Trust and Responsibility. Earned and Practiced Daily.

Corporate responsibility is smart business.  Each day at IBM we demonstrate leadership and accountability on critical areas such as environmental conservation, employee well being, skills and education, corporate governance, research and development, as well as the ethical development and use of technology.  

These are among the most complex issues of our day, and they cannot be tackled alone. IBM —a $79.6B corporation with 350,000 employees in more than 175 countries —takes great responsibility in applying our technology and talent to do our part. This is evident in how we manage our operations, how we renew and reinvent our practices and in how we take an early stand on issues that matter. For example:

• We procured 37.9% of the electricity consumed across our operations from renewable sources. And we set we new, more ambitious goals with 2025 targets, including obtaining 55% of our electricity from renewable sources and reducing CO2 emissions 40% from our 2005 baseline
• We were recognized as one of the World’s Most Ethical Companies by the Ethisphere Institute 
• Our employees completed 24.1 million hours of learning worldwide, and $392.5 million in global corporate contributions were made.
• Throughout 2018, we invested hundreds of millions to help train and prepare the global workforce with 21st century apprenticeship programs, returnships for women reentering the workforce, veterans programs and volunteer skills-building sessions for more than 3.2 million students worldwide.
• In May 2018, we published the Principles for Trust and Transparency to reaffirm our long-standing position: organizations that collect, store, manage or process data are obligated to handle it responsibly.  IBM’s new AI Fairness 360 toolkit addresses AI bias with a set an open source software toolkit that can help detect and remove bias in machine learning models.

The list goes on. Looking ahead, we are continuing to expand our social impact by prioritizing investments in education and skills, health and disaster recovery. We are retooling the way we work, and how IBMers contribute to their communities by introducing a new platform for community engagement, ibm.org. We are applying the same techniques we use with our clients: user centricity, co-creation and agility. And, we are using IBM Enterprise Design Thinking Framework to co-create the best outcomes through collaboration with our partners in the non-profit sector.  In short, we are reshaping our practices with considerable thought and care.  At IBM, social impact is built into our business –it is not an afterthought.

We have just released our 2018 Corporate Responsibility Report. I hope you’ll take a moment to read it.  It offers a snapshot of the results we delivered last year and the commitments we’re making.  Most importantly, it demonstrates what we at IBM are all about – Trust and responsibility. Earned and practiced daily.