IBM CEO Arvind Krishna will also take over as chairman of the tech giant's board of directors, the company said on Wednesday evening. Former CEO and current chairman Ginni Rometty will retire from the position on Dec. 31.
Krishna is trying to turn around "Big Blue," which has struggled to compete with the likes of Google and AWS as cloud computing becomes more popular. Now, he's aiming to carve out a leadership position for IBM in the hybrid cloud and AI industries. Krishna previously spun-off IBM's legacy IT infrastructure business.