IBM as a company barely makes sense at all at this point. They are a very large and a former tech company that mostly coasts along on doing expensive consulting projects around me-too clones of things that other people have invented just so they can still pretend to be a tech company. So you can do things with AI, cloud, and databases with them. But they aren't really leaders in any of that for a long time. And having been exposed to some of that stuff, they aren't very good at it even but they can still get some things done. They still have lots of ancient tech from last century that they support of course. But mostly a new company starting their business today would have very little reason to engage with IBM on anything. There's very little that they do that you can't get cheaper and better elsewhere.
So, IBM using this opportunity to cut down their own org tree a bit more and "replace it with AI" (or simply drop some people) is not unexpected. Because consulting related to doing exactly that is probably what they'll be selling a lot for the next few years. Basically, as world + dog is trying to figure out how to fit AI into their businesses, consulting related to that is going to be booming. And IBM is a consulting company. A lot of their previous efforts are actually powering the backoffice of course. So now that AI is going to replace all of that, that basically means there is going to be a lot of consulting happening as to how that would work. So that's a good business opportunity.