Biggish Blue hinted that it was laying off staff due to a roll out of AI products across the organisation. But the dark satanic rumour mill suggests that IBM is finding it trickier than expected.

CEO Arvind Krishna committed last year to replacing around 7,800 jobs with AI. IBM’s AI isn't up to replacing people, and it made life difficult for itself by letting go of the people who could set up an AI-based system.

Biggish Blue suits have been constantly pushed for automation and the use of AI. The logic is that it becomes unnecessary to pay for senior-level staff when you can promote a youngster who doesn't know any better at a much lower price.

The suits wanted a scenario where a seasoned programmer's code, which is, by law, the company's IP, is fed into an AI library. The library learns it, and the author is no longer needed.

While this is entirely logical, in a dystopian way, IBM could not make it happen.  Staff leaks claim that Watsonx [IBM’s generative AI offering] isn’t even available to employees to attempt to help automate some meaningless task.

Any WatsonX chatbot is years behind ChatGPT. The web interface was horribly borked to the point of being unusable until July 2024, and no one in the IBM uses it.

Watsonx Code Assistant technically knows PHP, but staffers see it as inferior to GitHub Copilot.  While it is better than a poke in the eye with a short stick, Krishna keeps asking people to use it, and few bother. They are banned from using externally sourced LLMs.