IBM Q1 2026 Earnings: CEO Krishna Says AI Is A Tailwind To The Business
'As [customers] get to scale, they've got to use the data from their internal systems. If they're using data from the internal systems, many parts of our portfolio—be it Red Hat, be it Confluent—will come to be consumed more and more,' says IBM CEO Arvind Krishna.
by Wade Millward via CRN
Growth in IBM's first fiscal quarter in its artificial intelligence, software and hardware portfolios did not translate into an improved forecast for the rest of the year—but Chairman and CEO Arvind Krishna (pictured) and his team feel confident in the long-term durability of parts of the vendor's business as OpenAI, Anthropic and other AI upstarts continue to innovate.
AI is a tailwind to the Armonk, N.Y.-based vendor's business, Krishna told analysts on the company's first-quarter earnings call held Wednesday, covering the three months ended March 31.
Customers experimenting with AI might make copies of some of their data, put it on a public cloud and put it in a public frontier AI model. "[But] as they get to scale, they've got to use the data from their internal systems," the CEO said. "If they're using data from the internal systems, many parts of our portfolio—be it Red Hat, be it Confluent—will come to be consumed more and more."
IBM Q1 2026 Earnings Highlights
Jack French, area vice president of the cloud global solutions and architecture team at Maryland Heights, Mo.-based World Wide Technology—No. 9 on CRN's 2025 Solution Provider 500—told CRN in an interview on WWT's financial operations (FinOps) practice that IBM's Cloudability cloud financial management platform has been one of his team's essential tools.
WWT has paired Cloudability and other FinOps tools with its Advanced Technology Center for testing how the tools work in different environments and whether the tool can support and ingest new data sources from AI companies to deliver a more holistic understanding of benefits and trade-offs for any one customer.
IBM and various divisions of its portfolio, including Confluent and Red Hat, have been investing in their partner programs to seize opportunities in AI, data streaming and hybrid cloud.