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		<title>Why Is This C.E.O. Bragging About Replacing Humans With A.I.?</title>
		<link>https://www.digiteex.com/why-is-this-c-e-o-bragging-about-replacing-humans-with-a-i/</link>
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		<pubDate>Sun, 02 Feb 2025 08:19:03 +0000</pubDate>
				<category><![CDATA[AI]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Logan Bartlett]]></category>
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					<description><![CDATA[Ask typical corporate executives about their goals in adopting artificial intelligence, and they will most likely make vague pronouncements about how the technology will help employees enjoy more satisfying careers, or create as many opportunities as it eliminates. A.I. will “help tackle the kind of tasks most people find repetitive, which frees up employees to [&#8230;]]]></description>
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<br />Ask typical corporate executives about their goals in adopting artificial intelligence, and they will most likely make vague pronouncements about how the technology will help employees enjoy more satisfying careers, or create as many opportunities as it eliminates. A.I. will “help tackle the kind of tasks most people find repetitive, which frees up employees to take on higher-value work,” Arvind Krishna, the chief executive of IBM, wrote in 2023.And then there’s Sebastian Siemiatkowski, the chief executive of Klarna, a Swedish tech firm that helps consumers defer payment on purchases and that has filed paperwork to go public in the United States with an expected valuation north of $15 billion.Over the past year, Klarna and Mr. Siemiatkowski have repeatedly talked up the amount of work they have automated using generative A.I., which serves up text, images and videos that look like they were created by people. “I am of the opinion that A.I. can already do all of the jobs that we, as humans, do,” he told Bloomberg News, a view that goes far beyond what most experts claim.According to Klarna, the company has saved the equivalent of $10 million annually using A.I. for its marketing needs, partly by reducing its reliance on human artists to generate images for advertising. The company said that using A.I. tools had cut back on the time that its in-house lawyers spend generating standard contracts — to about 10 minutes from an hour — and that its communications staff uses the technology to classify press coverage as positive or negative. Klarna has said that the company’s chatbot does the work of 700 customer service agents and that the bot resolves cases an average of nine minutes faster than humans (under two minutes versus 11).Mr. Siemiatkowski and his team went so far as to rig up an A.I. version of him to announce the company’s third-quarter results last year — to show that even the C.E.O.’s job isn’t safe from automation.In interviews, Mr. Siemiatkowski has made clear he doesn’t believe the technology will simply free up workers to focus on more interesting tasks. “People say, ‘Oh, don’t worry, there’s going to be new jobs,’” he said on a podcast last summer, before citing the thousands of professional translators whom A.I. is rapidly making superfluous. “I don’t think it’s easy to say to a 55-year-old translator, ‘Don’t worry, you’re going to become a YouTube influencer.’”Mr. Krishna, the IBM chief executive, once turned heads when he said A.I. could prompt the company to slow or pause hiring for the roughly 10 percent of its jobs involving back-office roles like human resources.For his part, Mr. Siemiatkowski said that A.I. had allowed his company to largely stop hiring entirely as of September 2023, which he said reduced its overall head count to under 4,000 from about 5,000. He said he expected Klarna’s work force to eventually fall to about 2,000 as a result of its A.I. adoption. (Mr. Siemiatkowski and Klarna declined to comment for this article.)One might be tempted to conclude that Mr. Siemiatkowski is simply unfamiliar with the political sensitivity around questions of automation, or with the best practices for communicating about it to skeptical employees. (“Leaders can combat this initial resistance by highlighting how A.I. can help people focus on more meaningful work,” an IBM study said.)But Mr. Siemiatkowski is well aware of the backlash that his bluntness can provoke. “We did a tweet later on about the marketing things we are doing about A.I., where we have less need for photographers,” he said in the podcast interview. “That had a violent reaction online.”Instead, interviews with former employees and transcripts of internal company meetings suggest that Mr. Siemiatkowski’s pronouncements about A.I. are motivated by something altogether different from political naïveté or an impulse for real talk. And those motivations shed light on the A.I. future that many executives and investors are working to bring about.Leaning In to AutomationSo far, most large companies do not appear to be replacing workers en masse. A report on 50 large banks by Evident, a firm that analyzes A.I. adoption, found that they typically derive other benefits from the technology, like improving services or helping employees work faster.In a paper exploring one area that Klarna has highlighted, customer service, the Stanford economist Erik Brynjolfsson and two co-authors found that A.I. made many employees more productive when it came to relatively complicated tasks, like navigating customers’ tax issues.The bot did this by excelling at certain simpler tasks, like advising the human on the optimal order in which to request information from a customer. But it didn’t handle the interaction from start to finish. (In fairness, the experiment didn’t attempt full automation.) “I think people exaggerate how much they can automate everything in the near term,” said Dr. Brynjolfsson, though he acknowledged that more tasks could be automated as A.I. became more powerful over the next few years.When pressed, Mr. Siemiatkowski has conceded that the picture is somewhat more complicated than his company’s news releases have suggested. He explained on another podcast that Klarna had been relying on humans to perform customer service tasks that other companies had automated long before A.I., like instructing a customer where to go on the Klarna app to delay a payment. As a result, Klarna replaced more workers than other companies would have replaced.His claims about hiring may have been overblown, too. The website TechCrunch searched through Klarna’s job listings more than a year after the company supposedly stopped hiring and found more than 50 openings in a variety of jobs. A Klarna spokesman told the outlet that the company was “not actively recruiting to expand the work force but only backfilling some essential roles” like engineering, and that Mr. Siemiatkowski had been “simplifying for brevity in a broadcast interview.”But all of this raises the question: At a moment when A.I. is already alarming office workers, why would a chief executive not only speak candidly about his company’s progress in automating jobs, but even overstate the case?A Self-Mythologizing RiseThe son of Polish nationals who immigrated to Sweden in the early 1980s, not long before he was born, Mr. Siemiatkowski grew up feeling like something of an outsider in his parents’ adopted country. He has talked of being teased as a child. According to former employees, he once said that feeling like an outsider helped him empathize with Black Americans after the killing of George Floyd.Mr. Siemiatkowski founded Klarna, then known as Kreditor, in 2005 with two classmates after a telemarketing job alerted him to the problems that small companies had collecting payments from online customers. The idea was to guarantee the payment for merchants and collect from the customer later.It was an old retail practice known as “buy now, pay later,” except updated for the internet age.The company quickly turned a profit by charging merchants a fee for the payment service, and began expanding across Europe and taking business from banks. By 2010, Klarna had renamed itself Klarna, meaning “clear,” and had begun to attract the attention of Silicon Valley investors.Mr. Siemiatkowski gave the impression of someone who had for years been playing out the moment in his mind. When the famed Silicon Valley venture capital firm Sequoia dispatched a partner to Sweden to pitch the co-founders on an investment, telling them Sequoia thought they could transform banking the way Google had changed the internet, Mr. Siemiatkowski was quick to pipe up. “Just tell me one more thing,” he said, recalling the exchange to Forbes magazine years later. “If we’re going to be the Google of banks, would you really just send you? Wouldn’t the whole of Sequoia come here?”The Sequoia partner quickly connected the founders with Michael Moritz, one of the firm’s high-profile investors. Mr. Moritz apologized for not appearing in person and later joined Klarna’s board.Mr. Siemiatkowski, who with his strong jaw and blue eyes looks like a long-lost Hemsworth brother, seemed to style himself as the kind of tech mogul investors were eager to back. Former employees said the company’s hiring process for engineers resembled that of a Silicon Valley start-up — using a logic test to screen applicants, then requiring some to demonstrate their coding chops in real time. From Amazon, he borrowed the “two pizza” rule — keeping teams small enough that the group could be fed with two pizzas.In 2019, Klarna began to build a major presence in the United States. The company’s timing proved impeccable. When the pandemic hit, Americans cut back on dining out and travel and embarked on an online shopping splurge — precisely the consumption habits Klarna was built to enable.New investors piled in at ever-higher valuations — from $5.5 billion in 2019 to to $45.6 billion in 2021. Klarna accelerated hiring, roughly tripling in size to 7,000 employees within three years. It ran a Super Bowl ad starring Maya Rudolph to lodge itself in the American psyche.Then the bill came due. From Google to Amazon to Netflix, the share prices of companies that had raked in profits as people retreated to their living rooms were suddenly pummeled by investors who saw rising inflation and interest rates as a sign that the pandemic-era boom was ending.When Klarna tried to raise money again in 2022, reportedly seeking a valuation above $50 billion, investors had other ideas. A funding round announced in July would value it at a mere $6.7 billion.In the meantime, Klarna culled about 10 percent of its employees, under pressure from investors to cut costs, and endured suddenly skeptical media coverage. Mr. Siemiatkowski also now had to contend with another setback to his rise as a tech icon: a growing union presence inside the company.Though morale at Klarna had generally been high because of its collaborative culture and competitive pay, a relatively small group of workers had formed a union in 2020. The union roughly doubled in size, to over 1,000 employees, not long after the downsizing announcement in May 2022.During an all-hands meeting around the same time, a recording of which The New York Times obtained, Mr. Siemiatkowski spoke darkly of how unionized companies handle layoffs (“union representatives and senior management, behind locked doors, decide on the outcome of each individuals”).He seemed to worry that a union would turn Klarna into just another stodgy Swedish company — around 90 percent of the country’s workers are covered by collective-bargaining agreements — and hardly the muse of investors worldwide. “The more everything becomes thick and slow moving,” he said at another meeting, alluding to the effect of a union, “my investors will challenge me.”But as workers prepared to strike in the fall of 2023, the company backed down and signed a collective-bargaining agreement.Mr. Siemiatkowski was sarcastic and brooding as he announced the arrangement at a third all-hands meeting. He appeared to liken union leaders to the pigs in “Animal Farm,” whom George Orwell had intended as a stand-in for Stalinists, and he quipped that there were two people in the entire company of more than 4,000 who made less than what the collective-bargaining agreement would mandate. “They’re going to get a salary increase thanks to us signing the C.B.A.,” he said. “Isn’t that amazing?”A Favorite Guinea PigMr. Siemiatkowski often says he first realized A.I. would upend the workaday world shortly after playing around with OpenAI’s ChatGPT in late 2022, only a few months after Klarna endured layoffs and saw its valuation crater. “I’m on Twitter in November ’22, and somebody is tweeting, ‘You’ve got to try this,’” he said on a podcast. “I’m just like, ‘Jesus, I’m speaking to a computer.’”He quickly arranged a meeting with Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI, and began pushing employees to experiment with the software.Whatever progress Klarna made on automation, Mr. Siemiatkowski sometimes seemed as invested in spinning out a story about A.I. as actually using the technology. In 2024, he and the company regularly put out news releases and conducted interviews, leading to headlines like “Klarna Marketing Chief Says A.I. Is Helping It Become ‘Brutally Efficient,’” in The Wall Street Journal.By the time Mr. Siemiatkowski made the rounds of prominent tech podcasts that summer, in a tour that included the popular show “Acquired” and podcasts hosted by Sequoia and the venture capitalist Logan Bartlett, he seemed to have distilled Klarna’s A.I. story to its sharpest narrative elements.“My understanding is that you told Sam and OpenAI that you wanted to be their guinea pig,” an interviewer said.“Their favorite guinea pig,” Mr. Siemiatkowski corrected.A former Klarna manager, who left in 2022, said the rhetorical emphasis on A.I. was no accident. According to the manager, there was a sense within the company that Klarna had lost its sheen in the media and among investors, and that Mr. Siemiatkowski was desperate to get it back.The former manager said the A.I. story provided a lifeline at a time when Klarna was hoping to offer shares on the public markets. It demonstrated that the company was still on the cutting edge, and that it was shrinking not because it had faltered but because it had figured out how to replace humans with machines.The effort appears to have worked. Klarna’s likely public offering is one of the more anticipated of this year and could fetch triple the valuation that followed its 2022 swoon. Though some of that progress reflects Klarna’s improved financial performance over the past year and a half and the upward march of the market overall, Mr. Siemiatkowski’s relentless focus on A.I. appears to have been important. “The benefits of A.I. are likely to be a key selling point for any Klarna I.P.O.,” The Financial Times wrote last year.It does not appear to have hurt that Mr. Siemiatkowski is willing to go much further in his A.I. pronouncements than fellow C.E.O.s, telling the paper, “Not only can we do more with less, but we can do much more with less.”Mr. Siemiatkowski’s statements are sometimes sweeping or grandiose because, former employees say, he sees himself as a righteous warrior in a fight with powerful forces. “I have always been anti-establishment,” he said at one all-hands meeting. “To me, what we’ve been doing here, going after the banks, is to be anti-establishment.”As with his challenge to Swedish banks and his standoff with the union, Mr. Siemiatkowski’s A.I. campaign appears to be another instance of self-interest merging with heroic self-conception.When the host of the “Big Technology Podcast” asked why he was so intent on talking up Klarna’s A.I. prowess, Mr. Siemiatkowski said it was partly for the good of humanity.“We have a moral responsibility to share that we are actually seeing real results and that that’s actually having implications on society today,” he said. “To encourage people, specifically politicians in society, to actually treating this as a serious change that’s coming.”Then he acknowledged that another part of the motivation was “self-promotion, for sure.” He added, “We’re regarded as a thought leader.”Saying What Investors Can’tMr. Siemiatkowski may have at times overstated what A.I. has accomplished at Klarna, but that doesn’t mean he’s wrong about the future.Dr. Brynjolfsson of Stanford notes that most office jobs are collections of tasks, and that while A.I. can take on some of them, it still struggles to combine most or all of them in the manner of a human.But even he believes that could change within a few years, while a growing number of tech experts argue that artificial general intelligence — a bot that can do anything the human brain does — is not far-off. Mr. Altman of OpenAI recently predicted that A.I. agents — bots than can perform relatively complicated tasks on their own— would soon “join the work force” and “materially change the output of companies.” Others have predicted that such agents will take over a wide variety of jobs.Many tech investors are already banking on this outcome, effectively counting on automation to save their huge bets on free-spending A.I companies. In an influential analysis last year, the venture capitalist David Cahn estimated that the combined A.I.-related revenue of companies like OpenAI and Microsoft was likely to be hundreds of billions a year less than the amount needed to pay back investors.But one way to make the numbers add up is if employers can save hundreds of billions of dollars using A.I. to replace workers in the relatively near future. In that case, the revenue of companies like OpenAI could grow rapidly and their investors could earn a profit. (They might still risk being undercut by Chinese competitors who can build similar technology at lower cost, though that would also make it cheaper for employers to automate work.)The catch is that very few investors and top executives are willing to discuss this in plain language. When it comes to the question of job loss, those with a large financial interest in A.I. tend to euphemize and equivocate.Even Mr. Altman, one of the foremost proponents of the idea that A.I. will soon be capable of advanced humanlike cognition, has increasingly avoided discussing the potential downside for workers. Two years ago, he conceded that A.I. would take over certain jobs and that the shift in power from labor to capital “goes way further in a world with A.I.” By last year, he had toned down this language, telling a podcaster that he, too, imagined A.I. taking over tasks rather than whole jobs and that it would allow people to do work at “a higher level of abstraction.” He did this even as — or perhaps because — he seemed to think the technology was becoming vastly more powerful.(OpenAI declined to comment. The New York Times has sued OpenAI and its partner, Microsoft, for copyright infringement. The two tech companies have denied the claims.)Mr. Siemiatkowski has brought clarity to this discussion. In his eagerness to court investors, and in his tendency to overstate the case and say the quiet part out loud, he has laid bare Silicon Valley’s ambition. In his own slightly muddled way, for his own slightly idiosyncratic reasons, he is helping to surface a conversation that has largely been whispered in the executive suites.Investors in his presence sometimes become so excited about the possibilities of displacing humans that they forget to deploy the usual euphemisms and aphorisms. During a podcast interview with Mr. Siemiatkowski, a partner at the prominent venture firm Kleiner Perkins gushed about Klarna’s “full-on automation at scale” and said, “That’s where it’s eyebrow-raising.”At times, even Mr. Siemiatkowski can be wrong-footed by such directness. When another podcaster asked which jobs were most likely to be automated, he seemed momentarily flustered, then reached for a joke he’d told Sam Altman.“I said to Sam, ‘What you should focus on, try to build A.I. that replaces C.E.O.s, bankers and lawyers,’” he recalled, identifying three unpopular jobs. “‘Nobody will make a big fuss about it.’”<br />
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<br /><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/02/business/why-is-this-ceo-bragging-about-replacing-humans-with-ai.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Source link </a></p>
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		<title>AI Overviews Data Shows Massive Changes In Search Results</title>
		<link>https://www.digiteex.com/ai-overviews-data-shows-massive-changes-in-search-results/</link>
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		<dc:creator><![CDATA[digitex]]></dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Sat, 01 Feb 2025 10:19:32 +0000</pubDate>
				<category><![CDATA[AI]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[search queries]]></category>
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					<description><![CDATA[Enterprise SEO platform BrightEdge published results on current AI Search trends, showing that Google AI Overviews (AIO) has expanded its presence by up to 100% in increasingly complex search queries. The changes suggest growing confidence in AI for search, with indications that Google is relying on authoritativeness and greater precision in context awareness for matching [&#8230;]]]></description>
										<content:encoded><![CDATA[
<br />Enterprise SEO platform BrightEdge published results on current AI Search trends, showing that Google AI Overviews (AIO) has expanded its presence by up to 100% in increasingly complex search queries. The changes suggest growing confidence in AI for search, with indications that Google is relying on authoritativeness and greater precision in context awareness for matching queries to answers, particularly in relation to content modality.<br />
The data shows that AI Overviews (AIO) has evolved from showing featured snippet style answers to being capable of handling multi-turn, complex search queries. The takeaway is that Google is increasingly comfortable with AI’s ability to surface precise answers for longer queries and this is a trend that may continue to rise.<br />
Google AIO Presence Is Growing<br />
Google continues to show confidence in their AI Overviews (AIO) search feature as BrightEdge has discovered that more keyword phrases are triggering AI answers now than at any point since the feature was rolled out last year.<br />
25% of search queries using 8 words or more are displaying AI Overviews (AIO), which is a clear upward trend indicating that Google continues to refine the accuracy of AIO and is better able to handle increasingly complex search queries.<br />
A graph shows how the keywords with 8, 9, and 10 words continued to increasingly show AI Overviews<br />
Graph Representation Of AI Overviews Growth</p>
<p>Keyword phrases with less than four words continue to show an increasing amount of AIO but the growth in longer more precise keywords is growing significantly faster.<br />
Screenshot Showing Percentage Of Keywords With Google AI Overviews</p>
<p>Change In AIO Patterns: Gains For Authoritative Brands<br />
BrightEdge provided additional data that looks at specific topic categories, showing how queries for some topics consolidating to answers from big brand sites.<br />
For example, in the healthcare category where accuracy and trustworthiness are paramount Google is increasingly showing search results from just a handful of websites. Content from authoritative medical research centers account for 72% of AI Overview answers, which is an increase from 54% of all queries at the start of January.<br />
15-22% of B2B technology search queries are derived from the top five technology companies such as Amazon, IBM, and Microsoft.<br />
Qualities Of AIO Answers<br />
BrightEdge data reveals that AIO answers follow certain patterns that reveal qualities that Google feels make content more relevant.</p>
<p>Excels at step by step and how to answers (structured hierarchical information)<br />
Shows precise real-time relevance<br />
Answers lean toward general guidance</p>
<p>Educational Search Queries<br />
For educational queries AIO shows a preference toward concise answers with a clean visual presentation. In the below example Google is hiding content that has additional information that answers additional questions beyond the main query. This may relate to Google’s information gain patent which is about anticipating additional information that a user will be interested in after receiving the answer to their original search query.<br />
AIO Showing Information Gain Ranked Content</p>
<p>Change In YouTube Citations<br />
An interesting pattern picked up by BrightEdge is that YouTube technical tutorials have increased by 40% in AIO while health related queries that show YouTube videos are trending downward by 31%.<br />
Of particular interest is that the high volume search queries (100k+ search volume) that trigger YouTube content have decreased by 18.7%. This may reflect a change in user needs and Google’s ability to identify that context and understand that it’s not served well by video content.<br />
What all of this means is that it’s increasingly important to think about context awareness, the appropriateness of the content to the query. The question to ask is what kind of content best serves the context and to expand that answer across modalities like images, sound, video, and text, then within those formats think in terms of how-to, data dump, informative, etc.<br />
BrightEdge observes:<br />
“Most Interesting Pattern:AI Overviews are developing sophisticated, context-aware citation models. While YouTube citations are declining for health queries (e.g., “symptoms,” “diet”), they’re increasing for technical how-to content, jumping from 2.0% to 2.8% of citations in this category.<br />
Pay Attention:<br />
1. Context is King – Focus video content where it’s gaining traction (technical tutorials, DIY) and pivot to text for topics where traditional authority is preferred (health, finance)2. Match Your Industry’s Pattern – In sectors with distributed authority (like B2B tech at 15-22% per source), focus on direct citations; in consolidated spaces (like healthcare at 72% institutional),<br />
partner with established authorities<br />
3. Monitor Actively – With citation patterns shifting dramatically in just one month, weekly monitoring of your space is crucial to spot new opportunities before competitors”<br />
Takeaway<br />
A way to make sense of the data is that it Google AI Overviews appear to be increasingly relying on the authoritativeness of the content as the stakes go higher with more complex search queries.<br />
Authoritativeness isn’t just about being a big brand but it may have to do with simply being meaningful to the Internet audience as a go-to source for a particular topic. Trustworthiness and other related factors are important and this has nothing to do with superficial SEO activities like author bios and so on.<br />
Read the data:How AI Giants Are Carving Distinct Territory in the Search Landscape</p>

<br /><a href="https://www.searchenginejournal.com/ai-overviews-data-shows-massive-changes-in-search-results/538878/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Source link </a></p>
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		<title>IBM seeks $3.5B in cost savings for 2025 • The Register</title>
		<link>https://www.digiteex.com/ibm-seeks-3-5b-in-cost-savings-for-2025-the-register/</link>
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		<dc:creator><![CDATA[digitex]]></dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Thu, 30 Jan 2025 17:17:03 +0000</pubDate>
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					<description><![CDATA[IBM is again forecasting cost savings in the coming calendar year, which likely means one thing for its legions of workers – pedal fast and keep your heads down because headcount reductions may be on the way once more. Despite a share price bump of 9 percent following publication of Big Blue&#8217;s Q4 and full-year [&#8230;]]]></description>
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<br />
IBM is again forecasting cost savings in the coming calendar year, which likely means one thing for its legions of workers – pedal fast and keep your heads down because headcount reductions may be on the way once more.<br />
Despite a share price bump of 9 percent following publication of Big Blue&#8217;s Q4 and full-year financial results ending December 31 [PDF], the company assured analysts on an earnings call that senior management will again look to chop operating expenses.</p>
<p>IBM talks up cost savings, including &#8216;workforce rebalancing&#8217;<br />
READ MORE<br />
&#8220;Our productivity initiatives have enabled investments in innovation, skills, and go-to-market capabilities, including our ecosystem,&#8221; said CFO James Kavanaugh. &#8220;We have accomplished this while simultaneously growing our operating profit margin and free cash flow, which in turn has increased our financial flexibility.<br />
&#8220;This remains our playbook going forward, having executed on $3.5 billion of annual run rate savings exiting 2024, supporting our strong free cash flow growing in excess of revenue.&#8221;<br />
Free cash flow was $12.7 billion, which IBM says is its strongest in years.</p>
<p>&#8220;We expect workforce rebalancing fairly consistent with prior years,&#8221; said Kavanaugh. &#8220;We are also ramping on the $241 million gain from the divestiture of The Weather Company.&#8221;</p>
<p>In 2024, IBM quietly laid off a low single-digit percentage of the workforce. IBM had 288,000 staff at the end of 2023 and no newer numbers are available.<br />
Kavanaugh also confirmed: &#8220;We are cutting back on discretionary-based spend, so we can fuel investment into digital transformation and GenAI overall.&#8221; Clients are doing the same thing. &#8220;We&#8217;ve been seeing that play out throughout 2024,&#8221; he added.</p>
<p>This is all part of reshaping IBM from the company it was three years ago to where it wants to be now and the requisite skills the corporation anticipates for the near future. This started with the 2021 sale of the infrastructure services biz, now known as Kyndryl.<br />
As for why the share price rose, IBM reported revenue for Q4 of $17.55 billion, up from the estimated $17.45 billion, and adjusted earnings per share came in at $3.92 versus the consensus of $3.74. Revenue was up 1 percent year-on-year in the quarter and for the full year to $62.8 billion.<br />
Net profit for Q4 was down 11 percent to $2.9 billion and down 20 percent for calendar 2024 to $6 billion. IBM&#8217;s Software division now accounts for 45 percent of the total revenues, hence higher margins. The profit drop was related to revenue declines in consulting, which also carries high margins.</p>
<p>Software revenue was up 8 percent year-on-year in the quarter to $7.92 billion, led by Red Hat, Automation, Transaction Processing, Data &amp; AI, and Security, and for the year jumped to $27.08 billion from $25 billion.<br />
Consulting revenue was down 2 percent to $5.17 billion in Q4 and dipped to $20.69 billion from $20.84 billion in 2024. The CFO said: &#8220;We continue to see clients re-prioritizing their IT spending towards digital transformation and AI initiatives for cost optimization and operational efficiency.&#8221;<br />
On that note: &#8220;Generative AI contributed about $1.5 billion of new bookings in the quarter as clients see the value our extensive industry and enterprise AI expertise can bring to accelerating their digital transformations,&#8221; Kavanaugh said.</p>
<p>It is nearly three years since IBM&#8217;s last z Series mainframe was released. As such, revenues generated by the Infrastructure division fell 8 percent year-on-year for Q4 to $4.24 billion and were down 4 percent in 2024 to $14 billion, &#8220;reflecting product cycle dynamics in our 11th quarter of z16,&#8221; said the CFO.<br />
&#8220;This product cycle has outpaced prior cycles and program-to-date installed MIPS have increased over 30 percent as clients&#8217; capacity needs continue to grow. IBM z remains an enduring platform for mission-critical workloads, driving not just hardware adoption, but also the related software, storage, and services.&#8221;<br />
On the earnings call, CEO Arvind Krishna talked extensively and enthusiastically about AI. No surprises there. &#8220;We continue to gain momentum with our GenAI book of business growing to over $5 billion inception-to-date, up by about $2 billion quarter-over-quarter. Approximately one-fifth of this book of business comes from software and the remaining four-fifths is Consulting,&#8221; he said.<br />
&#8220;Our AI portfolio is tailored to meet the diverse needs of enterprise clients, enabling them to leverage a mix of models, IBM&#8217;s, their own, open models from Hugging Face, Meta, and Mistral. IBM&#8217;s Granite models designed for specific purposes are 90 percent more cost-efficient than larger alternatives.&#8221;<br />
He said RHEL AI and OpenShift AI are giving customers a &#8220;consistent and scalable AI foundation built on open source technology,&#8221; with &#8220;traction also seen on IBM&#8217;s WatsonX middleware and AI assistance including Watsonx.gov, Watsonx code assistant for Z, [and] Watsonx Orchestrate.&#8221;<br />
Of the business landscape, the CEO said: &#8220;Geopolitical tensions may be on a better track right now, but certainly not solved. Interest rates, inflation, demographics, lack of skilled labor [and] supply chain, I think these issues all carry over into 2025.<br />
&#8220;I would tell you there is more optimism in the business climate and there is more optimism on the growth that is possible in &#8217;25 compared to &#8217;24. And we know all the reasons for that. Is it pro-innovation, is it pro-growth? Is it pro-regulation, reducing friction? All those things I believe are going to result in a better environment in 2025.&#8221;<br />
One thing that remains constant with IBM is its ongoing need to reduce costs. Expect more details at IBM&#8217;s investor day on February 4.<br />
For the year ahead, IBM is estimating 5 percent revenue growth compared to 2024 and free cash flow of $13.5 billion. ®                </p>

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