Pro Take: AI Boom Will Test Readiness of IBM, and Its Customers

ARMONK, N.Y.—International Business Machines Corp. researchers spent decades developing artificial intelligence when most of the world wasn’t ready to embrace it, and the company struggled at times to build a business around it. Now, as interest in AI booms amid new advances, IBM is tailoring the technology to address the individual business problems of customers that are prepared to use it.

“I think we’ve all talked a lot about AI as a fundamentally transformative technology and I think maybe over the last few months, now, the world is coming to agree,” IBM Chief Executive Arvind Krishna said during an interview at company headquarters. “I think before that they might not have disagreed, but I’m not sure they fully believed.”