The mandate
I joined IBM to help build the APAC market around Smarter Buildings and the wider Smarter Cities proposition. My role combined direct selling, solution leadership, opportunity validation, workshops, enablement of IBM and partner teams, and acting as an intermediary between what customers were asking for and what product teams could realistically deliver.
It was effectively an APAC industry-solution and evangelism role: very little depended on formal authority. I led by influence across IBM sellers, presales teams, partners and customer executives, while remaining directly involved in the important opportunities and solution conversations.
The portfolio brought together technologies such as Tririga IWMS, Maximo EAM, monitoring, emerging IoT concepts, integrated endpoint information, cloud delivery and increasingly sophisticated analytics.
Selling ahead of infrastructure readiness
Some of the ideas we were discussing with customers were ahead of the infrastructure economics of the time. We could describe an environment where building, asset and operational data came together and analytics helped drive better decisions. The vision was compelling. The practical path was not always.
One early customer wanted the concept but required it to remain on-premise. The infrastructure required to support the intended solution was estimated at around $2 million before we had even solved the business problem. That was a useful lesson: a technically possible future is not the same as an economically deployable solution.
This was the period in which IBM's smarter infrastructure, analytics and IoT thinking was evolving toward the broader cognitive / Watson-era proposition. I was close to the customer-facing side of that transition: translating emerging technical capability into an operational story customers could understand, while dealing honestly with what was and was not ready.
Why it maps to AI now
The current AI market feels familiar. Customers can see a radically different operating future, but there is a gap between the demo and what can safely, economically and organisationally work in production. The interesting role is in that gap: understand the problem, make the future concrete, find the constraints early, and help product and engineering teams turn the idea into something real.