Three ways IBM is advancing enterprise AI strategy

Organizations are racing to implement artificial intelligence, but many struggle to define a successful enterprise AI strategy. Despite all the tools at their disposal, results remain elusive. A recent BCG study found that just 26% of companies have developed the capabilities to scale AI and generate real business value.

For all the talk of automation, smarter workflows and digital reinvention, real progress is proving harder to define. Companies don’t just need new tools. They need sharper strategies, trusted data and partners who understand the operational grind — partners willing to deliver tangible outcomes, not just effort.

IBM’s Tony Menezes talks with theCUBE about how AI is transforming business operations, enabling enterprises to achieve scalable growth and efficiency.

“One chief financial officer told me, ‘You know more about my business than any other consultant I would pay millions of dollars. Just tell me what I know what you already know,’” Tony Menezes, global managing partner of business process operations, IBM Consulting, at IBM Corp., told theCUBE during a recent interview. “That’s where I think we have the opportunity to be really different in delivering our values for our customers.”

That kind of candor cut through the noise during the “AI-Powered Business Operations: Strategies for End-to-End Transformation”2025 event, where theCUBE Research’s Dave Vellante met with IBM leaders and enterprise decision-makers to talk about what it actually takes to run AI-powered operations at scale. From hybrid strategies to outcome-based models, the conversations revealed where the future is headed — and what’s standing in the way. (* Disclosure below.)

Here are three key insights you may have missed from theCUBE’s coverage:

1. IBM rethinks its enterprise AI strategy by aligning tech, talent and outcomes.

As AI moves from hype to enterprise strategy, IBM helps businesses rethink their technologies and operating models, according to Menezes. Rather than focusing on automation alone, IBM works with clients to fundamentally reimagine how work gets done — anchoring their enterprise AI strategy in data, process design and outcome-driven partnerships.

IBM’s Jill Goldstein talks with theCUBE about IBM’s innovative approach to AI skills and employee engagement.

“A lot of our commercial conversations we’re having with clients is now we’re putting our neck out to say we can deliver the outcome, and we’ll get paid on percentage of that outcome to be delivered,” Menezes told theCUBE. “That allows us to basically tell our clients what they can actually put up with us or we can put up with them to be able to get to those types of results.”

That shift in mindset goes beyond client engagements. IBM is also transforming internally, turning its human resources function into a proving ground for what AI-powered reinvention looks like in practice. Instead of introducing new tools top-down, the company invites employees to actively participate in how those tools are adopted and evolved, sometimes within 24 hours, according to Jill Goldstein, global managing partner of HR and talent transformation at IBM Corp.

“It was super stressful, but the team hopped right on it,” she told theCUBE, during an interview. “They were super agile. They spent time understanding content [and] understanding feedback and would introduce improvements within 24 hours rather than waiting for traditional quarterly releases.”

The company’s approach to transformation depends heavily on the people behind it. IBM has cultivated a new class of talent, which Goldstein calls “purple squirrels”— who understand both business functions and technical execution. That dual fluency enables faster adoption of AI-powered systems, such as watsonx Orchestrate, while preparing employees for future-ready roles that span traditional silos.

“One of the things that our IBM HR department did very early on was to take some of our functional experts [and] teach them technical stuff so that we could create what I call purple squirrels,” Goldstein explained. “By doing that, we’ve been able to … accelerate our digital transformation journey … powered by AI.”

Here’s theCUBE’s complete video interview with Jill Goldstein:

2. IBM uses agentic AI to upgrade service from reactive to real time.

Contact centers are notorious for inefficiency and customer frustration. IBM is tackling that challenge with a new generation of digital agents, shifting the focus of enterprise AI strategy from reactive support to proactive execution. These tools are agentic and capable of acting within enterprise systems to resolve issues, initiate workflows and elevate the entire support experience, according to Glenn Finch (pictured), global managing partner of cognitive and analytics at IBM.

IBM’s Glenn Finch talks with theCUBE about how IBM approaches contact centers’ need for efficiency and the evolution of agentic AI.

“The bottom line is if as you embed an agent into a business process, the model needs context,” Finch told theCUBE. “Where last year we’d be looking at multiple months to deploy agents, we’re now seeing agents deployed in a couple of weeks. It’s a radically different paradigm.”

That paradigm hinges on two key ingredients: Contextual understanding and transactional awareness. IBM is tackling both through tools such as InstructLab — which helps fine-tune large language models to reflect enterprise-specific knowledge — and through virtualization techniques that allow agents to pull relevant data on demand, even across massive customer bases, according to Finch.

“That’s when you start to see a little bit more hallucination from the model,” he said. “But we are using more virtualization techniques, more proxy techniques — things like that — to get the model both the context it needs and the data it needs to do its job.”

Organizations are responding. Instead of handing everything over to traditional bots, companies are deploying digital virtual agents capable of real-time, generative conversations. IBM’s approach reduces pressure on human agents and improves customer outcomes. In some cases, generative experiences outperform live agents in the Net Promoter Score, according to Finch.

“A lot of clients are saying, ‘OK … we’re going to let, not a chatbot, but a digital virtual agent that can have a generative conversation with you, we’ll let them take calls,’” Finch said. “The strange part is … the client perceived value of those channels is actually higher than the call center.”

Here’s theCUBE’s complete video with Glenn Finch:

3. Cemex showcases what’s possible when AI meets sustainability, with IBM in the engine room.

Cemex Inc., one of the world’s largest building materials companies, is redefining business process optimization through a bold combination of artificial intelligence, data consolidation and environmental responsibility. Rather than focusing on automation alone, the company takes a wide-angle view of transformation, directly weaving digital and eco-conscious priorities into its enterprise AI strategy and financial operations. The goal isn’t just operational efficiency — it’s resilience, relevance and long-term profitability, according to Maher Al-Haffar, chief financial officer of Cemex.

Cemex’s Maher Al-Haffar talks with theCUBE about how his company is enhancing operational efficiency, financial performance and environmental responsibility.

“We made it a real front-and-center target and goal to decarbonize,” Al-Haffar told theCUBE during the event. “We follow it every month in our executive committee. Even our compensation, frankly, is partially connected to how we perform on our decarbonization targets.”

Al-Haffar’s team has prioritized the creation of a “digital CFO” function, consolidating siloed enterprise resource planning systems into a centralized data lake to enable advanced analytics and smarter forecasting. By investing in middleware, AI and cleaner data pipelines — with support from IBM — Cemex has redesigned core financial processes to spot inefficiencies, strengthen decision-making and support higher-margin operations, according to Al-Haffar.

“We spent a couple of years taking all of our data from our ERP systems, which are not necessarily connected to each other, put it in a data lake, cleaned it up [and] came out with all of the consolidated numbers,” he said. “[This was then] giving us the ability to use middleware to do a bunch of analytics, trend analysis and process redesign.”

Perhaps the boldest move in Cemex’s evolution is its refusal to separate sustainability from enterprise AI strategy and business performance. The company sees decarbonization not just as a moral imperative, but as a growth lever, according to Al-Haffar. Urban mining, recycled materials and alternative fuels are now part of its operational DNA — and companywide alignment, emotional and financial, is helping drive those initiatives forward.

“The reality is we are in it for both,” Al-Haffar said. “We are in it because we think it’s the right thing to do. We do believe that the world is heating up, and we do believe that our business does contribute to greenhouse gas emissions, particularly CO2, as part of the industrial processes and the fuels that we use.”

Here’s theCUBE’s complete video interview with Maher Al-Haffar:

To watch more of theCUBE’s coverage of the “AI-Powered Business Operations: Strategies for End-to-End Transformation” event, here’s our complete event video playlist:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=videoseries

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the “AI-Powered Business Operations: Strategies for End-to-End Transformation” event. Neither IBM Corp., the sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE

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