By Darryl K. Taft
Publication Date: 2026-05-02 12:25:00
Neel Sundaresan doesn’t answer three questions. One of them, he says with some amusement, is why IBM Bob is named Bob.
That particular deflection is telling. Sundaresan — GM of Automation and AI at IBM Software, founding engineer of Microsoft GitHub Copilot, and former researcher at IBM before that — is not a product marketing guy. He’s a researcher who became a builder who became an executive, and the through line across all three roles is the same obsession: What does it take to make software developers more productive, and what keeps getting in the way?
He’s been working on that question since 2000, before transformers, before large language models, before anyone outside the then-mall research community thought AI and developer tooling belonged in the same sentence. The arc from there to IBM Bob — announced this week and already running at 80,000 users inside IBM — is longer than the launch press release suggests.
