IBM Ditches Billion-Dollar AI Metric Amid Shift to New Tracking Method

International Business Machines (IBM) has stopped reporting on its AI wins in billions of dollars, but the work itself hasn't gone anywhere. Generative AI still makes up about half of Consulting signings and over 30% of the Consulting backlog.

The company used to track its generative-AI business won as a single figure that carried most of the AI story. However, this number stopped appearing in public reports after the July 2025 call. Management never said it would retire this figure; it simply stopped appearing when IBM's performance fell short of expectations.

Now, the company tells its AI story through products like watsonx Orchestrate, which is described as the control plane for building and governing agents. The recurring software base also carries a significant portion of annual revenue, with about 80% being recurring subscriptions and consumption across products like Red Hat, HashiCorp, and Confluent.