I had an amazing time getting to talk to Bob Lord the Senior Vice President of Cognitive Applications, the group in IBM that I’m interning in this summer. For those of you outside of IBM, Bob Lord is literally a legend among IBMers. In my first week I heard chants of his name among the other interns.
So when I found out he was coming to my office in SF I decided to introduce myself as an intern and get a photo with him. It just so happened that we were heading out from the office at the same time and got into the same elevator. It gave me the once in a life time opportunity to ask the head of my division questions about IBM.
My first one was what tips he had for a new IBMer. His advice was to really take advantage of all the events and summits happening in SF, not only within IBM but throughout the city. To him being one of only 4 undergraduate interns in the SF office meant that I had a very rare opportunity to soak up as much as I could from the highly technical and dynamic staff in my building.
The second one was what he thought was the coolest technologies at IBM. This was a bit longer of a conversation. And I’m really thankful that we left right as every other person on different floors were leaving, because it meant that our elevator stopped on each of the 8 floors we were going down from. To him, he saw IBM’s Block Chain as the coolest technology and one that was vastly underestimated. “Too many people confuse Block Chain with the value of cryptocurrencies like BitCoin.” We ended up having a conversation about the future of cryptocurrencies and the need for stable-coins in the future. After we got down to the lobby I thanked him for his time and we parted ways. Overall though it was an amazing experience getting to talk to him.