IBM lays down ‘Big Blue’ blueprint for AI operating model
Traditionally a favourite technology conference that draws in press and swathes of coders, fans of IBM developer events will remember days at the Swan & Dolphin, when the words “Rational” were still on everybody’s lips and adoring fans were clamouring to attend the UML sessions.
This year, IBM Think 2026 sees the company detail an expansion of enterprise AI and hybrid cloud management capabilities.
It’s still IBM and it’s still developer… but there’s a bigger picture being drawn these days.. and newly acquired Confluent is now an interesting part of the total technology proposition.
Products and capabilities unveiled include the next version 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.
Big Blue says the announcements address the defining challenge facing enterprises: many have invested heavily in AI, but only a 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 organisations to manage AI-driven systems with the same rigour, governance, and scale as their most critical infrastructure.”
Krishna and team say that 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.
Agentic orchestration & development
As organisations 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 also announcing the next generation of watsonx Orchestrate (available in private preview), evolving it into an agentic control plane for the multi-agent era, where organisations can deploy agents from any source with consistent policy enforcement and accountability.
Alongside watsonx Orchestrate, IBM 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.
“For most enterprises, data is siloed and without meaning. To effectively power agentic systems with up-to-date data, IBM is delivering a 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,” noted the company, in a press statement.
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 watsonx.data integrations with Tableflow also feature alongside Flink integrations within and watsonx data will deliver what the firm says are unified AI and analytics across all data, connecting real-time event streaming with batch workloads across the hybrid enterprise.
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 also announcing IBM Concert platform (available in public preview), an AI-powered operations platform to move organisations 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 organisations 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 organisations from insight to action with built-in governance and human oversight.
