Welcome back. Arvind Krishna, who is succeeding Ginni Rometty as CEO of IBM, says AI is fundamental to all companies. Last year, as head of the company's cloud and cognitive software business, he explained that vision in an interview with The Wall Street Journal's Yun-Hee Kim. Today, we feature highlights from that conversation at the Journal's Future of Everything Festival. 

Newsletter Extra: How IBM's new CEO thinks about AI. Arvind Krisha, who succeeds Ginni Rometty as CEO of International Business Machines Corp. has been associated most recently with IBM's efforts in cloud computing. He played a pivotal role in IBM's acquisition last year of open-source software giant Red Hat for approximately $33 billion. Red Hat’s software enables IT managers to modernize older applications and run them both in data centers and across various cloud providers, among other features, as CIO Journal reported last year. 

Mr. Krishna's portfolio is broader than cloud, though. As head of IBM's cloud and cognitive software efforts, he was deeply involved in developing the role of AI in the company's business model. He shared his views on that subject last year at the Journal's Future of Everything Festival, where he was interviewed on stage by the Journal's Yun-Hee Kim. He said current AI applications were useful, but narrowly focused. 

Mr. Krishna, who studied at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, and received an electrical engineering doctorate from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, comes with a technology background that could help IBM as the tech sector undergoes further change, the Journal said. IBM topped the U.S. patent list in 2019, and he has been awarded 15 of his own during his career. He argues that broader corporate adoption of AI is coming, and has helped position IBM to capture that spending as it seeks to ramp up growth.

IBM sales have fallen around 25% in the past eight years, as other tech companies’ top lines have soared, the Journal said.

IBM’s AI efforts often are associated with its heavily marketed Watson brand. In 2017, the company said it would invest $250 million over 10 years in the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, to advance hardware, software and algorithms. Mr. Krishna told the Journal last year that its AI platforms often operate in the background of customer deployments.

Mr. Krisha also responded to reports that some of its AI efforts had not panned out.

Aquant raised a $30 million series B round, led by Insight Partners with participation from existing investors including Lightspeed Venture Partners, Angular Ventures, and Silvertech Ventures, AlleyWatch reported. Aquant, based in New York, uses AI to transform customer insights, reviews and information from industry experts into “digestible and comprehensible” form, AlleyWatch said.

The U.S. imposed entry restrictions on foreign nationals and quarantines on Americans returning from the Chinese province at the center of a deadly virus outbreak, as markets tumbled over fears about the impact on global growth. (WSJ)

Senate Republicans rejected Democrats’ demands to call new witnesses and documents in President Trump’s impeachment trial, clearing the way for a likely acquittal next week on abuse of power and obstruction of Congress charges. (WSJ)

The U.K. has formally quit the EU, closing the chapter on nearly half a century of integration with its European neighbors. (WSJ)

Write to Enterprise Technology Editor Steven Rosenbush and Pro AI Deputy Editor John McCormick.

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