The View From Davos with IBM's Rob Thomas on Turning AI Spend Into Real Enterprise Value
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Rob Thomas of IBM joins Patrick Moorhead and Daniel Newman from Davos to discuss why enterprise AI success depends less on experimentation and more on execution discipline, operational focus, and cultural readiness.
The AI ROI gap isn’t between ambition and technology. It’s between ambition and execution.
From Davos, Patrick Moorhead and Daniel Newman are with IBM’s Rob Thomas, Senior Vice President, Software and Chief Commercial Officer, to examine the disconnect many enterprises are now facing. AI investment is accelerating, expectations are high, yet measurable business impact remains frustratingly uneven.
Rob shifts the lens away from technology gaps and toward application discipline. The biggest gains, he argues, are rarely headline-grabbing. They show up in operational workflows that reduce friction, compress cycle times, and quietly lower costs. He also points to resilience, not novelty, as the trait that increasingly defines successful enterprise AI, especially as organizations move from experimentation to systems they must rely on every day.
Key Takeaways Include:
🔷 AI ROI is driven by execution, not imagination: Enterprises rarely fail due to a lack of ideas. They struggle to operationalize AI because processes, incentives, and ownership models are not designed for change at scale.
🔷 Boring workflows deliver outsized returns: Repetitive, operational tasks across finance, HR, supply chain, and customer support often provide faster and more defensible ROI than high-visibility, experimental use cases.
🔷 Productivity gains matter more than novelty: Reducing costs and accelerating cycle times are the most reliable early indicators that AI is delivering real business value.
🔷 Culture determines whether AI scales: AI adoption requires top-down commitment and tolerance for disruption. Without leadership-driven change management, even strong technology investments underperform.
🔷 Resilience is returning as a strategic priority: As AI becomes embedded in core systems, reliability, security, and operational stability move from secondary concerns to competitive differentiators.
Listen to the audio:
Disclaimer: Six Five Media’s The View from Davos is for information and entertainment purposes only. Over the course of this webcast, we may talk about companies that are publicly traded and we may even reference that fact and their equity share price, but please do not take anything that we say as a recommendation about what you should do with your investment dollars. We are not investment advisors and we ask that you do not treat us as such.
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