Reflets Magazine #148 devotes its cover feature to Béatrice Kosowski (E87), CEO of IBM France, whose aim is to combine the best of technology with individual potential to make a positive impact on tomorrow’s world, in a company that prioritises diversity and inclusion. Here is a free online translation of an excerpt of the article… subscribe to get the next issues (in French)!

Reflets Magazine: What led you to join IBM?

Béatrice Kosowski: It all started with the creation of my direct marketing company at the end of my first year in ESSEC, a company which I ran for six years until it went under. A company leader then reached out to me and took me on in his cosmetics company, and three years later, IBM, who had been one of my customers when I had my own business, asked me to join them. It was a most unusual move for me to join a big company, having had initial experience in entrepreneurship, so it represented a big change. Beyond the fact that I was very familiar with the company’s activity and culture, the idea of joining a major firm, which was experiencing difficulties and undergoing major changes at the time, really appealed to me; it was a motivating factor. When I look back 30 years later, I realise that IBM is constantly reinventing itself, because we work in a sector which is so demanding that if you do not evolve continuously, you can’t survive. The company is over 110 years old and there’s every chance it will still exist in a hundred years’ time. I pursued the entrepreneurial approach of my early career, but in a very different form at IBM, because I’ve always been an entrepreneur at heart.

RM: What are the positions have you held at IBM?

B. Kosowski: My first job was to build the equivalent of a direct marketing agency, but in-house, with around 700 campaigns to run per year. I then held regional positions, in Toulouse notably, where a ‘territory management’ structure was developed, and I had to run the whole ecosystem. I feel that all the positions I’ve held have involved building and developing something. This was especially true during the 2008 financial crisis, when I was director of our financial subsidiary for France, and then South-West Europe, so with a banking licence. It was highly-invigorating period, to say the least. I then had to resolve a crisis and reposition relations with the SNCF group and GEODIS, with some extremely important international stakes between the two companies. Lastly, I managed our development arm in infrastructure services, acting as corporate officer for several of our subsidiaries. I pursued that role until I was offered the position of CEO two-and-half years ago.

RM: You spoke of ongoing transformation in the company; how has IBM changed over the last thirty years?

B. Kosowski: A deliberate choice was made in the 1990s to bank everything on a strategy of value rather than ‘volume’. This subsequently enabled us to make appropriate and coherent decisions over the years, to determine the activities we would invest the most in, and those we would give up. This was the case, for example, with our move out of the printer and micro-computing sectors to focus on high added-value solutions. It was also what led to the 250 to 300 acquisitions we carried out in those years. This is a real driver in terms of our value-creation strategy. Our four main pillars are: an extremely substantial investment in R&D, somewhere around $6 to $6.5 million annually, with a new patent every hour including nights and weekends; acquisitions which often involve an element of risk; strategic alliances such as the recent ones with SAP or Adobe, in addition to partnerships with a large number of digital service companies, and the fourth pillar focuses on all our employees and how we advance their skills. This explains how we managed to go in a few years from a turnover which was 80% generated from hardware to a present-day turnover of more than 70% from software and services, so solutions.

RM: What were the greatest challenges you had to face when taking the helm of IBM France?

B. Kosowski: As for all company leaders at the time, the first challenge was to manage COVID, a real feat. Then just four days after my appointment, the spin-off decision was announced, i.e., the split of the managed services activity, which I had been Managing Director of a few days earlier. The spin-off formed the IT services giant Kyndryl, involving 90,000 people in more than 100 countries and $19 billion in turnover, a sum we had reached in just thirteen months. It was a huge challenge, requiring a vast amount of energy in terms of listening, communication and trust-building with our customers, staff and labour representatives. On top of that, on my arrival, a massive redundancy plan had just been announced, which my team and I managed to transform into a plan for voluntary redundancy, without any forced departures. Lastly, another challenge to meet was the complete overhaul to simplify and clarify our customer care communication. All that had to be dealt with while preserving our soul, which wasn’t easy, but I think I can now say it was all very positive. We accomplished this by changing our approach to communication, localness, attentiveness and support for the managers in the front line. To sum up, the transformation plan was already in our pipeline, but it was clearly pushed to the fore and sped up with the health crisis.

RM: What do you think has marked the digital industry in the last decade?

B. Kosowski: The plethora of innovation is fabulous, and when you put all these innovations together, you end up with huge changes and reinventions. The first was the cloud, and we believe that the hybrid cloud will bring the most value to companies, i.e., multi-cloud environments, because customers now choose their cloud providers. IBM is a cloud operator itself, but we have partnerships with other providers. The second transformational innovation is artificial intelligence, of course, and all the work around data. It’s no secret that AI is developing rapidly and more especially with the hype around ChatGPT, which allows us to do what all companies have been doing for some time already and explore generative AI. There are multiple possibilities right now for companies with experience in this area, and we believe that the real challenge is two-sided. Firstly, the scaling-up, i.e., the act of totally rethinking their business model, organisation, processes and applications to become fully industrialised in their approach to injecting AI. The second major aspect is what we call governance, for ethics, transparency and the eradication of bias.

RM: What is IBM’s position with regard to quantum computing?

B. Kosowski: We are extremely invested and advanced in quantum computing. This is a booming sector reaching its commercialisation stage, which is a sign of its maturity. Our vision of future computing includes heterogeneous systems, in other words, the standard, ordinary 0 or 1 bit, augmented by neuron-inspired AI, to which we now add quantum computing with qubits. The task is to enable these systems to operate alongside each other, which means that when we work in quantum, we work on hardware, software, skills and the ability to integrate quantum computing in modern-day businesses. With regard to technological power, we have opted for transparency, by publishing our road map, which is not without its risks, but we believe that it is right to share with the community and our customers. Last year, we released Osprey, a 433-qubit processor, which is a fair step ahead of the community. We announced this year that we would exceed 1,121 qubits, which represents a milestone in that, when you go beyond 1000 qubits, you can achieve a quantum advantage, i.e., superior to the most powerful traditional computing, for a practical application with a purpose, the beginning of something truly useful. In parallel to this growth, we’re also working on quality in order to minimise the error rate. This is an essential aspect because there is little point in having incredible power if the results are unreliable. At this stage, we’re very confident about future developments.

RM: What about the ethical aspect of your research? What is your view of this?

B. Kosowski: [Article to be continued in Reflets Magazine #148]

Interview by François de Guillebon, Chief Editor at Reflets Magazine, and Michel Zerr, Reporter for Reflets Magazine
Translation of an excerpt of an article published in Reflets Magazine #148. Read a preview (in French). Get the next issues (in French).

Image : © Christophe Meireis