ABB vs IBM
Side-by-side comparison of AI visibility scores, market position, and capabilities
Zurich industrial automation (NYSE: ABB) at $2.3B robotics revenue divesting to SoftBank for $5.375B (closing mid-to-late 2026); 140+ year history refocusing on electrification and motion control competing with Siemens for industrial automation.
About
ABB Ltd is a Zurich, Switzerland-headquartered industrial technology company — publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE: ABB) and SIX Swiss Exchange — providing electrification, motion control, process automation, and (pending divestiture) robotics solutions to utilities, industrial manufacturers, transportation, and infrastructure operators globally with approximately 110,000 employees. Formed in 1988 through the merger of Sweden's ASEA (founded 1883, launched the IRB 6 industrial robot in 1974) and Switzerland's Brown Boveri (founded 1891), ABB is undergoing a major strategic transformation: in 2025, ABB announced the divestiture of its ABB Robotics & Discrete Automation division (2024 revenue $2.3 billion, ~7,000 employees) to SoftBank Group Corp. for $5.375 billion, with the transaction expected to close mid-to-late 2026 — separating the robotics business to focus ABB on core electrification and motion segments.
Armonk NY hybrid cloud and enterprise AI (NYSE: IBM) at $62.8B revenue; $6B+ generative AI bookings, record $12.7B free cash flow 2024, DataStax acquisition for watsonx vector database competing with Microsoft Azure for enterprise AI.
About
International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) is an Armonk, New York-based global technology and consulting company — publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE: IBM) as an S&P 500 component — providing hybrid cloud infrastructure, artificial intelligence software, and enterprise IT consulting through approximately 270,300 employees in 170 countries with $62.8 billion in annual revenue. Founded on June 16, 1911, as Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company through a merger orchestrated by financier Charles Ranlett Flint, renamed IBM in 1924 under Thomas Watson Sr., IBM has undergone multiple strategic transformations over its 110+ year history: building the System/360 mainframe platform (1964), launching the IBM PC (1981), selling the PC division to Lenovo (2005, $1.75B), and completing the $34 billion Red Hat acquisition (2019) that repositioned IBM as a hybrid cloud platform company. CEO Arvind Krishna (appointed April 2020) has focused IBM's strategy on three areas: hybrid cloud (powered by Red Hat OpenShift, the enterprise Kubernetes platform), AI (the watsonx platform for enterprise AI model development and deployment), and enterprise consulting. Under Krishna, IBM recorded $12.7 billion in free cash flow in 2024 (a company record), surpassed $6 billion in generative AI bookings since June 2023, and saw the stock price double — trading at all-time highs through 2024-2025. IBM announced the DataStax acquisition in 2025 to deepen watsonx's data layer with AstraDB (vector database for AI applications), DataStax Enterprise (Apache Cassandra), and Langflow (low-code AI agent development).
AI Visibility Head-to-Head
Also Compare
Track AI Visibility in Real Time
Monitor how your brand performs across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, and Grok daily.