IBM’s Ayal Steinberg: Partners Are Key To AI And Hybrid Cloud Growth

At XChange BoB 2025, Ayal Steinberg, GM for Growth Segment Leader at IBM, outlined the company’s vision for accelerating AI and hybrid cloud adoption—and why solution providers are central to that mission.

“IBM is a 115-year-old company that we hit our highest market share about two weeks ago,” Steinberg said, noting the company’s recent momentum and commitment to innovation. He identified four major trends shaping the market, including the challenge of hyperscale cloud models that make workloads easy to onboard but hard to move. “If you think of a developer…they want choice. They want to be able to design the best application without thinking about location upfront.”

Steinberg emphasized the growing complexity of AI governance and the need for trusted solutions. “Some of the world’s largest companies depend on IBM because we have this trusted brand working with an ecosystem of partners to embed governed AI,” he said.

Despite widespread experimentation, only 25 percent of organizations have AI projects in production, and less than 1 percent have mature applications. Skills remain the biggest barrier. “Only one out of 10 of their data scientists are actually transferable to generative AI,” Steinberg revealed.

IBM’s strategy centers on hybrid cloud and AI, with partners driving success. “Over 85 percent of our wins were fulfilled through partners,” Steinberg said. “We are absolutely committed to the ecosystem…speed, AI, automation—that’s my new mission.”

Find out more at ibm.com.