AI can make everyone more productive, says IBM CEO Arvind Krishna

Excited about AI's power to drive incremental productivity, help companies, economies grow faster, says IBM's Arvind Krishna.

Arvind Krishna addresses the gathering on the first day of the three-day B20 Summit in New Delhi. (AFP)

IBM is one of the oldest tech companies around and it had made its name well before the likes of Apple and Google rose to fame. Leading IBM is CEO Arvind Krishna, who is of Indian origin. Now, with artificial intelligence grabbing the attention of policy-makers, entrepreneurs to the common man, Krishna made some telling points.

Speaking on Friday, Krishna said that he is very "excited" about AI's power to drive productivity, which can help companies and even economies grow faster - yesterday, an Australian official had said that AI has the power to grow that country's economy manifold. Australia's Productivity Commissioner Michael Brennan said on Thursday that AI could have a major impact on improving the economic output in the next few decades as the Western world deals with a productivity crisis.

Speaking at B20 Summit India 2023, Krishna said that by building on digital infrastructure, Artificial Intelligence (AI) can take on certain low level cognitive tasks and be able to do them.

"When you can do that, you make everyone more productive, in effect you have more workers...you are generating more capita GDP in each nation...as we go back to very beginning of B20 about inclusion, that is the way to make GDP grow faster across all countries," he said.

Krishna added, "Our goal should be - how do we make secure and accountable AI that can benefit productivity of enterprises and governments."

"Deployment of technology will happen from the global south, as we have already seen with the incredible services industry that has woken up in India. That is where I believe the initial focus should be in the south, not just to provide it for their own countries but globe at large because these workers are missing everywhere else," PTI quoted him as saying.

Noting that developing nations have decreasing working age population, he said there is only one answer on how to augment the need for labour.

Krishna observed that more than half the world has decreasing working-age people and jobs are really hard to fill across those places.