IBM CEO Arvind Krishna is continuing his about-face on AI, saying he doesn’t believe AI will be responsible for writing the majority of code.

Krishna sparked controversy in 2023 when he announced his goal to replace as much as 30% of IBM’s back-office roles with AI. In the aftermath of his comments, Krishna tried to walk them back, saying he didn’t plan to get rid of developer roles.

“I don’t intend to get rid of a single one,” he said. “I’ll get more.”

Despite the promise, IBM did proceed to lay off a number of developers and programmers. According to a report in late 2024, Krishna’s plans appear to be backfiring, with IBM struggling to field enough senior software engineers.

“The whole outsourced to AI thing is a myth that somehow our upper echelon of execs believes exists right now,” one source told The Register at the time. “The truth is that Watsonx [IBM’s generative AI offering] isn’t even available to employees to attempt to try and help automate some meaningless task. It’s so far behind OpenAI and ChatGPT that it’s not even close.”

According to TechCrunch, Krishna appears to now believe that AI will write a minority of the code companies rely on.

“I think the number is going to be more like 20-30% of the code could get written by AI — not 90%” Krishna said at SXSW, referencing a recent statement by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei. “Are there some really simple use cases? Yes, but there’s an equally complicated number of ones where it’s going to be zero.”

“If you can do 30% more code with the same number of people, are you going to get more code written or less?” he added. “Because history has shown that the most productive company gains market share, and then you can produce more products, which lets you get more market share.”

He also emphasized the need to use AI as a tool to complement programmers, not replace them.

“It’s a tool,” Krishna said. “If the quality that everybody produces becomes better using these tools, then even for the consumer, now you’re consuming better-quality [products].”

The statements are an interesting turn of events for a CEO who made so many headlines with his bullish take on AI replacing human personnel.