In today’s CEO Daily: Diane Brady on IBM’s new Manhattan HQ.
The big story: Trump complains Xi is ‘extremely hard to make a deal with’.
The markets: Up despite China deal and metals tariffs drama.
Analyst notes from Convera, EY, and UBS.
Plus: All the news and watercooler chat from Fortune.
Good morning. Is IBM cool again? During a NY Tech Week reception last night at IBM’s new Manhattan headquarters, I quietly asked that question to some attendees. One person cited Watson, the early chatbot that famously won Jeopardy! in 2011, as proof of both the company’s pioneering innovation, and its ability to lose a big lead. Others pointed to a positive shift that’s happened since Arvind Krishna became CEO of Big Blue in April 2020, both in terms of the stock price and meaningful growth in realms like AI.
My colleague Sharon Goldman explores IBM’s rebound in our Fortune 500 package that published this week. In many ways, it’s a model of resilience, having appeared on the Fortune 500 every year since debuting at No. 61 on the inaugural list in 1955. But it was the only brand among 17 U.S. tech companies valued at $100 billion or more to have lost market value over the past eight years when Krishna took over.
Krishna is a 35-year IBM veteran who’s also its first CEO to boast an engineering background. And as Goldman writes, he was struck early on by the potential of AI. She writes: “Krishna, a PhD engineer with decades of research experience, instantly recognized a game changer—and a huge opportunity. Once these models were mature enough, he realized, they would be able to help businesses handle everything from customer service to chemistry equations to climate modeling with unprecedented scale and efficiency—creating powerful new products for IBM to sell.”
Goldman adds that he has “steered billions in R&D money into new AI ‘foundation models’ and the infrastructure to support them. He also pushed the company to prepare for the rise of AI by updating its hybrid cloud platform—data-storage technology that Krishna had championed as the head of IBM’s cloud division.”
With the stock up over 20% year to date, there are certainly glimmers that Big Blue could be gaining momentum. Krishna is certainly up for the challenge. As he told Sharon: “Engineers don’t get scared about building big things.”
Read Sharon’s full story here.
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Contact CEO Daily via Diane Brady at diane.brady@fortune.com
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
