Marketing leader Jonathan Adashek shares how IBM is communicating its AI tools to both employees and clients

Insider

Jonathan Adashek, the SVP of marketing and communications at IBM, talks AI marketing.

Transcript

00:00When our CEO, Arvind Krishna, took over in April of 2020, he was very clear.

00:06He said, we are going to be the leading hybrid cloud and AI company.

00:14For us at IBM, the most urgent priority as we work with our clients and our partners

00:19is really making sure that we're co-creating solutions.

00:23And they've got to use that data to its fullest

00:26to really make sure that they can get ahead of their competition

00:30and make sure that the models, the AI models that they're using

00:35and that they're training are trained and being used in a way that result

00:39in answers that answer authentically for them as a company.

00:44Because the insights they can get out of that data, out of that AI is really unbelievable.

00:49I'm really fortunate because at IBM, we've got a great program

00:52that allows people to really learn the skills that they need

00:56for their current role or learn skills that will give them opportunities in the future.

01:01That allows people to really get great talent and great expertise

01:06in the skills that they need for their jobs.

01:09The other way that we've been doing this is as it relates to AI,

01:13we've been running these Watson X challenges inside the company

01:16where we get everybody, they get the opportunity to take two or three weeks

01:21to create things using Watson X, our large language, our AI product.

01:26And they develop teams across the company and around the world.

01:31And the best products, we celebrate those.

01:33Some of those we've brought to market.

01:36So that has brought people more closely to the tool and to the product,

01:41but it's also given them a lot of comfort in what they are trying to do and experimentation.

01:45And that's especially important because the average life of a technology skill today

01:51is just under three years.

01:53So there's a lot of skilling that needs to constantly happen.

01:56I think there are a lot of people who understand what IBM is as a brand.

02:01There's an old saying that you don't get fired for hiring IBM

02:04and people recognize the logo, the eight bars and the name.

02:09But does everybody understand what IBM truly does?

02:12And that's something we're really focused on at IBM today.

02:16So one of those things was as we spun out the company now known as Kindrel.

02:21That was about 90,000 people.

02:24It was about $19 billion in revenue.

02:27A big change where people questioned, is that the right thing to do?

02:32When we sold the weather company, when we got out of Watson Health,

02:35those were all things that we did because they weren't not going to get us to the point

02:39of being the leading hybrid cloud and AI platform company.

02:42The conversations that came in and the tone of conversations

02:45has really been interesting and engaging and exciting.

02:50You know, I think that we're in a different space when it comes to AI.

02:53I think more people are using AI in their organizations,

02:57but I think people are still hesitant to take the full dive in.

03:01But the conversation about how you do it is at a different place than it was just a year ago.

03:09And that's candidly not super surprising because when you look at enterprise data usage today,

03:16only 1% of enterprise data is in a large language model today.

03:22So that's been interesting.

03:24People are starting to look ahead to the future.

03:26And the conversation that I've been in a lot has been around search engine optimization or SEO for AI.

03:34What do we need to do as marketers to think about how we show up differently?

03:39What does this mean now that people are turning to other options besides just

03:43a traditional search engine to get their results?

03:46How do we show up differently?

03:48What kind of content do we need to create?

03:51Where does it need to be?

03:52How is it tagged?

03:53That's been a conversation that I've had a lot here.

03:56And I think it's going to be very interesting to see where that goes.

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