IBM Introduces New Hybrid Technologies To Help Enterprises Scale Generative AI

IBM, at its annual Think event, has unveiled new hybrid technologies to overcome longstanding barriers to scaling enterprise artificial intelligence and enable businesses to build and deploy AI agents with their own enterprise data.

According to IBM estimates, over 1 billion apps will emerge by 2028, putting pressure on businesses to scale across increasingly fragmented environments. This requires seamless integration, orchestration and data readiness.

To achieve this, IBM is combining hybrid technologies, agent capabilities and industry expertise from IBM Consulting to help businesses operationalise AI.  

IBM will provide a suite of enterprise-ready agent capabilities in watsonx to help businesses put them into action. The portfolio includes a capability to build-your-own-agent in under five minutes, pre-built domain agents specialised in areas like HR, sales and procurement, agent orchestration capability to handle multi-agent, multi-tool coordination, and agent observability feature for performance monitoring, guardrails, model optimisation, and governance.

IBM will offer integration with over 80 leading enterprise applications from providers like Adobe, AWS, Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce, Agentforce, SAP, ServiceNow, and Workday. It is also introducing a new agent catalogue to simplify access to over 150 agents and pre-built tools from both IBM and its ecosystem of partners. 

As AI adoption accelerates, integration remains a major challenge. Most enterprises rely on a patchwork of APIs, apps and systems spread across on-prem and multi-cloud environments — many of which weren't built to work together.  

IBM is introducing webMethods Hybrid Integration, a solution that replaces rigid workflows with intelligent and agent-driven automation. It will help users manage the sprawl of integrations across apps, APIs, B2B partners, events, gateways, and file transfers in hybrid cloud environments.

IBM will also evolve the watsonx.data platform to help organisations activate data to drive effective AI. The new platform will bring together an open data lakehouse with capabilities like data lineage tracking and governance to help enterprises unify, govern, and activate data across silos, formats and clouds. Enterprises will be able to connect their AI apps and agents with their unstructured data using watsonx.data.

IBM is also introducing watsonx.data integration, a single-interface tool for orchestrating data across formats and pipelines, and watsonx.data intelligence, which uses AI-powered technology to extract deep insights from unstructured data. They will be available as standalone products, with select capabilities also available through watsonx.data.

IBM has launched LinuxONE 5, its Linux platform for data, applications, and AI, with the ability to process up to 450 billion AI inference operations per day. LinuxONE 5's offerings and capabilities include AI accelerators, advanced security offerings, along with reductions in costs and power consumption.

The company 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.