Number of employees at IBM worldwide 2000-2019

As per the latest company data, in 2019, American tech company IBM employed around 352 thousand people worldwide, a change from the previous general trend of declining number of employees over the six years period between 2012 and 2018. IBM has been facing declining revenues and consequently is trying to restructure its business model, which could partly explain the decreasing number of current employees. Since early 2019, IBM is facing a class action lawsuit that claims the company violated federal law against age discrimination, though IBM maintains it makes its employment decisions based on skills.

Valuing employee skillset and retention

In the instances of skilled employees that the company would like to retain, the tech industry is notorious for a high turnover rate of 13 percent. IBM faces this familiar tenure problem and recently advanced its artificial intelligence (AI) work devoted to the retention of its most skilled employees and purchased a patent for a ‘’predictive attrition program’’ to predict employee departure and prescribe actions to intervene. IBM’s AI has been a significant source of its research and development costs, in particular its artificial intelligence software Watson, making it one of the top five business intelligence software vendors. However, it is unclear if Watson can give IBM the revenue boost it needs, as IBM’s revenue has stagnated in recent years.