At its annual Think conference, IBM (NYSE: IBM) announced its most comprehensive expansion of enterprise AI and hybrid cloud management capabilities to date. Products and capabilities unveiled today include the next generation of IBM watsonx Orchestrate for multi-agent orchestration, IBM Confluent to bring real-time data to AI, IBM Concert platform for intelligent operations, and IBM Sovereign Core for operational independence.
The announcements address the defining challenge facing enterprises: many have invested heavily in AI, but only few believe it is paying off. The products and capabilities unveiled today address this gap for enterprises.
“The enterprises pulling ahead are not deploying more AI – they’re redesigning how their business operates,” said Arvind Krishna, Chairman and CEO, IBM. “Running AI in the enterprise requires a new operating model, and IBM is enabling organizations to manage AI-driven systems with the same rigor, governance, and scale as their most critical infrastructure.”
“Across the Middle East and Africa, the next phase of AI will not be defined by experimentation, but by how deeply it is embedded into the way enterprises operate,” said Saad Toma, General Manager, IBM Middle East and Africa. “Successful enterprises are moving from isolated AI projects to an operating model where agents, data, automation, hybrid cloud, governance and sovereignty work together by design. That is how AI moves from ambition to productivity, from pilots to measurable business value, and from fragmented adoption to transformation at scale.”
A New Operating Model for the Agentic Enterprise
AI requires a new operating model, built on four integrated systems working together: agents through coordinated AI that executes and adapts across the business; data through real-time, connected information that gives teams a shared view of what’s happening; automation through end-to-end infrastructure and automated workflows that scale across processes; and hybrid through operational independence for sovereignty, governance, and security that allows AI to run consistently and with controls. Each is a separate priority that enterprises are chasing. Together, they represent a fundamental shift from improving parts of the business to changing how the business operates. Today’s announcements represent the next evolution of IBM’s portfolio, to deliver against the operating model.
Agents: Orchestration and Development at Scale
As organizations move from deploying a handful of agents to managing thousands, built by different teams on different platforms, the core challenge shifts from building agents to keep them governed and auditable in near real time.
IBM is announcing the next generation of watsonx Orchestrate (available in private preview), evolving it into an agentic control plane for the multi-agent era, where organizations can deploy agents from any source with consistent policy enforcement and accountability.
Alongside watsonx Orchestrate, IBM recently announced:
- IBM Bob (generally available), an agentic development partner designed for the enterprise, partners with developers to build agents with security and cost controls built in.
Data: AI-Ready Foundation
For most enterprises, data is siloed and without meaning. To effectively power agentic systems with up-to-date data, IBM is delivering, real-time, AI-ready data foundation through its recent acquisition of Confluent for real-time data streaming built on Kafka and Flink technologies, and pairing new capabilities coming to watsonx.data with a real-time context layer for AI.
Additional announcements include:
- Context in watsonx.data (available in private preview) extends watsonx.data with an open, federated context layer that makes enterprise AI reason reliably over business data — applying semantic meaning, enforcing governance at runtime, and making decisions explainable. Featuring new capabilities including context, OpenRAG, and OpenSearch on watsonx.data, and Confluent’s Real-Time Context Engine.
- Confluent and Tableflow integration with watsonx.data (generally available) and Confluent and Flink integrations with watsonx.data deliver unified AI and analytics across all data, connecting real-time event streaming with batch workloads across the hybrid enterprise.
- watsonx.data GPU-accelerated Presto (available in private preview) showed the potential to significantly reduce the cost of running certain workloads and processing time on large enterprise datasets in internal benchmark testing with NVIDIA. In a proof of concept with Nestlé, the engine delivered 83% cost savings and an overall 30x price-performance improvement on a global data mart spanning 186 countries.
- IBM Z Database Assistant (available in private preview) gives Db2 and IMS database administrators an AI-powered workspace to monitor performance, automate routine tasks, and optimize configurations across complex IBM Z environments.
- HCP Terraform powered by Infragraph (available in public preview) delivers unified infrastructure visibility through a centralized, event-driven knowledge graph by connecting data across cloud environments, infrastructure-as-code workflows, security tooling, and operations platforms to help streamline operations and automate remediation.
Automation: Intelligent Infrastructure Operations
Running AI at the core of the business can make infrastructure exponentially more complex, and most enterprises are managing that complexity through fragmented tools, siloed teams, and humans serving as the connective layer between systems that were never designed to work together.
IBM is announcing IBM Concert platform (available in public preview), an AI-powered operations platform to move organizations from passive monitoring to coordinated, intelligent response. Where traditional tools capture metrics, the Concert platform brings systems together. It correlates signals together into a single view across applications, infrastructure, network, without requiring organizations to rip and replace existing tooling.
Concert delivers this through three interconnected capabilities: cross-domain understanding to eliminate silos and surface what matters most; context-driven decisions that correlate signals across risk and dependencies, so teams act from a shared, clear view; and coordinated execution that moves organizations from insight to action with built-in governance and human oversight.
The threat landscape is changing— AI can now identify and exploit vulnerabilities in hours, not days. IBM Concert Secure Coder (available in public preview) addresses this by embedding security management directly into the developer workflow. Available in IBM Bob and VS Code, it identifies and prioritizes risks as code is written, and can generate automatic remediations to fix vulnerable code, or patch OS, middleware, packages and images. This makes security continuous and proactive and can help identify vulnerabilities before they are exploited.
