Good morning, everybody. Welcome to the Goldman Sachs Communopia and Technology Conference. I'm Jim Schneider. I'm the IT Services here at Goldman. It's my pleasure to welcome IBM and CFO, Jim Kavanaugh, with us today. Thanks, Jim, for being here. Thank you very much for having us. We're looking forward to a great discussion here. Likewise. Maybe start out, strategic, macro side of things. Global economy still has a lot of uncertainties to it. We heard from our Chief Economist this morning about inflationary pressures, unevenness in key markets. How is IBM adapting to these kind of shifts? How are you changing your operating model to kind of deliver resilient financial results, in this challenging environment? Yeah, it's a great place to start overall, and Hans did a great job this morning talking about it from a Goldman perspective. I would tell you, today's macroeconomic environment can be defined by one word: dynamic. When you take a look at it, enterprises are focused around a slew of challenges with regards to interest rate volatility, inflation, demographic shifts, supply chain dislocations, geopolitical uncertainty overall, and clients are looking at technology as a source of competitive advantage. That's why technology always outgrows GDP as a enabler of global business and economic growth overall. But Jim, as you know me quite well, I spend a lot of time talking to many of my peers across industry, and when you look at it, how do they view technology? They view technology as a source of competitive advantage in areas around, one, it allows them to scale their businesses. Two, it drives efficiency and productivity that enables financial investment capability for them to go compete. And three, more importantly, right now, with GenAI, which I'm sure we'll talk about, is it's a way for them to evaluate new market opportunities, new businesses, and new sources of revenue overall. And you talked about IBM. Within IBM, as CFO, I have the honor of running all of the operations for the company, too. So in this macroeconomic, uncertain environment around disruption, as a CFO, you've always got to be prepared for multiple scenarios, and we've done a lot of work around IBM, to your point, repositioning our business to- for better stability and revenue, profit, and cash. What do I mean by that? Geographic diversity, we operate in 175 countries around the world. I would say that's a pretty good natural hedge because not all markets operate the same. Industry diversification, 17 different industries we serve. Client set, we're actually all enterprise-focused. We serve 95% of the Fortune 1000, and our business mix profile, which is high-value, recurring revenue that drives that stability of revenue, profit, and cash. So when you take a look at it, you know, that underpins how we've kind of guided 2024. You know, we expected a very dynamic environment. We're seeing that play out, but we're very confident about the macroeconomic environment for technology, albeit we acknowledge short-term dislocations and uncertainty. But our guidance this year, we see revenue accelerating mid-single digit. We see continued operating leverage increases, and we just raised our full-year free cash flow guidance to above $12 billion. So we feel pretty good about our ability to compete in this market. Mm-hmm, and maybe one thing that's been a little bit, touchy has been the discretionary IT spending environment from a macro standpoint. Now, what do you think we're going to need to hear or see, for your clients to be a little bit more confident about kind of raising that kind of discretionary portion of the budget? Yeah. I think at the core, it's getting back to certainty. There's a lot of uncertain variables right now, whether it's geopolitical with the elections, by the way, it's not only the U.S.. I think the last count I had was about 73 different countries this year going through elections overall. So it's about getting better certainty in the macroeconomic environment. But, you know, at the core of your question, you know, the discretionary spending, what do you typically see? By the way, this has played out historically, for information technology over decades, right? In major technological shifts or macro uncertainty, human capital-based businesses where discretionary spending comes out, typically, the growth model always experiences shift and reprioritization. I think the consulting industry is seeing that today. We're definitely seeing, albeit, you know, I would match our consulting business with any around taking share in our capabilities. But I think what you're seeing right now is, one, we got to get better certainty back into the market, and that certainty then will lead to how clients then will take that cost and productivity initiative of what they're driving right now. That is creating a buffer of investment capability that's gonna go back into areas that we've been investing in IBM that differentiate for the long run, where we think there's long-term growth factors, and that's hybrid cloud, that's AI, that's automation, that's digital transformation, and we still see and very confident about that growth going forward. Mm-hmm. And then, I guess, you know, IBM obviously has a very long and storied history. More recently, over the past several years, your CEO, Arvind Krishna, when he took over, made some pretty big strategic changes, large M&A in software, some divestitures in the services part of the portfolio. You've been integral to all that. How do you plan to sort of differentiate yourself over the next several years in this changing landscape, and, you know, how would you position it in terms of what inning we are in, in terms of the changes at a strategic level that could drive more transformations for IBM over the next three to five years? Yeah. Thanks for the question overall. There's been a lot of hard work by 280,000 IBMers around the world, but under Arvind's leadership, we are a fundamentally different company today than what we were four or five years ago. When you think about it, Arvind has brought this company a strategic focus around what we believe arguably is the two most transformative technology shifts, that being hybrid cloud and AI, and we've repositioned and built a platform-centric business model that's gonna capitalize on those two technology transformational shifts. Around 75% of our business now growth vectors, software, and services that have integrated capability around our infrastructure portfolio, and third, we built a very attractive economic multiplier effect on those platforms. The platforms being the Red Hat acquisition around Red Hat OpenShift as our leading industry hybrid cloud platform, and now around our GenAI platform with RHEL AI, OpenShift AI, and our enterprise AI middleware, watsonx, but that platform economic model is very attractive in that every dollar we land on a platform, we get $3-$5 of software and $6-$8 of services, so really, a lot of strategic focus, a lot of work on portfolio, and now capitalizing on that attractive economic multiplier, but I would tell you, Jim, you know, I think the market is moving to what we have been calling as our strategic convictions for the last four or five years under Arvind's leadership. One, we believe technology is the only deflationary force, and it's a source of competitive advantage, as we talked about. Two, we think that hybrid cloud is the most dominant client architecture prevailing today. By the way, 90%+ of enterprises operate in a hybrid multi-cloud environment today, so it is a reality. Third, we're seeing right in front of us, AI is gonna be the most powerful form of productivity that we will ever see across enterprise and around the world, and fourth, open source is the new source of innovation. So to your question, Arvind and the team and all of us have been focused on redesigning our operating model to capitalize on those strategic convictions for long-term, sustainable value. We've done work around our integrated value thesis, bringing a powerful tech stack with a consulting business at scale, which is differentiated in the market today. Two, we've done work around portfolio optimization. You know, tremendous strategic capability and acquisitions that we've been able to garner since the Red Hat acquisition that has really expanded the growth profile, both of our software book of business and our consulting businesses. But it wasn't only acquisitions. We also had to prune our portfolio around areas, 15, 17 divestitures of assets that weren't either strategic fit or the financial equation that we wanted. But I'll tell you, one of the most underappreciated components of what Arvind has done is he's opened up IBM to ecosystem partnerships with AWS, with Microsoft, with SAP. I think Nikesh was up here earlier, with Palo Alto, Adobe. I go on and on and on, and we've been able to capture synergistic value of IBM with those partners overall. And fourth, I'd be remiss if I didn't say a whole new cultural transformation within IBM around a growth mindset, around speed, velocity, risk-taking. So all that's led to differentiated performance. I mean, it's played out our investment thesis, IBM today, higher revenue growth, higher operating margin, strong free cash flow yield, and a higher return on invested capital. And put it in perspective to wrap up, let's talk about three years ago before we came out with our midterm model, and we spun off Kyndryl. We had a business profile that was declining revenue growth. Over three years, we've changed that to a sustainable mid-single-digit revenue growth profile. We had a business that had dilutive margin operating leverage to a business over the last three years that has generated seven hundred basis points of improvement in margin. And finally, a business that was stagnating on free cash flow, and over the last three years, we're about double our free cash flow generation. So we feel pretty good about where our position is, and more importantly, always more work to do to drive continuous reinvention, and that's the mindset that we have at IBM. Mm-hmm, that's great to hear. And maybe just kind of pivoting to a topic we've already heard about, we're gonna hear a lot more about at the conference, you mentioned it, GenAI. You know, we've heard from some of the biggest technology companies around the idea of taking a general-purpose model with hundreds of billions of parameters in an LLM, and that consumes a lot of computing power and a lot of cost. I think IBM started saying, taking a relatively differentiated approach, you've talked about kind of taking smaller LLMs, LLMs that are 85%, 90% lower cost to operate, and implement. You know, what is going on there? Maybe explain for us what's the difference between what those companies are doing, what you're doing, how you're applying this to more tractable, specific business problems, and where do you see the advantage for you? Definitely. Great question overall. First, we're extremely excited about the secular growth opportunity with regards to GenAI, and believe this is gonna be a multi-trillion dollar market opportunity, TAM, around value creation overall. Jim, you were at our Think conference earlier this year, where we made significant announcements around how we were gonna bring the open source community to GenAI. Since then, we've announced, and now last week, just actually launched general availability of our open innovation AI platform overall. We bring a full stack capability around GenAI for our clients that I think is differentiated. Starting with RHEL AI, which today is our enterprise open innovation GenAI platform that includes IBM Granite models, the most cost-performant, efficient in the marketplace, and InstructLab, which is an open source way and a very cost-efficient way to do inferencing, training, fine-tuning, modeling. RHEL AI, what are the benefits of it? Number one, it's neutral to hardware. It's the most cost-efficient way to distribute general AI from a platform because RHEL AI sits now on Dell, it sits on Lenovo, eventually, around HP, and many others. Two, it's agnostic to infrastructure: NVIDIA, AMD, Intel, and others. And three, it's open source. But that's the foundation of our platform. On top of that, you have OpenShift AI that allows us to run GenAI platform in a hybrid cloud environment, so that synergistic effect of hybrid cloud and AI. Then we have our AI middleware, watsonx, which we announced at Think, with a whole suite of.ai,.data,.gov. We then have all of our solution agents, our assistants that run on top of that, that capitalize on things like code monetization or things like customer service or digital labor, and then we have ecosystem partners that run on our platform. But to the core of your question about large versus small, you know, when I talk to clients, especially CFOs, we're cost-minded by focus, right? We're looking for ROI, we're looking for value. If you look at large language models, they are very expensive. Why? Computational resources, memory requirements, latency, updating, fine-tuning, inferencing costs. CFOs today GenAI are focused on four things: cost efficiency, performance scale, speed of innovation, and governance. And when you think about it, small models today are at the essence of the most cost-efficient way to GenAI strategies. 85%-90% more cost-efficient than a large language model today. That obviously would get my attention as a CFO. Second, from a performance and a scale perspective, our IBM Granite models range from 3 billion- 34 billion. They're trained on 116 different programming languages. They consistently, from a cost-performance perspective, rank well in excess of our competition. Third, speed and innovation. I think reality is open source innovation is unmatched. Our analogy is we're gonna bring to GenAI with RHEL AI and OpenShift AI, what Linux has done to become the most dominant, operating system in the world. And then finally, governance. We were the first to market to indemnify all of our data, all of our models, all of our weights with transparency. So I think when you look at those four client value vectors, they've influenced our strategy around small open innovation, and by the way, it's playing out in the marketplace. We just finished second quarter, first full year of GenAI tech stack and consulting. We've got north of a $2 billion book of business, and I think we're capitalizing both on that technology architecture and inflection shift, and also on consulting being the strategic provider of choice. Mm-hmm. One more strategic question for you, and that's on M&A. I think obviously, that's been a core part of the strategy, as we discussed before. Red Hat has obviously performed very well. A number of acquisitions through the years, and this year, some of the Software AG assets you plan to close on, Hashi by year-end. But maybe just kind of contextualize this in terms of your broader AI strategy. How do all these acquisitions fit together? What is the kind of common purpose or common technology alignment? What are you trying to solve for customers and clients with this? And should we expect the pace of your software M&A to actually pick up or slow down from here? Yeah, great question. I mean, one, I think we've built credibility over the last handful of years under Arvind's leadership, about running a very disciplined capital allocation process around obviously starting with investing in our business organically and inorganically, around where we see a differentiated way to win and to compete and get synergistic value. Two, our capital allocation centers around maintaining a very solid investment-grade balance sheet, focused on debt leverage. And then three, we enable a very attractive return to shareholder dividend policy, but that capital allocation is supported by a capital structure that gives us tremendous financial flexibility to go compete in the marketplace. And M&A has been an instrumental element of us extending our leadership in hybrid cloud and AI, and it's also been a growth vector model of us delivering about a point, point and a half of revenue growth to IBM's top line. Now, we've talked many times. Our criteria hasn't changed: strategic fit, hybrid cloud and AI. Synergistic value, so we can get the multiplier effect of product, technology, consulting, and go-to-market synergies. And three, it has to have an attractive financial profile. Read that, you know, free cash flow accretive within two years or less. When you take a look at that strategic fit, what are the areas we're focused on? We're focused on where we believe those strategic convictions are, where revenue profit pools are gonna move. That is gonna be around hybrid cloud, that's gonna be around data, that's gonna be around AI. It's gonna be around automation, which we've capitalized on tremendously. It's also gonna be around consulting and building out differentiated expertise and capabilities for not only IBM tech, but also for our strategic partnerships. In terms of synergies... We run a playbook, and we've been pretty consistent since the Red Hat acquisition. A playbook that drives synergies not only from a cost efficiency, but I think you're asking more from a revenue client value perspective- Right Around product technology. Let me give you a couple examples, right? Let's talk about the Red Hat, since you started there. Red Hat, when we announced that acquisition in 2018, we saw a very strategic pivot of where the market was gonna go around hybrid cloud and around AI. And that was our differentiated point of view of having a hybrid, multi-cloud, multi-environment strategy with the industry-leading Red Hat OpenShift. When we announced that acquisition, Red Hat OpenShift was basically a $100 million ARR book of business. Less than five years later, we just exited second quarter through IBM's global distribution scale and incumbency. That book of business is now north of $1.3 billion, a 10X scale improvement. That is a go-to-market leverage of how we run that playbook inside IBM. Second, what has it done with the software synergies and consulting synergies? It's enabled us to reinvigorate our software growth, which, by the way, we took up this year, to high single digit, and it's also allowed us to build a consulting synergistic book of business. In less than five years, roughly $13 billion of signings on hybrid cloud Red Hat, and a $3 billion book of business. So we know how to run this playbook overall. Where are we at? We've taken advantage in 2024. We're probably, M&A-wise, our typical model is $4-$5 billion a year. We're probably gonna press north of $9 billion this year. Very excited about the Hashi acquisition. We got a lot of work. We just closed the Software AG StreamSets and webMethods. Mm-hmm. So we got a lot of work in front of us around integrating and ensuring we get those synergies, but I think you'll see us back in the market in 2025, and to be opportunistic, always aligned to that strategic fit and criteria I talked about. Mm-hmm, and relative to Red Hat, you laid out that case fairly articulately. Maybe just talk about, you know, what are the other growth opportunities you see for Red Hat that maybe haven't been fully realized yet? What excites you most from both a product and go-to-market perspective? And, you know, related to that, we've actually seen some changes in the technology landscape relative to Red Hat, from a competitive perspective, with some key industry acquisitions by your competitors, so maybe where does IBM see the future of that space and the implications for Red Hat? Yeah, well, we're very pleased with our Red Hat performance over the first five years. It has really repositioned the IBM company as a fundamentally different company, as I talked about earlier. Red Hat sits at the foundation of our hybrid cloud AI platform-centric company. On one aspect, Red Hat OpenShift is the industry-leading hybrid cloud platform that we drive that platform economic model on, and now, as I said earlier, at the core of our GenAI open innovation, platform-based strategy with RHEL AI, with OpenShift AI overall. If you take a look at it, where are we excited about the future growth opportunity? 'Cause we've taken a book of business five years ago, we've been able to accelerate... We've been growing mid to high teens over our compounded rate over the last five years. When you take a look at future opportunities, I would highlight kind of a handful. Number one, GenAI. We're at the early innings of that long-term future growth factor overall, and I think the power of our open innovation strategy, coupled with the integrated value thesis of our watsonx AI middleware, of our solution agents, of our consulting book of business to drive scale and adoption, there's a lot of room for growth in accelerating Red Hat there, one. Two, I think the Hashi Terraform acquisition, which we're extremely excited about, expect to close by the end of the year. When you think about the powerful combination of Hashi Terraform, Ansible, Red Hat OpenShift, our watsonx platform, our consulting services, there's a lot of synergistic value in accelerating growth overall. Three, and it touches some of your competitive dynamics, VMware opportunity. We're extremely excited about and have generated tremendous amount of pipeline and client interest right now. Fourth, we've been working on and excited about the future potential of new markets, new verticals. Rather: Edge, Telco, industrial segment, automotive, this hybrid cloud architecture, and more importantly, the synergistic value of hybrid cloud and AI together. We're getting a lot of interest overall. Those are three or four growth areas. Just to conclude on your point about the competitive landscape and the market opportunity around VMware, we're extremely excited about the compelling value proposition that we can bring to market. What it's forcing right now, with the Broadcom acquisition, is forcing every enterprise client to make platform architecture decisions, and that's gonna be between virtualization and containerization. And when you think about the power of IBM plus Red Hat, with our Red Hat OpenShift virtualization, plus containerization, plus our GenAI platform with watsonx, plus a consulting business at scale that can do the application modernization, that's why clients are coming to us with extreme interest around a growth factor that I think will play out for multiple years, and we're excited about that. Mm-hmm. You mentioned consulting. I want to pivot to that one next. It's no secret that that market has been a little bit weak for the whole industry, broadly speaking, because of the discretionary IT pullback that we've seen. You know, what are you doing that's within your control to sort of re-accelerate growth from here? You talked about the partnerships, but what else is there to it? Yeah. Well, to your point, you know, right now, we're operating in that extreme dynamic-based market environment, as CFOs like myself are all looking at spending programs around how they drive cost efficiency to create reprioritization of financial flexibility, so they can invest for their own sustainable advantage overall. But I would tell you, and that's not a surprise to us. In any human capital-based business, when you look at it, any major technological shift or macroeconomic volatility, discretionary-based spending, consulting-based market, the growth model always experiences some shift and some reprioritization. But we're actually very confident in the medium to long-term market potential of the consulting business overall, to grow on their average 5-7% overall, and we're excited about the position of consulting inside IBM to be a key differentiator. Why is it important to IBM? One, it capitalizes on that multiplier effect. If every dollar we land on Red Hat OpenShift hybrid cloud platform or now GenAI, we can get six to eight dollars of services revenue over time, and we've proven that with Red Hat OpenShift, and through the first year of GenAI, we already have north of $1.5 billion book of business on GenAI in consulting. Second, it drives scale and adoption back to our software and our infrastructure in pulling software overall, so where are we excited about our growth model of consulting? One, done a lot of work to reposition our portfolio, our growth platforms, our offerings and service lines in consulting overall. Today, it's about 85%, I would say, aligned to where the market is and moving. That is digital transformation, that's hybrid cloud, that's application modernization, and that's business transformation overall. So we feel pretty good about that. We actually have a pretty small BPO business that arguably is getting disrupted tremendously. We view that as an opportunity going forward. Second, we're still excited. We have a lot of headroom to grow around those strategic partnerships I talked about earlier. It's about 40% of our business profile right now in consulting. We've moved up the league tables from being nowhere to being in the top 10. Our goal is to get into the top two or three, and that's driven tremendous growth. Three, we're investing significantly in our IBM Consulting Advantage platform. That's our GenAI platform, leveraging watsonx, RHEL AI, OpenShift AI, of really assetizing our human capital service-based offerings to deliver better value, increased win rates. And then finally, you know, we've been pretty focused on the M&A side of the equation, just given the attractiveness of the assets we bought this year. But M&A is a key growth driver for us, and we're gonna come out after market today with an acquisition announcement around OCI and our partnership with, with Oracle overall, so we feel pretty good about that. But, you know, long term, this is a tremendous growth opportunity. It has great synergistic value, and we're gonna keep running those plays to gain share, which is what we've been doing. Mm-hmm. And you mentioned the $500 million of GenAI consulting bookings. What are those? What kind of client priorities are you solving? You know, what kind of work is it, and over what period of time does that revenue get recognized? Yeah. GenAI right now, first of all, excited about that secular growth opportunity. The way I kinda contextualize this and put it in perspective, what cloud did around the explosive growth of digital transformation for consulting about a decade ago, I think GenAI now has the ability to kickstart what I call digital transformation 2.0. If you look at it, $1.5 billion book of business overall, what's that centered around? That's centered around, first, data modernization, data architecture to leverage GenAI platforms overall. It's around business transformation services. Rather around redesigning digital labor, HR, procurement, finance, operations, and it's around customer service right now. Across all three, we're seeing significant value, 30%-40% productivity improvements, 75%-90% automation of tasks overall, higher quality, higher service delivery, higher margin profile for us overall. Now, with that said, that $1.5 billion book of business overall, you know, it is large transformational projects by design, longer durations, lower revenue yield in the near term versus our traditional revenue yield. But what it's doing is it's, one, building our backlog, which is up nicely, 5%, and it's enabling us, very important, to become the strategic provider of choice for our clients' GenAI journeys overall, which I think is important because that has a long-term growth vector with a future multiplier opportunity for us to move forward. So we're pretty pleased about that. Mm-hmm. I want to see if I can get to two more questions, perhaps. One on infrastructure, 'cause I think this is an area, specifically mainframe, an area where I think people, most investors are quite surprised of the performance of mainframe over the last five years plus, I think much better than people thought. What kind of demand. Where is the demand for mainframe coming from? Is it partly tied to AI? I think there's been some press reports about uses of AI running on a mainframe, which I think surprises a lot of people. You know, is that accurate? And then how should you think about the mainframe growth per opportunity for IBM going forward over the next several years? Yeah, appreciate the question on mainframe. As a CFO, albeit infrastructure is 25% of our total composition of IBM revenue, it's a substantial portion of our profit and cash generation that fuels that investment flywheel into our software, our M&A, our innovation, our go-to-market, our ecosystem. So it is the most enduring platform that is very relevant for today's hybrid cloud and AI era overall. When you take a look at it, we, under Arvind's leadership, about five, six years ago, we called a very strategic pivot of increasing significantly our investment in innovation. So today, the mainframe platform is the only platform that has pervasive encryption embedded in the system, the industry's only quantum-safe encryption today, cloud-native capabilities. We opened up mainframe, the Red Hat OpenShift and other cloud-native applications running on it. We've been putting GenAI back in 2022 when we announced z16. We had the Telum chip with the AI accelerator on the chip, and we're getting a lot of great resonating from a client perspective, and it's always been the most sustainable energy, energy efficiency. What's driving the value or the, or the shift in the pivot for mainframe to growth? Mainframe, over the last three cycles, has generated three X the installed MIPS capacity, and 80% of our clients are growing workloads. We haven't seen that for a long period of time. What's driving that? I think, one, definitely increasing capacity requirements, just driven by the volatility of the markets and around digital transformations, around enterprises. Two, focus on every board, resiliency, cybersecurity, regulatory environment, sovereignty around the world, AI running on mainframe, and around energy and sustainability, which is very... All of those things play to the compelling value proposition of mainframe, so when you look at it, mainframe is very relevant to AI today. We're working with probably 250-plus customers currently today on AI applications around everything from fraud detection, to AML, to clearing and settlement, to loan prevention, and to medical imaging, many different areas, so we feel pretty confident we're gonna come out with our new mainframe first half of 2025. We think mainframe right now, we've proven it over the last two cycles now, that it is a growth factor of IBM, and we think we're well-positioned as we enter 2025 with the next mainframe cycle, and we're excited about it. Great, and then maybe I'll sneak one financial question in for a second. You know, clearly you've done well on the margin expansion front, going from sort of low teens to high teens over the last several years. Give us a sense of the levers that you still have to pull from a cost rationalization and a margin leverage perspective, and where we think, where should we expect margins to go over the next three to five years? Yeah. Well, thank you for the question. I mean, operating leverage is an essential element of our financial and business model equation. We drive it three ways: productivity and mix, that's that high-value software growing high single digit, 40+% of IBM's revenue, almost two-thirds of our profit. Second, productivity. Every dollar we invest, R&D, go-to-market, ecosystem, we expect a return multiplier on that. And third, G&A scale efficiency. The latter is where we've been very aggressively going after and leveraging becoming client zero inside IBM, leveraging digitization and technology, embedding AI across all of our workflows, how we run HR, how we run finance, operations, et cetera, procurement, supply chain, optimization, real estate footprint, services, delivery, pyramid structures. We announced, what? 2022, at the time, an extreme productivity program around G&A optimization. We said about $2 billion exit run rate by 2024. We entered this year well in advance of that. We took that up to $3 billion exit run rate. That has been instrumental in the last three years, us increasing margins by 700 basis points overall. This year's Q2, we were up by 220 basis points. We think we've got more headroom to go. We're gonna aggressively go after that and and deliver better client value, better client ROI, better technology, better innovation, and better shareholder value at the end of the day, 'cause it has tremendous multiple expansion opportunity for us. Fantastic. I think, sadly, we're out of time, but thank you very much, Jim, for being with us today. We appreciate it. Appreciate it. Thank you.