At IBM Think last week, organizations showcased deploying and scaling innovations such as AI (artificial intelligence) and quantum at speed and scale quickly. This message was front and center that resonated throughout the many stories shared while I was in Boston for the event. I had the pleasure to meet IBM Bob, uncover more about Digital Sovereignty, dig deeper into IBM Quantum, and get firmly planted in what feels like Day Zero of the AI revolution.
With today’s pace of change and speed of innovation, the time has come to build the castle while the princess is in it. At least that is what Susan Doniz, chief information and data officer for the Walt Disney Co., is recommending.
Doniz explained delivering innovation at scale is tricky. “We can all deliver little pieces of innovation, but delivering it at scale, I think about it as eating the elephant in chunks,” Doniz said.
Doniz said she likes to envision innovation as blocks that are used in building a castle. To build a castle, you build it one block at a time, however you can most certainly move into the castle without all the blocks being used but note there are princesses in the castle while it is being built.
Moreover, Doniz added the importance of focusing on how to deliver continuous value through each of the blocks otherwise it would take too long to get everything in place.
The power of scalability is continuously building something as you go. I’ve been saying this very point for years. Digital transformation is not a destination. It is a journey. It’s a collaboration of partners advancing together through shared accountability and a unified vision for vision for the future.
Power Plays
Today, business executives need to get implementation, differentiation, and scalability right. Neil Dhar, senior vice president, Americas Consulting, IBM, calls these power plays, which are the moves CEOs are using to drive differentiation in the market. These power plays include:
- Orchestrating intelligence, which means bringing together people and technology. By 2030, 50% of operational decision making will be done by AI, but you will need humans in the loop.
- Customizing your AI mix, which is essential in today’s hybrid world.
- Considering your AI flywheel where productivity gains will drive only so much and you will ultimately need to innovate.
Innovation is the name of the game, but it can’t be innovation just for the sake of innovation. In his keynote, Jonathan Adashek, senior vice president for marketing and communications, IBM, shared McKinsey research that that showed nearly 90% of companies surveyed have deployed AI at least one time into one of their business functions. However, 94% of those same respondents are not seeing significant value from those investments today.
“Success is not going to be defined by who deploys the most agents or develops the most applications,” he said. “Success is going to be defined by strategic decisions that are being made right now.”
Arvind Krishna, IBM CEO, saw an opportunity in early 2023 to rethink IBM. The company defined a new strategy called IBM as Client Zero, which highlights IBM’s internal capabilities around hybrid cloud, AI, and automation with strategic partner technologies and consulting.
For IBM, client zero is about unlocking productivity, learning how to scale, while also learning what works and what doesn’t work at an enterprise level.
In its simplest form, organizations don’t just want AI; we are past that conversation. What matters now is the information layer: governed, protected, and wrapped in guardrails that unify data, identity, policy, processes, and applications. Everything must be harmonized and synchronized. The layer that standardizes data and process semantics is the connective tissue that is about to become the most valuable asset in the entire AI stack.
The objective here is not to put technology first. It’s about understanding how to move the enterprise forward with agentic AI and trusted data (yes, it’s all about the data) in a way that helps enterprises scale in a way that works for them to unlock business value with the right intelligence. It’s time to create the best business value possible, but it all goes back to intelligence and trusted data. Once you have the intelligence and agentic AI, enterprises can scale, opening a wide range of opportunities. It’s really about collaboration and interpreting the data—the trusted information.
We must keep people, process, and technology front of mind and we must remember digital transformation is not a destination, but rather a journey—one that we are all on together.
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- Bob Announcement: https://ibmcreator.com/4urRw6s
- Main Think Press Release: https://ibmcreator.com/4na8i7G
- Digital Sovereignty: https://ibmcreator.com/42RlRiR
- IBM Quantum: https://ibmcreator.com/42gdopn