Arvind Krishna

Arvind Krishna (born 1962) is an Indian-American engineer who joined IBM in 1990 and spent three decades in its research and cloud divisions before becoming CEO in April 2020 and chairman in 2021. He architected IBM’s $34 billion acquisition of Red Hat and refocused the century-old company on two bets: hybrid cloud and artificial intelligence.

The hiring pause heard round the world

In May 2023 Krishna told Bloomberg that IBM would pause hiring for back-office roles — around 26,000 non-customer-facing positions — because he could “easily see” 30 percent of them being replaced by AI and automation within five years, roughly 7,800 jobs. The remark became one of the AI era’s most-cited data points on white-collar displacement. Krishna later said he had been “slightly misquoted,” clarifying that IBM would simply stop backfilling roles vacated through normal attrition rather than conduct layoffs.

That same month IBM launched watsonx, its enterprise platform for building and governing AI models, and Krishna has since positioned AI as an answer to shrinking workforces in aging economies. He told Fortune in August 2023 that productivity gains from AI are the only way to keep quality of life from falling, and he has repeatedly argued AI will create more jobs than it eliminates — even as IBM’s own HR department became an early proving ground for AI-driven automation. Skeptics point out that IBM has continued substantial rounds of job cuts while championing the technology that justifies them.