Irving Wladawsky-Berger

Technology, Marketing and Storytelling

I’ve been involved in a number of interesting projects in my long career, but perhaps none more so than IBM’s Internet initiative in the mid-late 1990s.  In the Fall of 1995, Lou Gerstner, - IBM’s then Chairman and CEO, - made the decision to embrace the rapidly growing Internet as the centerpiece of IBM’s strategic vision and created the Internet Division as a cross-company group to lead the initiative, with me as general manager. 

At the time, a lot was happening around the Internet.  It was all very exciting, but it was not clear where things were heading, and in particular what the implications would be to the world of business.  A key part of our job was to figure out the business value around the Internet, and to then extensively communicate it to our customers and the wider marketplace.  Working closely with Ogilvy & Mather, IBM’s marketing agency, we came up with our Internet strategy, - which we called e-business.  Our challenge was not only to explain what e-business was all about, but also to leverage e-business to help re-build the IBM brand, given that the company was just coming out of a really serious near-death experience. 

Ogilvy created an award winning campaign, bringing e-business to life with compelling stories over a variety of communication channels, including memorable TV vignettes that nicely captured what it meant to do business over the emerging Internet.  The campaign succeeded in closely associating IBM with the Internet, repositioning the brand with the future rather than the once glorious past that almost caused its demise only a few years earlier.

My personal experiences with e-business, - and subsequent ones with Linux and other initiatives, - have sensitized me to the importance of storytelling in business and marketing, especially when introducing a disruptive innovation in the marketplace and/or needing to revitalize a troubled brand. 

I was reminded of those exciting times when reading a recent article, The Power of Immersive Media, by  Frank Rose, Senior Fellow at Columbia’s School of the Arts and author of a number of articles and books on digital culture, including The Art of Immersion.

The Slow, Steady March Towards Digital Money

On January 27, Citi and Imperial College held their third annual Digital Money Symposium in London.  As in previous years, the Symposium convened a group of leaders in their field to explore the state of adoption of digital money and its economic and societal impacts around the world.    

Last year’s symposium introduced the Digital Money Readiness Index, a set of global metrics to help quantify digital money adoption based on various measures of socio-economic development.  The Readiness Index aimed to answer two important questions: 

• What factors affect the adoption of digital money around world, and how do they vary across different countries and regions?, and 
•  Does digital money adoption really make a difference, and if so, can we quantify the benefit to governments, companies and individuals?

What Should We Think of Machines that Think?

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” is one of Arthur C. Clarke’s, - author of 2001: A Space Odyssey, -  most memorable quotes.  I still remember a Monday in the summer of 1996, when around 4 am I was in my Tokyo hotel room doing e-mail on my laptop while listening over the Internet to a live baseball game being played in New York, where it was Sunday afternoon.  Today this would be no big deal, but at the time it felt like one of those magical moments Clarke had in mind, perhaps the moment when I truly understood the transformative power of the rapidly growing Internet.

Artificial Intelligence may now be going through such an Internet moment.  “Artificial intelligence is suddenly everywhere.  It’s still what the experts call soft A.I., but it is proliferating like mad.”  So starts an excellent Vanity Fair article I recently wrote about.  “Everything that we formerly electrified we will now cognitize,” observed another great article.  “Experts envision automation and intelligent digital agents permeating vast areas of our work and digital lives by 2025, but they are divided on whether these advances will displace more jobs than they create,” was the overriding finding of a report published by the Pew Research Center this past August.

For the past several years, Edge.org has been asking a rather general, philosophical annual question to a diverse group of thinkers.  Last year the question was What Scientific Idea is Ready for Retirement?, and two years ago it was What Should We Be Worried About?  For 2015, Edge.org chose What Do You Think about Machines that Think? as its annual question.

The Big Data Era Is Here

In mid-January, the Transportation Research Board (TRB) of the National Academies held its 94th Annual Meeting in Washington DC.  The conference attracted around 12,000 transportation researchers and practitioners from around the world.  During the meeting, the TRB Executive Committee held a policy session on the impact of big data on transportation systems.  I was one of three panelists invited to the session.  Each of us made a short presentation which was then followed by an extensive discussion between the panel and the Committee.

Big data and related information-based disciplines, - e.g., data science, artificial intelligence, - are everywhere.  Why are we so excited about them?  Is it mostly hype, or is there something truly profound going on?  In my presentation, I tried to briefly address these questions based on three key observations.