About Virginia Rometty
Ginni Rometty, former Chairman, President, and CEO of IBM, has been speaking about leadership, artificial intelligence, and workforce development. In a 2023 SXSW conversation, she discussed her book "Good Power," which outlines five principles for using power positively. She described her personal background, including her mother's return to community college after her father left the family, as shaping her belief that "no matter how bad it gets there is always a Way Forward." Rometty advocated for a "skills first" movement in hiring, stating that "half the jobs in our country are over credentialed" and that IBM had hired 100,000 people in two years under that approach. She also reiterated her view that AI should "augment Humanity" and be built with "principles of trust and transparency."
Earlier in her tenure, Rometty frequently described data as "the world's new natural resource" and argued that cognitive AI would impact every decision within five years. She promoted IBM's "Watson" platform as a tool for domains like healthcare and education, emphasizing that AI systems must be transparent and trained on unbiased data to avoid perpetuating historical biases. Rometty also spoke about the importance of corporate social responsibility, citing an IBM program that grew from a single school partnership to 300 high schools and 150,000 students globally. She has called for public policies that support data movement, skills upgrading, and investment in research, and has stated that companies must balance the interests of customers, shareholders, and communities.
Source: AI-verified profile updated from Virginia Rometty's recent appearances.
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✨ AI-enhanced transcript with speaker attribution
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Deirdre Bosa0:00
Well, IBM has been a staple in many portfolios for decades. You could call it one of the original disruptors, but more recently it has struggled to keep up and turn itself around. Its shares have lost more than a quarter of their value over the past five years. But at a conference in Las Vegas, IBM sees its future powered by new technologies. Deirdre Bosa has more.
At IBM's annual Think conference, the company's biggest customers and partners are here in Las Vegas to hear about Big Blue's future strategy. We were able to sit down with IBM CEO Ginni Rometty to hear about her turnaround plans to shift the company towards next-generation technologies like blockchain and artificial intelligence as its legacy business slows.
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Virginia Rometty0:48
It's a different company than ten years ago, five years ago, three years ago. So break out the pieces. For one, the new products and services, and we did return to growth starting in the fourth quarter as you saw there. And the point being, 46% of what we make today, our products and services, are growing at 11% and are new to the IBM company, and a strong pipeline behind it. Blockchain, quantum, strong pipeline.
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Deirdre Bosa1:09
In light of recent pressures on Facebook in terms of privacy and security, data responsibility was a big topic here at Think. Box CEO and founder Aaron Levie talked about the need for updated regulations as tech and innovation plays a bigger role in consumers' lives.
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Aaron Levie1:29
We've had a tremendous amount of technology innovation that is now starting to really impact every single element of our lives. And this is what we've seen from the digital revolution. It's changing our cars and transportation, it's changing life sciences and healthcare, it's changing voting and democracy. And for quite some time, we've treated these technology platforms as sort of utilities where all of the users are the ones liable on these platforms. But ultimately, as you see growing use cases for machine learning and AI, the platforms themselves are going to be making more decisions on behalf of us, which means we have to make sure that the decisions that these platforms are making are those that protect consumers, that keep us safe, keep our information private, keep us secure.
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Deirdre Bosa2:08
David McKay, CEO of RBC, joined Ginni Rometty on stage for the conference keynote. As chief of Canada's largest bank, he's here to discuss the importance of new technologies into his business, and he also knows a thing or two about winning consumers' trust and the importance of privacy.
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David McKay2:25
There is a lot of brand risk, absolutely. I think you're seeing markets react to that uncertainty in the last couple of days. But certainly, if you want to create value for a customer and manage that data, and if you breach that trust, others will take that place and do that on behalf of the customer in a better way. And I think it does create franchise risk over the short and long term.
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Deirdre Bosa2:47
From tech companies to banks and more, IBM's Think conference this year looked at a future where data and privacy takes center stage. For Nightly Business Report, I'm Deirdre Bosa, Las Vegas.
