IBM’s CEO Has A Message For Founders: Treat AI As "Day Zero"

This article written by Chris Morris was originally published on Inc.com.

We’re fast approaching the fourth anniversary of the launch of ChatGPT, meaning artificial intelligence has been a part of the business conversation for quite some time now. Many companies have experimented with it or attempted slow roll-outs in select areas of their operations. But IBM CEO Arvind Krishna says the days of sticking your toes in the water are over. It’s time to jump in.

The rollout of the technology, he says, should be treated as a “Day Zero” event, a chance to reset the competitive race among businesses. But to do that, your business needs to start implementing AI at scale.

“It’s time to sit down and take it seriously,” Krishna said on the Masters of Scale podcast. “You’re not in the experimentation phase. Day Zero, the race is about to start. Put yourself in the blocks and start sprinting.”

Krishna says he isn’t talking about incorporating AI in every aspect of your company or automating a large percentage of the workforce. Instead, he recommends fully embracing AI in some aspects of your business as a case study of sorts to help you better understand what it can do for you. From there, you can expand your use of AI.

“Take three, four, five things—not 100—and learn how to do them at scale, because that’ll teach you how to get all your change management done,” he said. “How do you get your data organized? How do you really get people motivated to change a process? Do a few things at scale. Learn how to do that really well. Then do 10—and then give yourself the confidence to do the next 20.”

Despite all the talk of AI, Krishna estimates that just 20 percent of businesses are utilizing it correctly. The rest, he says, are not getting a return on their investment or don’t quite know what to do with it.

Incorporating AI might mean bringing on new staff in some cases. And while the instinct of some founders will be to search for an AI expert, Krishna says the smarter move is to find someone who understands the difference AI can make for your company.

“Find that 20 or 30 percent who are motivated to say, ‘I want to learn a new way to do things,’” he said. “I think curiosity and willingness to adapt are more important.”

When it comes to measuring the returns of AI on your business, that too is going to require a shift in mindset for business owners, Krishna said. Efficiencies and savings aren’t going to be immediate, he warned. In fact, there could be additional expenses.

For the first six months to a year, he said, businesses will likely spend more than they save, as they dedicate engineers to implementation and pay for tokens. But as companies operate AI at scale for a use case, they learn how to implement the technology, making subsequent rollouts cheaper.

IBM played its part in introducing the world to AI with Watson, which made headlines when it won on the TV show Jeopardy! But that awareness was also a wake-up call to other companies, which began to invest in AI very heavily while IBM did not, said Krishna. 

“As opposed to creating building blocks, we wanted to create solutions in verticals. That, I think, is a mistake, as technology shows,” he said. 

Today, the company isn’t trying to be OpenAI or Anthropic. Instead, it’s betting on AI orchestration—the coordination of multiple AI models into a single workflow. It’s also focused on enterprise AI, providing businesses with tools to build, scale, and govern artificial intelligence.

Lately, there has been growing consumer pushback to AI. One recent report from AI platform Parloa found that during automated customer-service calls 61 percent of respondents have screamed at automation to get routed to a human faster. A separate survey from WordPress VIP, which offers an enterprise version of the publishing platform, found that 60 percent of the people it polled found AI in a brand’s messaging to be a turnoff, not a feature.

Meanwhile, some companies that went all-in on AI are starting to realize the real cost of the technology. Uber, for instance, exhausted its 2026 AI budget in just four months and was forced to cap employee use. And several companies that fired workers in favor of AI are bringing those employees back.

Krishna argued that companies that don’t incorporate AI ultimately face even more potential problems.

“The riskiest route is taking zero risk,” he said. “What happens in any business that takes no risk? It means you’re trying to extract profit—or what an economist would call rent—from what you already have. But that means you’re giving everybody else the opportunity to clone you or copy you, to innovate from the bottom, and pick off the most profitable parts of your business.”