Tom Gardner

Well, hello, Fools.

We're so excited to spend the next half hour or so with the Chief Financial Officer of IBM, Jim Cavanaugh, and Matt Frankel, our Hidden Gems Investment Analysts, helping out throughout.

Jim, thank you so much for this time.

Let's hope we don't let you down.

We're so excited about this.

I will say for investors of The Motley Fool, we have eight recommendations of IBM.

Those investments have done quite well for us.

We take a very long-term perspective with our investment strategy.

So we're always looking to hold our investments for at least five years.

Obviously, there's so many transactions in the marketplace and so much excitement about trading and sports betting and all the other things that people get drawn into.

But we're very convinced that the best returns come in the equity markets to those who find businesses that are

Making improvements, solving the problems of the world, generating cash flow from it.

And so it is within that frame that we begin our conversations.

I'll just start, Jim, with maybe the standard question.

You might expect that investors or some investors may still think of IBM as legacy services and hardware versus software AI companies.

and all of the R&D investments that IBM has been making.

But what would definitively change that perception, do you think?

What milestones should investors be watching as proof that we have a real transformation afoot here?

And it's that couple of years in at least.

This is going to be a bit of a walking tour or a pub crawl because we're going to go in a couple different directions and return back, circle back to some points you've just made around productivity and about change management and the culture at IBM today and the changes that have emerged over the last couple of years.