{"id":659637,"date":"2026-08-27T17:54:14","date_gmt":"2026-08-27T17:54:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/659637\/"},"modified":"2026-08-27T17:54:14","modified_gmt":"2026-08-27T17:54:14","slug":"arvind-krishna-the-100-most-influential-people-in-ai-2026","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/659637\/","title":{"rendered":"Arvind Krishna: The 100 Most Influential People in AI 2026"},"content":{"rendered":"

IBM<\/a> chief executive Arvind Krishna has a lot on his mind. \u201cExecutive orders. A dynamic market. Where\u2019s the AI trade? What do clients want to do? The end of the quarter, product innovation. Name it,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

Krishna became the company\u2019s CEO and chairman in 2020, just in time for the AI boom. To him, steering a 115-year-old technology giant through that upheaval requires being bold. \u201cI actually think that trying to muddle along without taking risk is the riskiest path,\u201d he says. \u201cIt leads to eventual falling off a cliff.\u201d<\/p>\n

IBM trains small, efficient models of its own\u2014some of which run on its mainframe computers that many top banks and other enterprise clients still rely on. If a client\u2019s application needs a larger model, IBM rents one from Google, OpenAI, or Anthropic. Krishna\u2019s central bet is that, in the end, models will become commodities. That doesn\u2019t mean they\u2019re not valuable. \u201cWhat I mean is that you can use any one of them, because they\u2019re close enough,\u201d he says. Krishna believes that 90% of the value will eventually accrue not to the companies training large AI models, but companies like IBM that build applications on top.<\/p>\n

His prediction is yet to fully pan out. Though IBM\u2019s shares have nearly doubled since Krishna took the reins, they tumbled 25% in one day in July as customers shifted spending from mainframes to AI infrastructure and have yet to recover to their highs. \u201cWe did not adapt and move quickly enough,\u201d Krishna wrote<\/a> to investors. Meanwhile, leading model builders have swallowed some of the most successful AI-native application startups, like Cursor and Windsurf.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are not quite there yet,\u201d Krishna says. But he believes proprietary data will be a differentiating factor rather than raw model-power, in which case trust becomes key. He believes IBM\u2019s reputation working with enterprises in highly regulated sectors will be an advantage.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"IBM chief executive Arvind Krishna has a lot on his mind. \u201cExecutive orders. A dynamic market. Where\u2019s the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":659638,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[261],"tags":[23267,291,289,290,18,23268,19,17,23269,361,23270,753,82,278724],"class_list":["post-659637","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-accolades","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-eire","tag-franchise","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-list","tag-magazine","tag-special-project","tag-tech","tag-technology","tag-time100-ai-2026"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/659637","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=659637"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/659637\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/659638"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=659637"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=659637"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=659637"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}