Agree or disagree with Krishna – and he has plenty of fans and critics. His thoughts on AI’s future role make fascinating reading.
1 What’s AI’s Impact on Innovation
I think we’ll give you a multi layered answer. First, put aside AI as a market. How do you apply AI inside to improve innovation? I think this is something that everybody ought to understand. This is mostly a question of the speed and cost of innovation. I think I see AI directly providing — if I look at a two-year picture — anywhere from 30% to 60% improvement in the speed and cost of doing innovation. I hear people talking about 80 to 90%. I think that’s a bit of a stretch, at least in technology. We see 10% already in terms of pure programmer productivity across the board. When I measured across 5000 people, I think that 10 goes to 20% once I include test cases and requirements, and [it] goes to 30% with just improvement in these capabilities over the next two years.
2 AI Destroys Job, Ruins Economy…But Fuels Rebirth
Let’s take a simple example. Let’s take mechanization of farms. 1900, if I remember the number right, 47% of the US labor force directly worked on a farm. By 1960 that number was 3% maybe around the same, maybe even lower. Now I didn’t bother to go further. So mechanization, as in, combines, harvesters, tractors, all of those things dropped the 47% to 3%. The doom and gloom people turn around and say, oh my god, 45% of all jobs were lost. [That’s] completely BS. I mean, the total number of jobs only increased in that time period. But these things didn’t exist in 1900 and did exist by 1960. Restaurants and fast food together, about 15% of all jobs. The whole automobile industry and the appropriate service industry around that.
Why? Because, as time got filled up, people now had the option to do leisure activities, go to restaurants. As productivity increased, they had the money to go and do all those things. And so to me, this is the same exact that is going to go on here.
3 Managing Human and Digital Workers will be the Norm
4 IBM’s BIG Bet on Smaller Vertical Models
MORE:
https://www.hpcwire.com/2025/05/14/ibm-ceo-arvind-krishna-on-the-good-bad-and-ugly-of-ai/