CEO respondents say they expect the growth rate of AI investments will more than double over the next two years50% of surveyed CEOs report that rapid investment has resulted in disconnected technology within their organization

ARMONK, N.Y., May 6, 2025 /PRNewswire/ — A new global study by the IBM (NYSE: IBM) Institute for Business Value found that surveyed CEOs are committed to advancing AI solutions across their organization even as they face challenges from accelerating technology adoption.

The IBM CEO study,* which surveyed 2,000 CEOs globally, revealed that executive respondents expect the growth rate of AI investments to more than double in the next two years, and 61% confirm they are actively adopting AI agents today and preparing to implement them at scale.

According to the findings, 68% of surveyed CEOs identify integrated enterprise-wide data architecture as critical for cross-functional collaboration, and 72% view their organization’s proprietary data as key to unlocking the value of generative AI. However, the research indicates organizations may be struggling to cultivate an effective data environment: half (50%) of respondents acknowledge that the pace of recent investments has left their organization with disconnected, piecemeal technology.

In the foreword of the study, IBM Vice Chairman Gary Cohn writes, “As AI adoption accelerates creating greater efficiency, and productivity gains, the ultimate pay-off will only come to CEOs with the courage to embrace risk as opportunity. Meaning, focusing on what you can control, especially when there is so much you can’t. When the business environment is uncertain, using AI and your enterprise data to identify where you have leverage is a competitive advantage. At this point, leaders who aren’t leveraging AI and their own data to move forward are making a conscious business decision not to compete.”

“CEOs are balancing the pressures of short-term ROI and investing in long-term innovation when it comes to adopting AI,” said Mohamad Ali, Senior Vice President and Head of IBM Consulting. “But we know that organizations that keep innovating, especially during periods of uncertainty, will emerge stronger and be better positioned to capitalize on new opportunities.”

Other key findings include:

CEOs face competing pressures of short-term ROI and long-term innovation

Surveyed CEOs report that only 25% of AI initiatives have delivered expected ROI over the last few years, and only 16% have scaled enterprise wide.To accelerate progress, two-thirds (65%) of CEO respondents say their organization is leaning into AI use cases based on ROI, with 68% reporting that their organization has clear metrics to measure innovation ROI effectively.Just over half (52%) of CEO respondents say their organization is realizing value from generative AI investments beyond cost reduction.64% of CEOs surveyed acknowledge that the risk of falling behind drives investment in some technologies before they have a clear understanding of the value they bring to the organization, but only 37% say it’s better to be “fast and wrong” than “right and slow” when it comes to technology adoption.59% of surveyed CEOs admit their organization struggles to balance funding for existing operations and investment in innovation when unexpected change occurs, as 67% say more budget flexibility is needed to capitalize on digital opportunities that drive long-term growth and innovation.By 2027, 85% of surveyed CEOs expect their investments in scaled AI efficiency and cost savings to have returned a positive ROI, while 77% expect to see a positive return from their investments in scaled AI growth and expansion.

CEOs see strategic leadership and specialized talent as essential to unlocking AI value, amid expertise and skills gaps

69% of CEO respondents say their organization’s success is directly tied to maintaining a broad group of leaders with a deep understanding of strategy and the authority to make critical decisions.67% of CEOs surveyed say that differentiation depends on having the right expertise in the right positions with the right incentives.CEOs cite lack of collaboration across organizational silos, aversion to risk and disruption, and lack of expertise and knowledge as top barriers to innovation in their organization.Surveyed CEOs say roughly one-third (31%) of the workforce will require retraining and/or reskilling over the next three years, while 65% say their organization will use automation to address skill gaps.54% of CEO respondents say they are hiring for roles related to AI that did not exist a year ago.

To view the full study, visit: https://www.ibm.com/thought-leadership/institute-business-value/en-us/c-suite-study/ceo

*Study Methodology
The IBM Institute for Business Value, in cooperation with Oxford Economics, surveyed 2,000 CEOs from 33 countries and 24 industries between February and April 2025. Survey questions covered several key areas, including organizational performance, strategic priorities and innovation challenges. The survey also explored how companies manage change, adopt technology like AI, make decisions, leadership approaches, talent strategies, cultural readiness for transformation, collaboration efforts and regulatory concerns.

The IBM Institute for Business Value, IBM’s thought leadership think tank, combines global research and performance data with expertise from industry thinkers and leading academics to deliver insights that make business leaders smarter. For more world-class thought leadership, visit: www.ibm.com/ibv. To receive more insights, subscribe to the IdeaWatch newsletter: https://ibm.co/ibv-ideawatch. 

About IBM
IBM is a leading provider of global hybrid cloud and AI, and consulting expertise. We help clients in more than 175 countries capitalize on insights from their data, streamline business processes, reduce costs and gain the competitive edge in their industries. Thousands of governments and corporate entities in critical infrastructure areas such as financial services, telecommunications and healthcare rely on IBM’s hybrid cloud platform and Red Hat OpenShift to affect their digital transformations quickly, efficiently and securely. IBM’s breakthrough innovations in AI, quantum computing, industry-specific cloud solutions and consulting deliver open and flexible options to our clients. All of this is backed by IBM’s long-standing commitment to trust, transparency, responsibility, inclusivity and service. Visit www.ibm.com for more information.

Media Contact
Marisa Conway
IBM Communications
conwaym@us.ibm.com

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KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia, May 6, 2025 /PRNewswire/ — The highly anticipated Malaysia Blockchain Week (MYBW) is back in 2025 to drive our blockchain ecosystem towards global prominence. The inaugural event returns after its successful debut last year, this time with a bold theme of “Lift-Off”, signifying a pivotal moment for Malaysia’s blockchain ecosystem to grow bigger, better, and badder.

“The theme ‘Lift-Off’ reflects our ambition to accelerate Malaysia’s role within the global sphere. MYBW aims to be the movement that brings together visionaries from across various sectors and industry to build real change.” – Dr Ian Tan, Lydian Labs.

Now in its second year, MYBW 2025 promises to once again serve as the launchpad in Malaysia for innovation, education, investments, and regulatory progress in the decentralised era.

Malaysia is well-poised to jet set into the future, with blockchain technology firmly backed by industry leaders as well as the national government.

“It’s clear that government leadership is essential in driving blockchain adoption—such as through digitisation and exploring tokenisation of financial instruments and other use cases. With the right steps, Malaysia can position itself at the forefront of this global digital transformation.” – Prime Minister Dato’ Seri Anwar bin Ibrahim on X.

UPLIFTING CONNECTIONS

With Malaysia’s growing prominence in the global blockchain landscape, MYBW 2025 aims to bring together industry leaders, policymakers, project founders, venture capitalists, and Web3 pioneers to drive further growth.

MYBW’s focus is to bridge emerging blockchain opportunities with real-world applications to reinforce Malaysia’s burgeoning digital landscape in the global blockchain movement. From Web3 veterans to grassroots freshies, the Web3 playground has limitless potential for everyone.

As title sponsor of MYBW 2025, IOTA brings global credibility and nearly a decade of blockchain innovation to the event. IOTA stands out as one of the few projects in the industry that has consistently prioritized real-world adoption over short-term hype, delivering trusted infrastructure for governments, enterprises, and developers worldwide.

With the recent launch of its new Mainnet built on the Move programming language, IOTA delivers a secure, scalable, and programmable Layer 1 infrastructure that enables fast, cost-efficient transactions and advanced smart contract capabilities. As the first organization registered under the DLT Foundations Regulations of Abu Dhabi Global Market (ADGM) and recognized as Shariah-compliant by the Cambridge Institute of Islamic Finance, IOTA brings a unique blend of regulatory credibility and ethical alignment – making it an ideal partner to help elevate MYBW 2025 as a global hub for blockchain innovation.

“IOTA is proud to be the title sponsor of Malaysia Blockchain Week 2025, marking a shared commitment to inclusive innovation and responsible technology. With our new Mainnet, we offer a secure and efficient foundation for a truly decentralized digital economy – and we look forward to connecting with builders across Malaysia who are ready to build their solutions on IOTA,” says Dominik Schiener, Co-Founder and Chairman of the IOTA Foundation.

MYBW is working hand-in-hand with the digital collective ARC, while also being proudly supported by Tourism Malaysia and Malaysia Digital Economy Corporation (MDEC).

Other official partners joining this cause include new L2 blockchain Titan Chain, AI-platform Aimazin, crypto investment platform Luno, accessible blockchain solutions provider Masverse, digital currency trading platform Tokenize Xchange, open metaverse activation blockchain The Root Network, and more. Stay tuned for more official information from our media partners Etherscan, bitcoin.com, and more.

With all the right people in the right place, this launchpad will create a powerful platform for meaningful dialogue, strategic collaboration, investment opportunities, and forward-thinking solutions.

READY, SET, GO

This year, visitors can look forward to stacked activities and opportunities to network with both local and international names.

Keep an eye out for exclusive airdrop giveaways, keynotes, and various activations that truly bridge the gap between Web3 and reality. MYBW 2025 also welcomes the return of their popular Hackathon, Demo Day, VC Pitch Sessions and more than 100 side events to make the week a truly accomplished one.

Early bird tickets for MYBW are already available on the official website. There are a limited number of discounted tickets, so grab yours today!

EVENT DETAILS:

Date: 21 – 22 July 2025
Location: World Trade Centre Kuala Lumpur (WTCKL)
Website details: https://myblockchainweek.com/

About Lydian Labs

Lydian Labs is a full stack Web3 solutions provider focused on the APAC region and China, providing 3 main pillars of services: Advisory, Tech, and Marketing.

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To know more about Lydian Labs, visit https://bit.ly/LydianLabs or find them on X (formerly known as Twitter).

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SOURCE Malaysia Blockchain Week (MYBW)

ARMONK, N.Y., May 6, 2025 /PRNewswire/ — IBM (NYSE: IBM) is working with Oracle to bring the power of watsonx, IBM’s flagship portfolio of AI products, to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). Leveraging OCI’s native AI services, the latest milestone in IBM’s technology partnership with Oracle is designed to fuel a new era of multi-agentic, AI-driven productivity and efficiency across the enterprise.

Organizations today are deploying AI throughout their operations, looking to take advantage of the extraordinary advancements in generative AI models, tools, and agents. AI agents that can provide a single, easy-to-use interface to complete tasks are emerging as key tools to help simplify the deployment and use of AI across enterprise operations and functions. 

“AI delivers the most impactful value when it works seamlessly across an entire business,” said Greg Pavlik, executive vice president, AI and Data Management Services, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. “IBM and Oracle have been collaborating to drive customer success for decades, and our expanded partnership will provide customers new ways to help transform their businesses with AI.”

Watsonx Orchestrate to support multi-agent workflows
To give customers a consistent way to build and manage agents across multi-agent, multi-system business processes, spanning both Oracle and non-Oracle applications and data sources, IBM is making its watsonx Orchestrate AI agent offerings available on OCI in July. This multi-agent approach using wastonx Orchestrate is designed to work with the expansive AI agent offerings embedded within the Oracle AI Agent Studio for Fusion Applications, as well as OCI Generative AI Agents, and OCI’s other AI services. It extends the ecosystem around Oracle Fusion Applications to enable further functionality across third-party and custom applications and data sources. The first use cases being addressed are in human resources. The watsonx Orchestrate agents will perform AI inferencing on OCI, which many customers use to host their data, AI, and other applications.

IBM agents run in watsonx Orchestrate on Red Hat OpenShift on OCI, including in public, sovereign, government, and Oracle Alloy regions, to enable customers to address specific regulatory and privacy requirements. The agents can also be hosted on-premises or in multicloud environments for true hybrid cloud capabilities.

IBM Granite Models Hosted on OCI Data Science
To give customers more choice of fit-for-purpose, compact and efficient models, Oracle intends to make the IBM Granite family of AI models available through its OCI Data Science via AI Quick Actions. To streamline Granite access, the open-source Granite models are expected to be available within OCI as a cached LLM in the second half of this year.

“By integrating our AI with Oracle’s offerings, we’re enabling businesses to easily deploy and manage AI agents across their enterprise,” said Kareem Yusuf Ph.D, Senior Vice President, Ecosystem, Strategic Partners & Initiatives, IBM. “Our collaboration with Oracle illustrates how IBM and our partners offer clients a seamless and flexible path to scale AI.” 

IBM Software to be Available on OCI
Oracle and IBM also plan to make IBM Envizi ESG Suite available on OCI, with an initial release in Saudi Arabia expected within the next 12 months. IBM Envizi is an enterprise sustainability solution that automates the capture, management and reporting of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) data.   

IBM’s watsonx.ai is now certified to run on OCI, enabling customers to leverage its industry-leading scalability and performance for bare metal and virtual machine instances with the benefits of the Red Hat OpenShift. Watsonx.ai is an enterprise-grade developer studio for building, running, and managing AI applications. Bringing  watsonx.ai to OCI can help organizations develop AI services on OCI, where they may already have applications and data, and deploy them into their application of choice with a collection of the APIs, tools, models, and runtimes.

Expanded Oracle Services from IBM Consulting
IBM is introducing expanded consulting services to help customers turn enterprise strategy into enterprise outcomes by enabling the use of AI agents across multiple platforms to transform end-to-end business processes. Leveraging deep technology and industry expertise, IBM Consulting will help customers orchestrate their agentic ecosystem by integrating, building, and scaling AI agents, including native Oracle AI agents, watsonx Orchestrate AI agents, and agents from across IBM’s partner ecosystem. IBM Consulting will also advise customers on how AI agents impact enterprise operating models and the workforce, including change management and enabling new ways of working. IBM consultants bring deep expertise in transforming core business processes like HR and supply chain as well as capabilities in its AI-powered delivery platform, IBM Consulting Advantage, to deliver value quickly.

IBM Consulting is offering new services that leverage AI-powered assets and methods to help Oracle customers migrate their workloads from on-premises virtual machines to Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization on OCI bare metal cloud. This service helps customers migrate and modernize their infrastructure as they deploy with the proven virtualization of the OpenShift container platform running on OCI to provide flexible infrastructure for both legacy applications and AI and hybrid multicloud workloads.

IBM brings deep expertise in business transformation with OCI and Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications, backed by a 38-year strategic partnership spanning technology and services, thousands of consultants who are certified across core Oracle technologies, and the acquisitions of Oracle consultancies Accelalpha and Applications Software Technology LLC.

Oracle and IBM also intend to pilot a joint go-to-market approach in select markets to help bring these new services and capabilities to customers.

“Agents are becoming an important strategic advantage for organizations to optimize operations and deliver better customer and employee experiences,” said Ritu Jyoti, IDC General Manager and Group Vice President. “Today’s most advanced agents are able to interact across different systems and processes, unleashing greater productivity and driving wider adoption. The Agentic AI approach IBM is taking with Oracle is a leading example of how the ability to orchestrate agentic workflows across systems can drive significant advantages, streamlining how work gets done and unlocking growth and innovation.”

For more information about this collaboration between IBM and Oracle, please visit: https://www.ibm.com/consulting/oracle

Statements regarding IBM’s future direction and intent are subject to change or withdrawal without notice and represent goals and objectives only.

About IBM
IBM is a leading provider of global hybrid cloud and AI, and consulting expertise. We help clients in more than 175 countries capitalize on insights from their data, streamline business processes, reduce costs and gain a competitive edge in their industries. Thousands of governments and corporate entities in critical infrastructure areas such as financial services, telecommunications and healthcare rely on IBM’s hybrid cloud platform and Red Hat OpenShift to affect their digital transformations quickly, efficiently and securely. IBM’s breakthrough innovations in AI, quantum computing, industry-specific cloud solutions and consulting deliver open and flexible options to our clients. All of this is backed by IBM’s long-standing commitment to trust, transparency, responsibility, inclusivity and service. Visit www.ibm.com for more information.

About Oracle
Oracle offers integrated suites of applications plus secure, autonomous infrastructure in the Oracle Cloud. For more information about Oracle (NYSE: ORCL), please visit us at www.oracle.com.

Trademarks
Oracle, Java, MySQL and NetSuite are registered trademarks of Oracle Corporation. NetSuite was the first cloud company—ushering in the new era of cloud computing.

Media Contacts:
Holli Haswell, IBM Communications
hhaswell@us.ibm.com

Calin Gunn, Oracle Communications
calin.gunn@oracle.com

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SOURCE IBM