IBM boss says investments in India will keep growing

Be it Cloud or artificial intelligence (AI), IT major IBM is bullish on the innovations coming out from its research and development (R and D) centres in India and the company will continue to invest more as the country aims to become a trillion-dollar digital economy by 2026, its Chairman and CEO Arvind Krishna said here on Monday.

AI adoption is steadily on the rise globally and India is well poised to lead the AI revolution and establish itself as an AI innovation garage of the world.

“Our researchers in India are doing some of the deepest work on AI than anywhere in the world. Do we have people deploying it? Absolutely. That’s what our consulting teams and our BPO teams do. Do we have our teams building products that use AI? Pretty deep. How many people are using and deploying AI? They are in tens of thousands,” Krishna told the media during an interaction here.

He said that in IBM’s case, “we run a globally integrated enterprise so our own people can leverage the compute facilities not only in India but all over the globe”.

IBM in India reflects our global footprint,” the Indian-origin CEO emphasised.

Krishna said that the total investment in India “will keep growing”.

IBM in India has been investing in building development centres that help contribute to the innovation and growth of its software portfolio. Last year, Chris Hockings, Chief Technology Officer, IBM Security APAC, had said that the technology giant aims to train around 500,000 people in India over the next five years, equipping them with specialised skills related to cybersecurity.

India is poised to be a trillion-dollar digital economy and could support 60 to 65 million digitally enabled jobs by 2025-26.

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