IBM Accelerates Enterprise Gen AI Revolution with Hybrid Capabilities

At its annual THINK event, IBM (NYSE: IBM) unveiled new hybrid technologies that break down the longstanding barriers to scaling enterprise AI – enabling businesses to build and deploy AI agents with their own enterprise data.

IBM estimates that over one billion apps will emerge by 2028, putting pressure on businesses to scale across increasingly fragmented environments. While AI investments are accelerating, only 25% of initiatives meet ROI expectations, as per the new IBM CEO study, prompting IBM to offer hybrid technologies, agent capabilities, and deep industry expertise from IBM Consulting to help businesses operationalize AI.  

“The era of AI experimentation is over. Today’s competitive advantage comes from purpose-built AI integration that drives measurable business outcomes,” said Arvind Krishna, Chairman and CEO, IBM. “IBM is equipping enterprises with hybrid technologies that cut through complexity and accelerate production-ready AI implementations.”

Key Highlights:

• Build AI agents in watsonx Orchestrate that work with 80+ leading business applications:  IBM is providing a comprehensive suite of enterprise-ready agent capabilities in watsonx Orchestrate to help businesses put them into action, including pre-built domain-specific agents for areas such as human resources, sales, and procurement, as well as utility agents. It also facilitates integration with over 80 business applications, including Salesforce, Workday, and SAP, while providing comprehensive agent lifecycle management. IBM is also introducing the new Agent Catalog in watsonx Orchestrate to simplify access to 150+ agents and pre-built tools from both IBM and its wide ecosystem of partners such as Box, MasterCard, Oracle, Salesforce, ServiceNow, Symplistic.ai, 11x and more.
• Forrester TEI projects 176% ROI over three years by automating integration of apps, APIs, events, and more with IBM’s  webMethods Hybrid Integration, a next-generation solution that replaces rigid workflows with intelligent and agent-driven automation across hybrid cloud environments. Forrester’s TEI study found:
  • 40% reduction in downtime
  • 33% time savings on complex projects
  • 67% time savings on simple projects
• Unlocking unstructured data for generative AI with the enhanced  watsonx.data, which now supports unstructured data, offering up to 40% more accurate AI agent performance than traditional methods. New tools include:

• watsonx.data integration (cross-format orchestration)
• watsonx.data intelligence (insight extraction)
• Content-aware storage (CAS) on IBM Fusion for real-time data processing
• IBM is also expanding its capabilities via DataStax acquisition and integration with Meta’s Llama Stack, reinforcing its leadership in generative AI openness and scalability.
• IBM’s new content-aware storage (CAS) capability is now available as a service on IBM Fusion, with support for IBM Storage Scale coming in 3Q. This provides ongoing contextual processing of unstructured data, making extracted information easily available to RAG applications for faster time-to-inferencing.
• Infrastructure for AI scale: IBM is  launching IBM LinuxONE 5, its most secure and performant Linux platform for data, applications, and trusted AI, capable of processing up to 450 billion AI inference operations per day. It features cutting-edge AI accelerators, advanced security with quantum-safe encryption, and offers up to 44% lower total cost of ownership over five years compared to x86 systems, making it ideal for scalable, secure, and efficient AI workloads.

IBM has also expanded its GPU, accelerator and storage  collaborations  with AMD, CoreWeave, Intel, and NVIDIA to provide new solutions for compute-intensive workloads and AI-enhanced data.