Businesses have entered the most rapid period of technological change in history, and artificial intelligence (AI) is on the cusp of revolutionizing the entire workforce, Ginni Rometty, chairman, president, and CEO of IBM, said in a keynote address at the 2018 Gartner Symposium/IT Expo in Orlando.
“The pace is unabated,” Rometty said. “You have to change the way you work, because this isn’t going to stop.”
IBM’s work with Watson in particular “starts with a fundamental belief that it’s going to change 100% of jobs, 100% of industries, and 100% of professions,” Rometty said. “We try to focus on AI for business. It’s different than consumer AI.”
Companies beginning to work with AI must consider change management, Rometty said. “This is not a technology issue, this is a change management issue,” she added. “This is about changing how people do their work.”
IBM has particularly learned this through Watson’s work in healthcare she added. Doctors see patients for only a short period of the day. Giving them more technology won’t be useful, she said—instead, you have to change their workflow.
Another major AI implementation issue to grapple with is trust, Rometty added. Companies must use AI in a way that is explainable and free from bias.
Customer services is the no. 1 AI project IBM is working on worldwide, Rometty commented. “But pretty complex customer service, with free-flow dialogue going on,” Rometty said. “There are real breakthroughs are what people are getting.”
The world is increasingly pairing man and machine, “and people feel better about doing their job,” Rometty said.
Rometty laid out the following three principles that guide IBM’s work with AI:
- The purpose of these new technologies is to augment man. “We are the builders,” Rometty said. “Is it to help make us better?” For example, she added, quantum computing can do great things, but it can also break most traditional encryption codes. Therefore, IBM is building new cryptography that quantum cannot break.
- Data belongs to its owner and creator. “It’s yours, and our business model won’t conflict with yours—you own those algorithms and insights,” Rometty said.
- New technologies need to be explainable. This will both help avoid bias, and keep them from being frightening to people, Rometty said.
“We have to usher these technologies into the world,” Rometty said. “They will change 100% of jobs, and that is a scary thing … They will replace some number of jobs, but not all jobs.”
During the keynote, Rometty also spoke about digital transformation more generally.
When it comes to the cloud, IBM found that the low-hanging 15-20% of business cloud deployments—namely, the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)—is over, Rometty said. The 80% difficult parts are in front of us now, she added.
