Tobias Leicher on AI, Innovation & the Value of Partnership

It's very cool. Very cool venue as well, but also lots of customers, so I really like to be around. Thanks for inviting me. I think we had a good start of the day. It wasn't the perfect spot, because last night everyone was drinking, so having the first spot in the morning is always challenging, but no one fell asleep.

AI will play a role, definitely, and it will be a massive tool for everyone that knows what he or she does. But I think the big problem we have these days is that it's seen as a silver bullet that will solve all of our automation problems, and we don't need to have any humans anymore. I think that's a little bit of an overestimation of what it can do. But it will be, of course, for people that understand what to do, it will be a massive tool because, as I also said in the keynote, we will be fewer people, so we need to be more efficient with what we do, and AI is definitely one of the helpful tools with agentic appearances and stuff like that.

Me being the mainframe guy, I, of course, with all of my customers, have been to Beta tools, if it is for the spooling, if it's for automation and stuff like that. So I always encounter Beta tools. So for us at IBM, Beta is, especially, I think, in the European market, a massive and very valuable partner. And that's, of course, why I love to be here. I love to meet all of our common customers and I think it is very cool. Also exciting that you try to change things, try to motivate change with customers. I think that's a very good thing.