- A new generation of AI agent orchestration and development tools, providing enterprises with unified, scalable capabilities for agent planning, building, deployment, and governance;
- A real-time, ready AI data foundation, offering enterprises governed, interconnected information to enable rapid agent responses;
- AI-driven hybrid cloud management, bridging infrastructure, security, and operations across hybrid environments;
- Built-in governance and autonomous control, helping enterprises achieve safe, controllable large-scale AI deployment.
BeijingMay 7, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — At the recent annual Think conference, IBM (NYSE: IBM) unveiled its most comprehensive expansion of enterprise-grade AI and hybrid cloud management capabilities to date. The products and capabilities released include: a new generation multi-agent orchestration tool IBM watsonx Orchestrate, IBM Confluent providing real-time data stream support for AI, intelligent operations platform IBM Concert, and IBM Sovereign Core for ensuring operational autonomy.
IBM unveils ‘AI Operating Model’ blueprint to bridge the widening AI gap
These releases directly address the core challenge facing enterprises today: many have invested heavily in AI, but only a few believe these investments are generating returns. IBM’s new products and capabilities are designed to bridge this gap.
Arvind Krishna, IBM Chairman and CEO, stated: “True leaders are not focused on deploying more AI tools, but on redesigning their own business operating models. Enterprise-grade AI applications require a new operating model. IBM is helping enterprises apply the rigor, governance, and scale used to manage critical infrastructure to manage AI-driven systems.”
A New Operating Model for the Agentic Enterprise
Enterprises need a new AI operating model built on four integrated systems that work in concert:
- Agents: Coordinate AI tools across business execution and adapt to business changes;
- Data: Provide real-time, interconnected information, offering teams a unified view of real-time situations;
- Automation: Achieve cross-process scaling through end-to-end infrastructure and automated workflows;
- Hybrid Environment: Provide operational independence for digital autonomy, governance, and security, ensuring consistency and controllability of AI operations.
These systems may already be a priority for enterprises individually. Integrating them represents a fundamental shift from “business partial improvement” to “operating model transformation.” This release marks the continued evolution of IBM’s portfolio to realize this new AI operating model.
Agents: Scaling Orchestration and Development
Today, enterprises have moved from deploying a few agents to managing thousands built by different teams on various platforms. The core challenge has shifted from “building agents” to achieving “near real-time governance and auditing.”
IBM’s new generation watsonx Orchestrate (private preview) has evolved into an agent control plane for the multi-agent era, helping enterprises deploy agents from any source with consistent policy enforcement and accountability tracking.
Additionally, IBM recently officially launched IBM Bob, an agent development partner built specifically for enterprises, collaborating with developers to build AI agents with built-in security and cost controls.
Data: An AI-Ready Data Foundation
For most enterprises, data silos are widespread and lack semantic meaning. To better serve agent systems with real-time data, IBM recently completed the acquisition of Confluent (a real-time data streaming platform based on Kafka and Flink technologies). Combined with upcoming new capabilities from watsonx.data and a real-time context layer for AI, this creates a real-time, AI-ready data foundation. Other releases include:
- watsonx.data Context capability (private preview): Extends watsonx.data with an open, federated context layer, enabling enterprise AI to reason reliably based on business data—adding semantic meaning, enforcing governance at runtime, and ensuring decision explainability. New capabilities include watsonx.data Context, OpenRAG, OpenSearch, and Confluent’s real-time context engine.
- watsonx.data integration with Confluent and Tableflow (general availability), and Confluent integration with Flink: Unifies real-time event streams with batch processing workloads across hybrid enterprise technology environments, enabling unified AI applications and analytics across data.
- GPU-accelerated Presto engine in watsonx.data (private preview): In internal benchmarks (in collaboration with NVIDIA), this feature demonstrated significant potential in reducing operating costs for specific workloads and shortening processing times for large enterprise datasets. In a PoC project at Nestlé, the engine achieved 83% cost savings and a 30x overall price-performance improvement on a global data mart covering 186 countries.
- IBM Z Database Assistant (private preview): Provides an AI-driven workspace for Db2 and IMS database administrators to monitor performance, automate routine tasks, and complete configuration optimization in complex IBM Z environments.
- HCP Terraform powered by Infragraph (public preview): Connects data across cloud environments, infrastructure-as-code workflows, security tools, and operations platforms via a centralized, event-driven knowledge graph, providing unified infrastructure visibility to help customers simplify operations and automatically remediate issues.
Automation: Intelligent Infrastructure Operations
Embedding AI into the core of business exponentially increases infrastructure complexity. Most enterprises still manage this complexity with fragmented tools, isolated teams, and manual processes, attempting to connect numerous systems inherently difficult to coordinate.
To address this, IBM officially launched the IBM Concert platform (public preview). This AI-driven operations platform helps enterprises shift from passive monitoring to collaborative, intelligent response. Traditional operations tools only capture metrics, while the Concert platform integrates multiple systems to correlate signals into a single view across applications, infrastructure, and networks, without requiring enterprises to replace existing tools.
Key capabilities of Concert include: Cross-domain understanding eliminates data silos to highlight important matters; Context-driven decision-making correlates signals in risks and dependencies, ensuring teams act based on a shared, clear view; and coordinated execution helps enterprises move from insight to action through built-in governance and human oversight.
As the security threat landscape evolves, AI can now identify and exploit vulnerabilities in hours rather than days. IBM Concert Secure Coder (public preview) addresses this challenge by embedding security management directly into developer workflows. Available within IBM Bob and VS Code, this tool identifies and prioritizes risks during code writing and automatically generates patches to fix code vulnerabilities or patch operating systems, middleware, software packages, and images. This enables continuous, proactive security, helping technical teams take timely action before vulnerabilities are exploited.
Other releases include:
- HCP Terraform powered by Infragraph (public preview): Transforms infrastructure into a real-time, intelligent system, providing real-time visibility and context-aware automation throughout the infrastructure lifecycle.
- IBM Vault 2.0 (general availability): AI-driven leaked key analysis enables rapid classification, supports dynamic short-term credentials for major public cloud vendors, and automated key rotation to reduce credential sprawl.
- IBM zSecure Secret Manager (planned general availability June 2026): Brings enhanced security automation to RACF mainframe environments, integrating with IBM Vault self-managed edition for IBM Z and LinuxONE to simplify certificate lifecycle management.
Hybrid Environment: Operational Autonomy
Embedding AI into the core of business means it will operate in the most sensitive and complex environments: regulated data, critical infrastructure, cross-jurisdictional contexts. In these scenarios, compliance is not just a configuration option but a mandatory requirement.
IBM officially launched IBM Sovereign Core. This platform embeds policies into the infrastructure runtime layer, ensuring governance adapts as regulatory requirements change, while prioritizing workload portability. IBM Sovereign Core includes an extensible catalog, allowing enterprises to customize for their users, use their own applications, or use pre-vetted IBM, third-party, and open-source software and services (partners include: AMD, ATOS, Cegeka, Cloudera, Dell, Elastic, HCL, Intel, Mistral, MongoDB, and Palo Alto Networks).
Built on open enterprise-grade technologies like Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat AI, IBM Sovereign Core aims to help enterprises extend existing investments into hybrid and partner environments.
References:
- Byline article: Manage all your AI agents in one place with watsonx Orchestrate
- Byline article: Shifting from AI-assisted coding to AI-assisted delivery with IBM Bob
- Byline article: Real-time context for AI across hybrid environments
- Byline article: Introducing GPU acceleration for IBM watsonx.data
- Byline article: IBM Data Gate for Confluent: Turning Z data into real-time action
- Byline article: IBM Z Database Assistant brings intelligent operations for the AI era
- Byline article: Introducing IBM Concert platform: Closing the gap between insight and action
- Byline article: Announcing IBM Concert Secure Coder: Bringing security to the moment code is written
- Byline article: Introducing HCP Terraform powered by Infragraph: Now in public preview
- Byline article: Vault Enterprise 2.0 modernizes identity security at scale
- Byline article: Introducing IBM zSecure Secret Manager: Bringing automated certificate lifecycle management to IBM z/OS
- Byline article: IBM Sovereign Core creates AI-ready sovereign environments with verifiable control
Statements regarding IBM’s future direction and intent are subject to change or withdrawal without notice and represent goals and objectives only.
Examples in this document are for illustrative purposes only. Actual results will vary based on customer configuration and conditions, so no general expected results can be provided.
About IBM
IBM is a leading global hybrid cloud, artificial intelligence, and enterprise services provider, helping clients in over 175 countries derive business insights from their data, streamline business processes, reduce costs, and gain competitive advantage. More than 4,000 government and enterprise entities in critical infrastructure sectors such as financial services, telecommunications, and healthcare rely on IBM’s hybrid cloud platform and Red Hat OpenShift for fast, efficient, and secure digital transformation. IBM’s breakthrough innovations in AI, quantum computing, industry-specific cloud solutions, and enterprise services offer our clients open and flexible choices. A long-standing commitment to corporate integrity, transparent governance, social responsibility, inclusive culture, and service excellence is the cornerstone of IBM’s business development. For more information, visit: https://www.ibm.com/cn-zh
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