IBM sees enterprise customers are using ‘everything’ when it comes to AI, the challenge is matching the LLM to the right use case

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Over the last 100 years, IBM has seen many different tech trends rise and fall. What tends to win out are technologies where there is choice.

At VB Transform 2025 today, Armand Ruiz, VP of AI Platform at IBM detailed how Big Blue is thinking about generative AI and how its enterprise users are actually deploying the technology. A key theme that Ruiz emphasized is that at this point, it’s not about choosing a single large language model (LLM) provider or technology. Increasingly, enterprise customers are systematically rejecting single-vendor AI strategies in favor of multi-model approaches that match specific LLMs to targeted use cases.

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IBM has its own open-source AI models with the Granite family, but it is not positioning that technology as the only choice, or even the right choice for all workloads. This enterprise behavior is driving IBM to position itself not as a foundation model competitor, but as what Ruiz referred to as a control tower for AI workloads.