- IBM aims to be “customer zero” for the AI products it sells to clients, said Chief Marketing Officer Jonathan Adashek.
- He said AI had increased the work of IBM’s staff and even made its advertisements more effective.
- This story is part of “What’s Next,” a series about business leaders’ strategies for workplace productivity.
This essay as told is based on a conversation with Jonathan Adashek, senior vice president of marketing and communications and director of communications at IBM. The following has been edited for length and clarity.
In April 2020, our CEO Arvind Krishna said that IBM would become the leading hybrid cloud and AI company. Everything we need to do should be more productive to get to this point. That means acquisitions, that means divestitures, that means prioritizing certain areas of work over others.
A good example in my opinion is AI. We have an HR service center here in the company which has around 800 people. Today, this service center has 60 people because we were able to automate repetitive tasks, allowing people to move into more value-creating roles and creating a better interface for our customers.
Instead of picking up the phone or emailing someone at a service center saying, “I need help,” I can access our AskHR chatbot, and with fewer trips- returns with the online system, my request is answered in less than two minutes.
AI must augment the work done by people. Last year, when Adobe introduced Firefly, a generative AI creative model, in beta, we received permission to create an ad for the Masters golf tournament, which we sponsor.
Using Firefly, we made thousands of selections in just minutes. We didn’t just take the one we thought looked the best and move it around. We took the time to go through them and put the right words to crown them. We still needed this human touch. The pinnacle for me was that it was our best performing digital ad of the year. The ad performed 26x better than IBM’s average paid social benchmarks in driving engagement on IBM.com among key target audiences.
With IBM Watsonx.ai, we will create a product assistant to help us as marketers and communicators tell our stories and personalize that content for larger audiences and deliver more versions of those stories.
The way I look at AI today is like a big iceberg. There is the bright spot which is 20% above the water. Everyone is paying attention to the consumer application of AI: choose your engine, choose your model.
Then there’s the 80% underwater, and that’s where the real change happens and productivity really happens at the enterprise level. For example, we have IBM Watsonx Code Assistant; By using natural language prompts, developers can move from languages like COBOL to Java and deploy code at a faster pace.
There are all kinds of examples within IBM where we want to be “customer zero” to make sure we understand how these things work.
In August last year, we launched the Watsonx Challenge, a week-long hackathon where the most senior to junior members of the company worked together. Today, 160,000 people have a much better understanding of how they use Watsonx, which allows them to better communicate about it with their customers and partners. We’ve had several customers ask us, “Can you help us structure a challenge like this so we can do the same?” »
Ditching “hybrid working” from the return-to-office vernacular
I think a lot of what pushes productivity in the wrong direction is when people don’t focus on the must-haves and spend more time on the nice things.
Take events. Historically, we could have seen certain events year after year, but let’s take a step back. Should we go to these events? Is our client really there? Or should we not spend all the same amount of money, all these resources, all the time preparing for it, and instead focus on three, four or five others to get further along the path we need to travel? As a 100% business-to-business company, is a consumer show as important to us as showing up where we have retailers, for example?
A lot of the processes we’ve been working on internally in the company are about ensuring we become simpler and more agile.
IBM has always embraced a hybrid workplace and given flexibility to its employees. It’s important, but there’s no substitute for in-person collaboration.
I dropped the concept of “hybrid work” from my common parlance a while ago because it means one thing to me, something else to you, and something else to someone else. What we’re trying to say is: be more intentional about the work you do in the office.
We have set a requirement that all managers and executives in the marketing function be in the office three days a week, but I give flexibility to decide when.
Intentionality helps. People schedule meetings and do different engagements that work on those days in order to experience the value of being in a room. This helps people better understand each other’s work styles and thought processes and allows people to make decisions more quickly.
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