In an interview with EXAME, the president of IBM in Brazil, Marcelo Braga, says that the pandemic has accelerated the adoption of technologies such as cloud computing, but this growth requires effort for the professionalization of new workers.

In an interview with EXAME, the president of IBM in Brazil, Marcelo Braga, says that the pandemic has accelerated the adoption of technologies such as cloud computing, but this growth requires effort for the professionalization of new workers.

It hasn’t been that long since the American tech giant IBM changed almost everything about its operations in Brazil. To defend the company’s leadership in the cloud and Artificial Intelligence segments, its most dominant field, the company launched the executive Marcelo Braga as president of IBM Brazil just over 10 months ago.

With 24 years in the company, knowing well the business vision for which the company is oriented, and with an intense contact with the market, Braga is an enthusiast of the world of data. The defense he makes, above all, is that the potential of digital transformation, despite accelerated in the pandemic, is still in its infancy.

In the next step, according to the executive, companies that are equipped with technologies operated in cloud services, with well-formed, organized and adapted IT teams, will enjoy the benefits of artificial intelligence. This factor will completely expand the capacity of these companies.

So, of course, Braga highlights that the global movement to invest in the cutting edge of professionalization in technology must respond in the future to a large part of the efficiency gain – something fundamental in moments where there are supply crises and instabilities in global geopolitics.

After you took office, what challenges did you find on the horizon at IBM?

We are going through a very important moment of market repositioning. On the one hand, we are committed to being a technological foundation for the largest companies in the world, and on the other, the digital transformation that involves the migration to the cloud of many businesses. Both are directions in which we must go. With the objective, above all, of keeping IBM as a catalyst for companies and people to succeed. Today we have a leaner and more agile operation, which operates in the hardware and software segments, but also in specialized migration services consulting and which has the challenge of scaling the use of artificial intelligence (AI).

What would you highlight as specific challenges for the Brazilian market?

In the position I am in now at IBM I have the ability to positively reach many more people. And knowing that we have a talent blackout for the tech industry, and that demand for professionals is happening all over the world at the same time, IBM has a global plan to empower 30 million people with the new skills needed for the jobs of the future by 2030. In this sense, in Brazil we have ‘IBM SkillsBuild‘, which is a project that we carried out with the Santa Maria City Hall, in Rio Grande do Sul, where we train students and teachers from the public school system in topics related to technology, such as computing cloud computing, artificial intelligence and programming, all at no cost. It is an essential work when we look at a market that today lacks at least 460 thousand IT professionals. If we don’t get together with society, other companies and governments, problems of this kind will not be solved.

In the last two years, many companies have transformed their business by applying more technology to operations, but with the ‘end of the pandemic’, digital transformation still remains the main watchword?

Depending on the industry and segment, things accelerate quickly. However, not all sectors were like this. Retail, for example, has already surpassed some important milestones. Banks as well. Even the government has implemented changes in this regard. But basic industries are still far behind in this cycle. I would say that it is still important to move towards digitalization, adding that for those who are already on this path, it will be necessary to solve problems that arise when you gain a higher level of digital maturity. Among them: gaining scale, controlling the supply chain, and strengthening data security, a topic that almost all conversations about digitization pass through. So the orientation is to organize within this new era.

And how has IBM done to bring its technologies, which usually focus on large companies, closer to companies and sectors that are still at the beginning of these digitization cycles?

The time when large companies were the center of innovation, in a way, is over. IBM, for example, has been the patent leader in the world for 28 years, but in a