Q&A With IBM’s New GM Of Power, Hillery Hunter - IT Jungle

May 11, 2026

IBM’s new general manager of Power, Hillery Hunter, made a solid first impression on the IBM i community during her attendance at the POWERUp conference in New Orleans two weeks ago. In addition to delivering a keynote address, Hunter spoke with many IBM i professionals at the show. She also made some time to speak with IT Jungle. Here’s an edited transcript of our conversation.

Alex Woodie: Your keynote address during the POWERUp Opening Session was great. Could you elaborate on some of the points you were making about using IBM i as a platform for AI?

Hillery Hunter: Working with my team has been one of the most exciting parts of this job that I’ve been in now for about six to eight months. My commitment to IBM i is reflected in me coming to POWERUp to do the keynote. One of my first major client meetings was the Large User Group up in Rochester back in the fall, right after I got into the job. It certainly been really exciting to see the rate and pace of AI on the platform because the stack is complete and therefore the team, the development team, and the developers have been able to integrate and access the layers in a very modern way, putting MCP servers in right off the bat. That sometimes isn’t possible with other products because with other products we’re worried about interchangeability.

When IBM has a database product in general, it has to support lots of different types of platforms and users. When we have an operating system, we’re anticipating lots of different types of users. IBM i being a complete stack as well as the type of data that’s on it, sits in a really unique position. Because I think right now everyone is moving past the early enthusiasm of cloud based POCs on data peripheral to the enterprise, and realizing that the real ROI is on the crown jewel data.

And for the IBM i user base, whether it’s healthcare or logistics or financial services, it’s critical industries, it’s critical data. And now that folks are realizing that that’s actually where the largest AI ROI is.

Hillery Hunter, IBM GM of Power, IBM Fellow, CTO of Infrastructure

Alex Woodie: You have been the GM of Power for six to eight months. What decisions have you made to accelerate AI adoption on IBM i?

Hillery Hunter: I was immediately supportive of the work that the team was proposing to pivot to do with Bob. You may be aware that we had an early program with Watson Code Assistant, and we made the decision to hold that and instead release with Bob. And that was a really important moment based on the user feedback that we’ve had, over a thousand users from the IBM i community in the Bob preview program.

I’ve been really supportive of that, as has been the Bob team. They’re very actively working with us. Their product manager is down there at the conference getting all that user feedback and making sure the roadmap aligns well.

What we’re pushing forward to and some of the things that are being demonstrated at the conference around MCP servers, workload level stuff, work with our ISVs, conversations with our partners to help them work through coming up the skills ladder, around being effective on implementations, AI based systems operations, kind of in the AIops space – [Those] are all projects that we’re doing that I’m really excited about. I think we’ve got the right pieces coming together from the feedback that I’m hearing. And the community is mostly asking how fast they can go right, how they can come up that learning curve and come on this journey with us.

Alex Woodie: IBM has not yet made its traditional spring technology announcement. Can you discuss what the IBM i community might expect to hear from IBM in the next few months?

Hillery Hunter: What we can say is that we see AI as a means for improving platform efficiency. We’re improving efficiency end-to-end on the platform, and that spans everything from code modernization to system optimization and operations. So I think as a general posture, not only in IBM i, but what you will see for us across IBM Power products and honestly across IBM infrastructure products, is that we view AI as the end-to-end opportunity for our clients to have more modern code bases, create more capabilities, grow their revenues, and monitor and operate a system environment that is more resilient and secure. I think that would be my best summary of how pervasive we think that this AI thing will be, and what we are looking to release to make all of that stuff possible.

Alex Woodie: The IBM i community as a whole is known to be stubborn and they tend not to like to adopt new things. They’re not always on the cutting edge. They want something that’s native. They’re afraid of sending their data to the cloud. How are you navigating that?

Hillery Hunter: I’ll go back to the broader IBM perspective on hybrid cloud. I would say we’re firmly committed to optionality. And I think you will see that as a pretty consistent value that we live as we release stuff for IBM i, for AIX, for Linux and across our portfolio.

Our client base spans the full gamut of what you just said. You know that. But just to repeat it, our client base spans all the way from those that are in highly regulated industries and dealing with sovereignty considerations that means the data needs to be where they can see it and know it, and entirely control it beyond a shadow of a doubt, to clients that are more oriented toward the cloud is an opportunity to grow their business at unprecedented scale because it’s elasticity and there’s LPARs available around the globe.

And so we truly have within the IBM i community that full spectrum. And likewise, when it comes to things like backup and DR and stuff like that, we have the full spectrum of those that want to keep all that functionality on premises to those that see the opportunity to have resiliency solutions delivered in the cloud is their answer to sovereignty concerns, about local instability or their answer to overall resiliency. So there’s a wide range and I think the value that you will continue to see us live is along the lines of that macro IBM message of hybrid cloud, and it’s the client’s choice.

So when it comes to AI, you’re going to continue to see us deliver a set of things across the spectrum of those that need to be entirely on the system, leveraging on-system acceleration, MMA, etc., and needing the software to do it entirely locally, to those that want to couple that to resources in the cloud. There are patterns where, for example, if the right thing for you is to explore the data and build your own AI model, maybe you want to use a field of GPUs in our cloud. But we have patterns through what we refer to as our deployable architectures to set up a secure connection and a secure environment in the cloud, and enable that to be done within your security and compliance guidelines.

So I think you’ll continue to see us leverage the fact that we can couple cloud AI and Power Virtual Server IBM i in the cloud to complement what people have on premises. But we will always continue to acknowledge that a lot of our client base has a very strong need to be on premises and will need to operate fully independently there.

Alex Woodie: Is there a push to run large language models on Power? Or is this always going to be something running in the cloud?

Hillery Hunter: I would say that our strategy with Spyre is the small to moderate language models, because that’s really what we are seeing enterprises need as they get to the cost implications of scaling and in terms of what they want to spend to run on premises. It feels like that’s well matched to that enterprise client set that’s trying to do AI on their enterprise data. So from a Spyre perspective, Spyre is positioned to handle the small to moderate sized language models.

Alex Woodie: As the Power GM, how do you weigh the risks of adopting AI and having a model go off the rails, with the incredible opportunity that they provide right to automate business, grow revenue and delight customers?

Hillery Hunter: We talk about it a lot across my leadership team. It’s a very personal journey right now. We have 80,000 internal users of Bob. I use Bob. My colleagues use Bob. Other executives even are using Bob. It’s not just about developers. And so I think what we’re seeing is that there’s a tremendous amount of productivity to be had with these tools. And the interesting thing is to get to dialogue with our clients about what that experience is, and how do you represent knowledge of your specific enterprise and industry?

We’re living that because we need to express knowledge to Bob in order to have it be productive on our proprietary stuff that we’re developing. That’s exactly the same journey that enterprises are going through. How do I represent my specific proprietary context to a model so that I can be productive on my specific proprietary data is exactly what we’ve been doing for months and months internally.

And sharing with peers. Every CIO or CTO that I talk to, we have this conversation about what you just said and the risks and the rewards and the balance of AI. I personally am very optimistic that this is a time when we’re going to have an unprecedented level of productivity. We’re seeing that, and I think the fact that we as an enterprise have taken what we call the Client Zero approach, saying we’re going to use our own products even before GA to refine and enhance and scale them, but also to figure out the practice of it, has been a new approach for us in the last couple of years.

Alex Woodie: What your perception of COMMON and POWERUp? How was your trip this week to New Orleans?

Hillery Hunter: It was great. We love the partnership with COMMON. And I will say from my side, it being my first COMMON POWERUp conference. I was so impressed with the enthusiasm and the energy from the kickoff of the first morning with local musicians setting a really high energetic tone there. It was a great way to come on stage then to follow that as a keynote, but the feedback that I got and everyone that I talked to on the expo floor, it’s really clear to me that this is a community that wants to learn new things and fully take this platform with us into the AI era.

And I think that is so important right now. The opportunity to refresh workloads and code bases bring more of the code base of a company into this time and to lower the skills barrier for use of the platform and create new functionality, along the lines of the logistic situation that I highlighted, for example, with a voice activated system on the platform.

It’s just neat to see people imagining and asking the what-ifs and the how-tos. And taking the opportunity to define something new for their business, is really what I think is unique about what I saw in the community. People are trying to figure out how to change business outcomes. And I love to see that because that’s a total empowerment of the technical community and the developer profession. And for me, that was the biggest takeaway that those conversations were happening. And I think therefore it’s an exciting platform for the developers that are working on it because that’s a very unique position to be in to, to have that fluency, to be able to describe an outcome change to a line of business owner.

Alex Woodie: Thank you for your insights and your time.

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