IBM’s CEO doesn’t think AI will replace programmers anytime soon

IBM CEO Arvind Krishna says that, despite the Trump administration’s attacks on globalism, global trade isn’t dead. In fact, he thinks that the U.S.’s key to growth will be embracing an international exchange of goods.

“So, I actually am a firm believer — I think it goes all the way back to the economists who studied global trade in the 1800s — and I think their perspective was, every 10% increase in global trade leads to a 1% increase in local GDP,” Krishna said during an onstage interview at SXSW on Tuesday. “So, if we want to really optimize even for local [growth], you got to have global trade.”

Global trade goes hand in hand with allowing overseas talent to flow into the U.S., Krishna said. The administration and its allies have called for increased restrictions on student and H-1B work visas, which they claim put U.S. citizens at a disadvantage.

“We want people to come here and bring their talent with them and apply that talent,” Krishna said. “And we want to develop our own talent as well, but you can’t develop it as well if you’re not bringing the best people from across the world for our people to learn from too. So we should be an international talent hub, and we should have policies that go along with that.”

During the wide-ranging interview, Krishna touched on not only geopolitics but also AI, which he thinks is a valuable technology — but no panacea.

He disagreed with a recent prediction from Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, that 90% of code may be written by AI in the next three to six months.

“I think the number is going to be more like 20-30% of the code could get written by AI — not 90%” Krishna said. “Are there some really simple use cases? Yes, but there’s an equally complicated number of ones where it’s going to be zero.”

Krishna said he thinks AI will ultimately make programmers more productive, boosting their and their employers’ outputs rather than eliminating programming jobs, as some AI critics have predicted.

“If you can do 30% more code with the same number of people, are you going to get more code written or less?” he said. “Because history has shown that the most productive company gains market share, and then you can produce more products, which lets you get more market share.”

Granted, IBM has a vested interest in presenting AI as nonthreatening. The company sells a range of AI-powered products and services, including assistive coding tools.

The statements are also a bit of a reversal for Krishna, who said in 2023 that IBM planned to pause hiring on back-office functions that the company anticipated it could replace with AI tech.

Krishna compared the debates over AI replacing workers to early debates over calculators and Photoshop replacing mathematicians and artists. He acknowledged that there are “unresolved” challenges around intellectual property where it concerns AI training and outputs, but that ultimately, the tech is a positive — and augmenting — force.

“It’s a tool,” Krishna said of AI. “If the quality that everybody produces becomes better using these tools, then even for the consumer, now you’re consuming better-quality [products].”

This tool will get cheaper, Krishna predicted. While he noted that reasoning models like OpenAI’s o1 require lots of computing and thus are energy-intensive, he thinks that AI will use “less than 1%” of the energy it’s using today thanks to emerging techniques like those demonstrated by Chinese AI startup DeepSeek.

“I think DeepSeek gave us a preview that you can live with a much smaller model,” Krishna said. “Now the question arises still, do you still need some really big models to start from? And I think that is what [DeepSeek] didn’t talk about.”

But while AI will commoditize, Krishna isn’t convinced that it’ll help humanity arrive at new knowledge, echoing a recent essay by Hugging Face co-founder Thomas Wolf. Rather, Krishna thinks quantum computing — a technology IBM is heavily invested in, not for nothing — will be the key to accelerating scientific discovery.

“AI is learning from already-produced knowledge, literature, graphics, and so on,” Krishna said. “It is not trying to figure out what is going to come … I am one who does not believe that the current generation of AI is going to get us towards what is called artificial general intelligence … when the AI can have all knowledge be completely reliable and answer questions beyond those that were answerable by Einstein or Oppenheimer or all the Nobel Prize laureates put together.”

Krishna’s assertions stand in contrast to those from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who has argued that “superintelligent” AI is within the realm of possibility within the next few years and could massively accelerate innovation.