Business Chief North America June 2020

LEADERSHIP & STRATEGY
1911
Year founded
$79.59bn+
Revenue in
US dollars
44
350,000
Number of
employees
at the end of 2017 and by year end
2019 we had over 100,000 active
users on it internally, who were infusing
AI into their business processes,
and several clients replicating these
use cases externally. That’s a really
high rate of adoption for both internal
use and by our customers.”
A BLUEPRINT FOR LONG-TERM SUCCESS
Any transformation journey is an
ongoing process, even with a CDO as
capable as Bhandari at the helm. He
freely admits to adopting a ‘fail fast’
approach to his role and mission at
IBM and is not afraid to admit – even
with his experience – that he and his
team are always learning. “If you are
the CDO then you must be aware it’s
a transformation role and you are
primarily a change agent,” he explains.
“You have to change the enterprise to
transform it, so the data and AI blueprint
that we developed has all of the
aspects that any change agent should
focus on.
JUNE 2020