And so, after eight years spent leading one of the world's oldest and most famous technology businesses, IBM's CEO Ginni Rometty will step down in April. Stepping up to the CEO role is Arvind Krishna, who currently serves as the senior VP for the company's cloud and cognitive software unit. When the news came out on Thursday, IBM's shares jumped as much as 5%. Fingers can easily be pointed at Rometty's mixed legacy: during her tenure, the company's stock price dropped over 25% and while the company has been keen to trumpet its artificial intelligence work (in the form of IBM Watson) and its reinvention as a cloud company (thanks to Red Hat) there is still plenty of work to do if IBM is to every approach its former glories. Sure, the latest earnings published by IBM earlier this month beat Q4 expectations.

IBM's journey toward cognitive computing is well documented in the media. Cognitive computing is loosely defined as a simulating of human thought processes in a computerized model. It's a self-learning system that mimics the way the human brain works. Cognitive computing is an evolution of the artificial intelligence work that started in the 1960's. Many people are familiar with IBM's cognitive computing product, called Watson, through the famous Jeopardy episode where Watson won the game in 2011.

The chief executive of technology giant IBM has urged Australian business leaders to plan for dramatic changes to their organisations and the workforce caused by artificial intelligence and advances in quantum computing. Ginni Rometty, who has run the $US120 billion company since 2012 and is in Australia to sign an AI deal with Woodside Petroleum and attend other customer meetings, said business leaders must change their approach to hiring or risk being left behind. Ms Rometty gave a keynote address at a cloud computing conference in Sydney on Tuesday, alongside Woodside chief executive Peter Coleman who told the event he expects AI technology to slice maintenance costs in its plants by 30 per cent a year - or around $300 million. Mr Coleman said this is one of several applications being developed with IBM that also include automating production and improving cybersecurity. Westpac Banking Corp chief executive Brian Hartzer also spoke at the event.

I am often asked about artificial intelligence and the future of work. My answer is that A.I. will change 100% of current jobs. It will change the job of a factory worker. It will change the job of a software developer, of a customer service agent, of a professional driver. And it will change my job as the CEO of one of the biggest technology companies in the world.

If you work at IBM or a company equipped with their artificially intelligent employee retention software, your planned two-week's notice may already be old news. According to a recent panel discussion with IBM's CEO, Ginni Rometty, at a Work Talent and Human Resources Summit in New York, the company's'predictive attrition' software is now 95 percent accurate in determining when an employee is ready to quit. Using their predicative software, Rometty says that IBM has been able to preempt employees on the cusp of quitting, bolstering their retention rates, which has reportedly saved them $300 million. Human resources may need a new name as a host of new software has begun to disrupt jobs and efficiency. Among the many AI-powered tools being developed by IBM for human resources is'predictive attrition.'

IBM's Chair, CEO and President Ginni Rometty has a powerful message for workers and employers in all strata of society: The Fourth Industrial Revolution is underway and it is shaping up to be one of the most significant challenges and opportunities of our lifetime. We are already seeing jobs, policies, industries and entire economies shifting as our digital and physical worlds merge. According to the World Economic Forum, the value of digital transformations in the Fourth Industrial Revolution is estimated at $100 trillion in the next 10 years alone, across all sectors, industries and geographies. "As a result, we face an imminent and profound transformation of the workforce over the next five to 10 years as analytics and artificial intelligence change job roles at companies in all industries," Rometty said while giving a keynote address at the CNBC's At Work Talent & HR: Building the Workforce of the Future Conference in New York on Tuesday, April 2. In February, the executive was appointed to Trump's American Workforce Policy Advisory Board along with 24 other leaders. While only a minority of jobs will disappear, the majority of roles that remain will require people to work with the aid of analytics and some form of AI and this will require skills training on a large scale, Rometty said.

IBM enabled Watson AI to run across the enterprise data centers and mainstream public cloud platforms. Branded as Watson Anywhere, the flagship data and analytics platform that was initially built for the IBM Cloud can be deployed in a variety of environments including VMware, IBM Cloud Private, AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform. At the THINK 2019 conference hosted in San Francisco, Ginni Rometty, IBM's CEO announced Watson Anywhere. IBM Watson Anywhere is built on top of Kubernetes, the open source orchestration engine that can be deployed in diverse environments. Since the Watson Anywhere platform is built as a set of microservices designed to run on Kubernetes, it is flexible and portable.

IBM enabled Watson AI to run across the enterprise data centers and mainstream public cloud platforms. Branded as Watson Anywhere, the flagship data and analytics platform that was initially built for the IBM Cloud can be deployed in a variety of environments including VMware, IBM Cloud Private, AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform. At the THINK 2019 conference hosted in San Francisco, Ginni Rometty, IBM's CEO announced Watson Anywhere. IBM Watson Anywhere is built on top of Kubernetes, the open source orchestration engine that can be deployed in diverse environments. Since the Watson Anywhere platform is built as a set of microservices designed to run on Kubernetes, it is flexible and portable.

At this year's Think 2019 the world was privy to many a critical lesson, inspiring story and valuable insight, and while the event of the year may now be wrapped up, journeys to becoming a more cognitive enterprise are almost certainly underway. Fifty keynote speakers, 2000 sessions and 180 sponsors made the event a place of infinite ideas, one that played host to the innovation, insights and integrity essential to your clients' and business partners' transformation. But it's far from over, and the spotlight is not only on our technological future more than ever, but IBM itself. With that in mind, we've put together a selection of the most popular articles to come out of the event: In a keynote covering what Ginni Rimetty dubs'chapter two' for digital transformation, she explains that we're now coming out of the experimentation stage and can start to focus on gaining speed and scale. "I think this chapter two of digital and AI is about scaling now and embedding it everywhere in your business. I think this chapter two, when it comes to the cloud, is hybrid. And this chapter two is driven by mission-critical apps. But underpinning it, for all of us, is a chapter two in trust."

Ginni Rometty, chief executive officer of International Business Machines Corp. (IBM), speaks during the IBM Think Conference in San Francisco, California, U.S. Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg photo credit: 2019 Bloomberg Finance LP 2019 Bloomberg Finance LP The title of this article comes from one of many memorable (and tweetable) lines I heard from one of the speakers at IBM's THINK 2019 conference in San Francisco. This is one of the major conferences focused on AI, data, and technology that drives business today. I attended sessions that had universal business lessons for the forward-thinking company. Here is a summary of some takeaways. Ginni Rometty, IBM's CEO, came out strong in her "Chairman's Presentation" with another provocative statement: "Data is the basis for the competitive advantage."