IBM’s Billy Seabrook on unlocking billions in productivity
How did IBM unlock $3.5 billion in productivity through internal AI adoption?
According to Global Chief Design Officer Billy Seabrook, the answer isn’t just technological, it’s philosophical. In this episode of The CMO Show, Billy shared how IBM became its own “client zero,” using AI to reimagine how work gets done, from HR chatbots to dynamic content creation. IBM’s transformation began not with a product launch, but with introspection. By applying its own AI technologies to internal operations, IBM unlocked $3.5 billion in productivity savings in just two years. But the real story isn’t about cost-cutting, it’s about self-awareness. “That savings has fuelled our growth engine,” said Billy. According to Arvind Krishna, CEO, IBM, a 'huge amount of work inside IBM on leveraging AI and automation on certain enterprise workflows’, including cutting jobs, has actually resulted in total employment increasing. ‘What it does is it gives you more investment to put into other areas,' he told The Wall Street Journal.
Creativity and the machine
As AI agents become the new interface between brands and audiences, adaptable marketers must rethink everything, from SEO to design systems. “You want to train your own AI interface that knows your brand, knows the right things to say, and is well-governed,” said Billy.
In this new paradigm, content must be structured not just for human readability, but for machine comprehension. The marketer’s role becomes one of stewardship, ensuring that what the machine learns is aligned with what the brand stands for. In a world that once prized hyper-specialisation, AI is enabling a return to creative breadth and critical thinking skills at all levels. "AI is bringing back the generalist,... There used to be a web designer and a webmaster. Now there are 20 to 30 specialist roles...but AI is converging them again,” said Billy.
It’s not technical skills but human qualities - empathy, ethics, curiosity - that will define the next generation of leaders, and according to Billy, this means you need to “hire for heart and train for AI.”
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This episode of The CMO Show was brought to you by host Mark Jones, producers Kate Zadel and Kirsten Bables and audio engineers Ed Cheng and Daniel Marr. This is an edited excerpt of the podcast transcript.
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Mark Jones
One of my favourite sayings from American businesses, there's riches in the niches, or the niches as we say in Australia. And for marketers, we've been on a journey for decades now, and that has been from a generalist view down into these very specific areas of expertise. The thinking is you can provide more value and, let's face it, earn more money if you're a specialist in a very ultra niche part of the marketing universe. My question is, what if we've been heading in the wrong direction? Hello and welcome back to The CMO Show. Thanks for joining us. The CMO Show is a podcast produced by Impact Institute in partnership with Adobe.
Now today we have a fascinating conversation with one of the pioneers in the customer experience and AI space, and he is from IBM. Now, IBM of course, has been around for a very, very long time. In fact, in digital speak, probably an eternity, 114 years. And my guest is Billy Seabrook, the global Chief Design Officer at IBM Consulting. Now we have a classic wide ranging conversation, as we like to say, which is just code for lots and lots of topics. But one thing I want to highlight from our conversation is what's going on in the world of how we get stuff done as marketers. We've been on a track into these sort of niche, ultra specialised forms of work. We think we'll earn more money, but we'll also provide more value. Well, his point is we need to think more generalist. How can we have a bigger perspective? And if we start collaborating more widely, it'll create more opportunities for us, of course, and for the organisation. It's a great perspective. Dig in and have a listen.
Mark Jones
Now I want to start right from the very beginning, which is IBM itself. What's it like working for Big Blue?
Billy Seabrook
Well, it's an adventure. There's always a new problem to solve either for ourselves or with clients. And of course IBM's been around for 114 years, so we like to think of ourselves as a 114 year startup, in the sense that we are constantly reinventing ourselves to stay current.
Mark Jones
As I formally say, the Madonna of IT.
Billy Seabrook
That's right.
Mark Jones
Now, IBM Consulting is where your focus lies.
Billy Seabrook
Correct.
Mark Jones
And what's so unique about that? And I'm interested actually from a customer point of view. So what do people think about, what do customers say to you when you begin talking with them about the IBM brand? Because I would've thought that's both a positive and a negative.
Billy Seabrook
It can be. Like I said, it's a 114 year old brand and it has changed quite a bit over the years. So just to give you some context, IBM's almost three companies in one. There's a huge research arm that we fund with over 5 billion worth of funding to invent the next new technology. So all of our AI innovation came out of research, our quantum computing, our hyper cloud is all run out of research. Now, what comes out of there, there are new technologies, new products that then can be commercialised in our technology group. That's the second pillar. So that's software and hardware. And that has changed over the years. I can get into that. And then consulting is the third arm. And we're actually the largest consultancy in a technology company in the world. It's a very unique position.
Mark Jones
How many people?
Billy Seabrook
We have 160,000 people in consulting at about 250-ish for the company worldwide. So within consulting we work with clients of all different industries on digital transformation effectively, but applying those technologies to their business challenges. So AI and automation, hybrid cloud transformation. But then for what I do, customer and employee experience design, bringing new products and services to life for our clients so they can drive new growth, take cost out, transform their businesses.
Mark Jones
You bring this global perspective to an interesting intersection of a few things actually. And I wanted to pick up on the fact that you do design, customer experience, you've got this consulting focus, and then the hardware and software that clearly that's a unique focus. What's the primary demand coming out of the client base? What are people asking you for?
Billy Seabrook
A lot of it is digital transformation work. It's how do we modernise our systems to deliver better customer experience? How can we use technology? That's typically the core. But what often comes up very quickly in the conversation is not just the digital transformation, but the cultural transformation that has to happen within their firm. That the human component is actually typically what needs to really be thought through and handling change management, upskilling, reskilling their operating model. If that's the fire, AI is the gasoline that's just been thrown all over that. So there's so much pressure to take cost out of the system, drive a differentiated value proposition, leverage the technology that they've invested in, get the most out of it, really to drive those employee and customer experiences. So what starts as a conversation around improving customer experience, maybe new content, maybe delivering new services, quickly becomes a conversation around employee experience and how you can enable them to basically deliver a better customer experience.
Mark Jones
Want to connect on a couple of threads here. One, employee experience, which quite rightly you pulled out as critical, right?
Billy Seabrook
Yeah.
Mark Jones
And by the way, North America and Australia, burnout, engagement, productivity, these are very, very hot topics, right?
Billy Seabrook
Yes.
Mark Jones
You've got to get that right as part of this broader solution. Then the transformation piece. We need people happily, positively engaged in digital technologies. And that, we talk about this a lot, but the change management associated with that. What have you seen change the most in the last, say five, 10 years? Because you've worked across some pretty interesting companies in your time, eBay and Citi and others.
Billy Seabrook
That's right.
Mark Jones
What would you say has been the biggest shift that you've noticed?
Billy Seabrook
Well, AI, you can't ignore AI. And the implication of AI in terms of augmenting human work in terms of thinking about your human workforce as well as your digital workforce, I think that's been the biggest shift. And how to get the most out of these technologies, with all the risks that are at play with them. In the marketing, obviously a big goal for decades has been personalised content at scale. That has been the aim for most marketers is to actually deliver it. But it's always been practically impossible because of the cost and time involved to generate that stuff. With AI, it actually is possible now. You can square that equation of faster, better, and cheaper and deliver that personalised content at scale really quickly.
Now the challenge is people see, okay, what's possible. They know why they should adopt AI, what they could use it for in most cases, like the use cases. But now it's the how, it's how do you actually do the change management, reskill, upskill, get the right tools in the hands of the workers, the proper enablement. But then it's all the more tricky stuff, which is making sure you've got the right compliance and governance in place, you've got your cost management under control. You can trust the output of the AI.
And we've leaned into it at IBM, we've leaned into it quite heavily in terms of adopting our own technologies so that we're not just consulting with no real lessons learned or experience. We have actually taken all of our own technology and applied it to ourselves to actually solve the same problems that our clients are asking us about And we've recognised in two years by applying AI and automation to a lot of our back office processes, we've unlocked $3.5 billion in productivity savings in just two years.
And that savings has fueled our growth engine. So we've been able to acquire companies, hire more people, a whole variety of things. We've taken that investment we put into research as well to continue to sort of invent the next technologies. And that has ultimately driven a more productive company as a whole, but more profitable company. So now our stock price is finally seeing a boost. And we are growing. We grew 5% last year, which was great turn around, thanks to applying AI to our service, like our back office processes.
Mark Jones
Can you give me some other examples of how that's flowing through? Because we're obviously familiar with a lot of those trends.
Billy Seabrook
Absolutely. So we call it client zero. So again, we're operating on ourselves before operate on clients. That's kind of the vision to unlock that growth. So we methodically went through our domains. So HR was our first, to look at what could we do to automate and add AI to make HR more efficient. We created these conversational agents where our employees can actually manage all these tasks through a chatbot effectively. We call it Ask HR. It's a 24/7 HR representative at your fingertips. But it's reduced our cost by 40%. So we've been able to streamline the HR team dramatically. So now we have a much thinner, smaller team, but more senior. So these are senior HR representatives that handle the complex tasks, the extra 6%.
Mark Jones
So like, "Can I go to Australia on a business trip and take some time off," for example?
Billy Seabrook
Yeah. Well, funny enough, and the next one that is live, we have Ask IBM, which is sort of the full agentic experience, where we have Ask HR, Ask IT, Ask Finance, Ask Procurement, all these individual use case specific bots, we now have Ask IBM is aggregates all of them. So you can do much more complex tasks like, I'm going to take a business trip to somewhere to hire this new person, or recruit and hire this new person and enable them with a new laptop and then put them on a trip to visit the client.
Mark Jones
So tell me then about the role of creativity and design in this consulting space. Because I think in marketing it comes on and off again in terms of hotness, right? Sometimes we're data driven and other times we're leaning back into traditional creative. In fact, I was talking to some creatives last week about the very simple power of a great TVC. These ideas never go away.
Billy Seabrook
Yeah. Brands still need storytelling, and that's where creatives can really play a big role. I do think with these new tools ... Obviously there are people on both sides of the fence. Some feel a little bit distressed by all these AI and the fear. There's some truth to that. And there's something you should lean into to really get used to these tools, understand ... Don't get left behind. I think there's something there. There's also a huge crowd of optimists thinking about, "Wow, I can do so much more now with these tools. I can be more of a generalist." I think when you look back in the creative field, call it 30 years ago, especially in the web world, digital world, there are really two types of players. There was a web designer and a web master, if you remember these terms.
Mark Jones
I do.
Billy Seabrook
And then over the years they really fractured out into all these specialist roles. Now there are like 20 to 30 different specialist roles within the world of digital creative. And I feel like AI's bringing that convergence back a bit. You're seeing more generalists. And you're able to do a lot more that previously wasn't possible.
Mark Jones
What are some of the projects that you've worked on that would best typify that?
Billy Seabrook
We did a campaign for the Masters where we sponsored the Masters, have for over 30 years.
Mark Jones
That's golf for people playing at home.
Billy Seabrook
Golf, yep. Big golf tournament. And we used Firefly. It was actually right after Firefly launched, Adobe Firefly, generative art capability. It was right after it launched and we got special permission from Adobe. So our CMO talked to their CMO to actually use it for the Masters digital performance media campaign, social media campaign. It was a great use case. It was a question mark that was the primary creative vehicle, but it was textured in all golf-related materials. So a question mark made out of tees, question made out of golf balls, sand, et cetera. The question was what if, is question mark. But using Firefly we generated hundreds if not thousands of these question marks in different textures that would've taken a digital artist weeks to render out. We did it in days. Launched a campaign, and it was the highest performing social media campaign of all time. And we saved time and money. I mean we did it 80% faster for less money, much more variation in the creative, and it performed 26 times engagement scores.
Mark Jones
You were talking about Ask IBM before, chat is employee interface, now we've got chat, marketing becomes chat, right?
Billy Seabrook
Yes.
Mark Jones
So there's an interesting thing emerging here, which is that our tasks and our functions, how we get stuff done is becoming an AI chat style-
Billy Seabrook
It's completely changing.
Mark Jones
And multimodal.
Billy Seabrook
It's completely changing user experience. I mean, as consumers, you're experiencing yourself, how often do you go onto Google now and in the search term you're asking a question or getting a recommendation or asking for a task to be done. And it's just that Gemini summary has kind of solved ... I mean very few people are clicking through deeper and actually browsing, searching and browsing. That behaviour is completely changing to-
Mark Jones
You just want the answer.
Billy Seabrook
... we're calling demanding and commanding.
Mark Jones
Yes.
Billy Seabrook
So what the implication there is for all the marketers is how do you rethink your approach to SEO and content generation so that it serves up to the AI models.
Mark Jones
Yes, correct.
Billy Seabrook
And it gets indexed properly.
Mark Jones
Well, to jump in, I wanted to go there, because in this world of design, creativity, transformation, ultimately the clients or the customers that we're serving are these AI engines.
Billy Seabrook
That's right.
Mark Jones
A lot of the futurists are now saying that the web as we know it is going away. It'll just become an abstraction, or if you like, a way of interfacing with data that's helping all of these distributed databases around the world. And so actually our prompt, our new, if you like, Google interface becomes your AI of choice, right?
Billy Seabrook
That's right.
Mark Jones
So what's your take on how we deal with that? Because it actually throws a lot of things into question.
Billy Seabrook
It really does. Well, it is starting with the data and rethinking, moving to a GEO versus an SEO, so generated engine optimization mindset. That's number one. But then from an interface standpoint, from a design standpoint, how do you differentiate? When you think about these chat interfaces, they're quite simplistic.
Mark Jones
Of course.
Billy Seabrook
How do you differentiate your approach and also have a logical design pattern for the type of assistant you're interacting with, the expected output, whether it's summarization or whatever the task is that you want that AI to do, and then the context of how it shows up on the interface. Because there are multiple ways. When you really start to think about it, you can have AI appear as sort of a placement on a website, you can have it be kind of a omnipresent banner down the side. It could be just that classic chat icon in the corner. Little pop-ups and modals. When you really start to break it down from a design system standpoint, there's a lot to be done. A lot of brands could benefit from having a very intentional approach to how their AI shows up.
And obviously you want to train your own AI to interface that knows your brand, knows the right things to say, is well-governed to almost interface with the other AI. So it's going to be like marketing to the machine is the expression I use. And then you're going to be almost taking a step back and seeing how the interactions unfold. And you're going to be playing more of a governance role to make sure you're catching the outliers or the experiences that go awry.
Mark Jones
A lot of marketers, CMOs, think about their marketing team as their primary tribe within a large organisation. And it can be just a small room of people or it can be in many cases quite large. The sort of future you're speaking about here is where a marketing team has no choice but to collaborate more deeply with product development, with sales, the customer experiences or customer service and on.
Billy Seabrook
Of course.
Mark Jones
So in order to have the sort of dynamic landscape you're speaking about, it really changes how we think about the teams in which we work. What's your take on what that's going to look like in the future?
Billy Seabrook
I think that's right and I think we've been on that trend for a while now in terms of forming these relationships across the C-suite and marketing and CMOs and CFOs and CIOs, really finding new forms of collaboration because you have to. It's all intertwined right now. Using methodologies that bring people together is becoming more and more important. So in the past, it sounds like an old methodology, a little bit past its prime, but design thinking is still an incredibly important method to apply in the age of AI in terms of bringing diverse stakeholders together to think, to identify a problem, collaboratively design for a solution through that human-centred lens. I think that's still an important method to be used in the age of AI. And bring these stakeholders together.
And then also, because what's also happening simultaneously is with these new tools people's roles are expanding. This generalist concept is coming back across design, across strategists, marketers, everybody. And creating this world of democratised marketing, democratised content creation.
Mark Jones
It'll be interesting to see how the distributed power and distributed decision-making takes place under that model.
Mark Jones
going back to your design thinking comment ... And by the way, I haven't heard that phrase for quite some time.
Billy Seabrook
I know.
Mark Jones
Thank you for bringing it back into my consciousness. I wonder when we think about the future of marketing transformation and this customer experience journey, I wonder whether designing for humans ironically becomes the focus. Because the issue we're facing from a governance and an ethics and a speed of change point of view is that with tech, with AI rather, we've got to keep reminding it of the humans.
Billy Seabrook
Yeah. Well, we just did a ... We have a research arm within IBM, a think tank called the IBV. Stands for IBM Institute of Business Value. And we do a lot of research across all different topics just every year.
Mark Jones
Of course.
Billy Seabrook
And we just released a study called the CMO Study. And we interview 1200, 1500 marketers and CMOs around what the trends that they're seeing and what are the challenges they have and where the future's going. And one of them, one of the five big insights or trends that we highlight in the report is this notion around designing for the human. But also when it comes to your workforce, hiring for heart is the expression we use, hire for heart, train for AI.
So what that's getting into is this notion that for companies to be successful, you do need the curious, creative, empathetic, ethics-oriented people to really design and deploy AI responsibly. And you really have to hire ... That's the innate human ability is to have a heart, right? So hire for those types of people, the people that you want to be in the boat with, and then you can train them on the AI. AI is always going to evolve and change and you can teach them the tools and enable them properly. But the thing that is the most important is make sure that your workforce has those ethics to almost keep a little bit of, again, that human in the loop, control over, and intent around how you're using AI properly.
Mark Jones
Are you suggesting that the most successful marketers in the future will be those with the kindest hearts?
Billy Seabrook
Well, yeah, that's the provocative thought. Yeah, it's the ones that care, that really do think about the impact of what they're putting out there in the world, all the different stakeholders and how that mpacts them. We did a different study actually two years ago. It was more focused on the designers, experience design, and it was asking that crowd basically what the impact of AI is going to have on the profession of experience design, et cetera. And we asked them to rank the most important skills that you're going to need, hard skills and soft skills. And no surprise, the skills that popped to the top were speed in decision making, creativity, using AI effectively. Those were the things that popped.
The two things that were thought of to be the least important were resilience, and I'll get to that in a second, and ethics and empathy. They thought, "We don't really need designers to have ethics and empathy." It was such a blind spot in the report. We were like, "Whoa," that how could people think that it's all just about how fast and hard you can work to get this AI model. And none of the human centeredness was popping. So this is interesting to see in the CMO Study, that almost that has changed. Now people are recognising, oh no, this is actually really important. You need to have an ethics council. You need to think about investing in proper training and make sure people have that sensitivity when they're rolling out these campaigns or these new experiences, that they're thinking about all the consequences that could happen, positive or negative.
Mark Jones
To take a broader view, it's interesting to see how this wider transformation story is becoming a story about sustainable workplaces.
Billy Seabrook
Well, that was the resilience thing. Thanks for ... If the promise is that you're working harder and faster, or you're quick decision maker and that theoretically you're getting your job done faster so you can take on another assignment sooner, that could-
Mark Jones
And go home on time.
Billy Seabrook
And go ... Yeah. You can start to see a future of burnout, where people are working at such a fast rhythm of constant output, constant output, is it just going to burn out? And that's why the resiliency ranking low I thought was kind of interesting, another blind spot. Because actually if it keeps going at this pace, there's a risk of burnout.
Mark Jones
Billy Seabrook, a fascinating conversation and an incredible window into your world of all these different interconnecting bits and pieces. Thank you so much for being my guest on The CMO Show.
Billy Seabrook
Yeah, thank you very much.
Mark Jones
One more thing I really am fascinated by is what's happening to the future of the web, which of course is the content engine that feeds AI. It's changing everything and it means that we won't be using the web in the same way, and we're going to be maybe using AI itself in different ways in times to come. I wonder what you took out of the episode. I hope you've taken some really great lessons on that topic and many more. Thanks for joining us on The CMO Show. As always, click a like on your podcast platform of choice, check us out on LinkedIn. And let us know if you've got any suggestions, who should we talk to? That's it for this episode. We'll see you next time.