Chairman and CEO of IBM. Led IBM's $34 billion acquisition of Red Hat and pivoted the company toward hybrid cloud and enterprise AI with the Watson platform and WatsonX suite.
Krishna is making the smartest bet available to IBM: that regulated industries — banking, healthcare, government — will never send their most sensitive data to OpenAI's cloud, and WatsonX can own that gap. It's a realistic strategy for a company that can't compete on frontier model development but still has deep relationships with exactly the CIOs who care most about governance, explainability, and on-premises deployment. The Watson brand carries scar tissue from years of overpromising, but if Krishna can deliver boring, reliable enterprise AI, the regulated-industry moat is real.
Something big has changed. Not just the technology, but the stakes. Across every industry, leaders are pulling ahead or falling behind faster than ever. The difference is not how much money they spend on AI. It’s how deeply AI is built into the way their business actually works. At #Think2026 in Boston, I talked about how this moment is different, and how organizations can lead instead of chasing.
I was proud to join Governor JB Pritzker, Greg Case, and Chancellor Juan Salgado to announce that IBM will bring 750 new jobs to Chicago over the next five years through the new IBM FutureNow Chicago delivery center. The center will be based at the Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park, under development on the city’s South Side, and will focus on attracting, growing, and utilizing in-state talent, as well as housing IBM’s Quantum System Two. We will leverage IBM’s consulting and technology expertise, together with Illinois colleges, universities, and community partners, to create pathways to Illinois jobs—from apprenticeships and co-ops to recent-graduate programs and beyond. I look forward to growing our partnership with the Illinois Economic Development Corporation to help advance entry-level hiring in the age of AI.
We have reached a point where technology is the single greatest source of competitive advantage in how businesses operate. Join me at Think 2026 to learn how AI, hybrid cloud, and quantum computing are shaping the future: https://lnkd.in/evWvaYpB