IBM's Arvind Krishna says most AI use will move to open models

Arvind Krishna, who is chairman and CEO of IBM, expects most companies to move to AI that anyone can download and run for free. He said so on the podcast All-In, in an episode posted Wednesday.

This touches everyday life through cost. If businesses pay far less to run AI, the apps and services you use could get cheaper. It could also mean more company data stays in house.

Krishna said a company could run a Chinese open-weight model on its own chips. He put today's price at $20 for a million tokens, the small chunks of text AI is billed by. He said a week of engineering work could cut that to $1 to $2. He asked who would turn down "a 40 times cheaper answer for effectively what can do 95% of the work". He also named privacy and politics as reasons. He expects 75 to 90% of usage to move to open models.

CRN reported Thursday that IBM's enterprise AI bet is paying off. Its story says third-quarter 2026 revenue climbed as enterprise AI, Red Hat OpenShift, hybrid cloud, automation and quantum computing fueled growth and demand.

IBM sells AI and cloud software to companies, so it has a stake here. Krishna said the best open models today are Chinese. He expects Western ones to catch up, with a gap of 6 to 12 months at most. Nikesh Arora, on the same panel, said the priciest AI should be saved for high-value jobs like stopping a breach.

Watch the 6 minutes where Krishna makes the case.9:01