IBM Corp. has a compelling sales pitch for enterprises mulling investments in artificial intelligence (AI) agents. The company claims a return on investment (ROI) of more than $3.5 billion in the past two years.
“We have achieved a productivity improvement of $3.5 billion over the past two years by applying AI to more than 70 business areas,” Lee Ji-eun, IBM Korea’s chief technology officer, said at a press conference in Seoul this week.
Inside the computing giant, AI agents have been deployed in human resources, finance, sales and IT, according to Lee Ji-eun. An AskHR agent in human resources, for instance, has helped automate 94% of simple tasks such as vacation requests and pay statements. AskIT, meanwhile, slashed the number of calls and chats for the IT support team by 70%, she said.
Besides its integrated platform, the company said its hybrid approach allows organizations to run AI workloads in various environments, from public cloud to on-premises.
“At the core of corporate AI adoption is a platform that can comprehensively manage these elements. In addition to data connection capabilities, the platform also includes various insights such as prompts and governance, so I believe that this can reduce risks,” Lee Ji-eun said. “We will continue to utilize the ‘client zero’ approach that IBM is pioneering, and support companies to utilize diverse and safe agentic AI solutions with an open platform.”
At the same press briefing, Kim Ji-kwan, executive director of client engineering at IBM, introduced Watsonx Orchestrate. The platform integrates multiple business applications and AI agents into a single interface to analyze user requests and connect them to the appropriate destination.
All the talk of ROI and AI agents have had a positive effect on Big Blue’s bottom line.
During a conference call with analysts to discuss the company’s quarterly earnings on Thursday, IBM executives touted an AI business of more than $6 billion in bookings to date, and $1 billion in the last quarter. The AI business has had a flywheel-like impact as the infrastructure business segment grows, IBM CEO Arvind Krishna said.
“We exited 2024 at $3.5 billion of annual run rate savings, and we continue to see these efforts play out in our margin performance this quarter,” IBM Chief Financial Officer James Kavanaugh said during Thursday’s call. “These actions create a flywheel that allows us to invest back in our business, increase our financial flexibility and deliver margin expansion.”
IBM executives added the company is in good shape to weather a trade war, with just 5% of its spending on imported goods. Federal government contracts constitute less than 5% of revenue, they said.
