It’s not that they aren't in the AI space, it’s that the CEO has a shockingly sober take on it. Probably because they’ve been doing AI for 30+ years combined with the fact they don’t have endless money with nowhere to invest it like Google.
They know what revenue streams existed and how damn hard it was to sell it, considering IBM Watson probably had the option of 100% on-prem services for healthcare, if they failed to sell that will a privacy violation system like ChatGPT,etc have a chance to penetrate the field?
Because however good ChatGPT, Claude,etc are, the _insane_ amounts of money they're given to play with implies that they will then emerge as winners in a future with revenue streams to match the spending that has been happening.
They were ahead of the game with their original Watson tech, but pretty slow to join and try get up to speed with the current GenAI families of tech.
The meaning of “AI” has shifted to mean “generative AI like what ChatGPT does” in the eyes of most so you need to account for this. When people talk about AI, even though it is a fairly wide field, they are generally referring to a limited subset of it.