at an interesting point in that there is now going to be a set of interesting architecture decisions made by our clients. They may be making them implicitly or explicitly, but it's going to start to happen. And for those of you that have been around a long time, you know that when architecture decisions are made, they determine an awful lot of things," Rometty pointed out. "They can determine the environment that you sell infrastructure to, but they often have a big influence on everything downstream."
Rometty expects there will be three key areas where clients will be making these key architecture decisions, and this will "probably" determine what will happen over the next couple of decades. She also noted that both vendors and partners will have a key role to play in the outcomes of these decisions.
The three areas will be around the data platform, cognitive or an AI platform, and a cloud platform, Rometty said, telling partners that if they get clients embedded in solutions now, it will "position you for not just years of growth, I think decades of growth".