IBM CEO makes play for AI market and more US investment

(Reuters) -IBM on Tuesday made a play for more sales in the crowded artificial intelligence field, touting tools that could help customers manage a fleet of AI agents for their key business applications.

In an interview, Chief Executive Arvind Krishna said he saw an opening to provide software that integrates customers' AI agents from other providers -- among them Salesforce, Workday and Adobe -- and lets them build their own agents for untapped use cases, with IBM's help.

"We help our clients integrate. We want to meet them where they are," he said, ahead of IBM's annual Think conference sessions on Tuesday.

IBM's tools to help customers create their own agents, a process it said would take under five minutes, draw on the IBM Granite family of AI models, as well as alternatives from Meta Platforms and Mistral, Krishna said.

Krishna said that customer interest in using different AI models for different tasks would build demand for IBM, which last month reported that it has built a $6 billion "book of business" on ChatGPT-like generative AI. A small cloud provider relative to Amazon Web Services and Microsoft, IBM has tailored its tech to clients wanting multiple clouds or their own infrastructure to manage their data.

"All of these capabilities will only accelerate that rate of growth on those numbers," he said of IBM's new tools.

IBM also announced in April that over the next five years, it would invest $150 billion in the United States, where it has manufactured mainframe computers for more than 60 years. It will make quantum computers in the United States as well, Krishna said.

"Between mainframe, artificial intelligence and quantum computing, we think there's going to be a very healthy market that behooves us to invest and lean in," he said.

Krishna added that the technology focus and reduction in regulations from President Donald Trump's administration would set the economy up for growth.

(Reporting by Jeffrey Dastin in San Francisco; Editing by Cynthia Osterman)