How IBM Reinvented Itself With AI

There is an old saying: “Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM.” For decades, this phrase was more than a wry joke—it was a reflection of the near-mythic status of Big Blue in the world of business technology. The company’s mainframes powered the world’s banks, its computers helped put men on the moon and its “business machines” were so ubiquitous that “IBM” became shorthand for “work.” But the true meaning of the phrase was always about more than just reliability and scale. It was a nodding wink in the C-suite: Play it safe, stick with the tried and true and you’ll keep your job—even if you miss the next big thing. 

IBM’s history is a study in both the power and peril of incumbency. At its peak, IBM was the backbone of global commerce and the most valuable technology company in the world. But as the technology landscape shifted—first to personal computers (another IBM innovation), then to mobile and cloud computing, and now to generative AI—IBM found itself…