IBM used its latest earnings call to argue that a sharp software sales slowdown in the second quarter was a temporary blip caused by enterprises prioritising AI infrastructure spending, not a sign of deeper trouble. The company's stock had already taken a steep hit after preliminary results suggested customers were pulling back, so this earnings call was an attempt to reassure investors that the delayed deals would eventually materialise rather than vanish entirely. Analysts remained sceptical during the Q&A, pressing IBM on whether the demand was truly deferred or permanently lost.

CEO Arvind Krishna said large capital expenditure deals with major clients had stalled in Q2 as budgets went instead towards servers, storage and memory, but noted that around a third of those postponed deals had already closed in the first three weeks of the new quarter. Krishna also pitched AI as a fresh revenue opportunity, highlighting a new $1 million-a-year service called Project Lightwell, which uses AI to find and fix security vulnerabilities in ageing open-source software; he cited Anthropic's Mythos model as having accelerated vulnerability discovery, and named early adopters including Bank of America, Citi, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Mastercard, Morgan Stanley, Visa and Wells Fargo.