IBM sees an opportunity to help customers build, run and manage AI applications and agents across their distributed, hybrid environments at a time when enterprises are experiencing some implementation frustrations. This week at its annual Think Conference in Boston, IBM is rolling out new technologies aimed at this burgeoning world of AI agents and workloads.
“We expect there will be over a billion new applications constructed using generative AI,” IBM CEO Arvind Krishna said in a press call this week. “Our clients are expecting to double or even increase the investments on AI, [but] they’re finding that only about 25% of the time are they getting the ROI that they expect, driven by a lot of factors, including inadequate access to enterprise data, the siloed nature of different applications, together with the fragmentation that is happening in the infrastructure as they [network] across all of that.”
Core to what IBM is introducing is the ability to develop and manage AI agents, which IBM says will handle the heavy lifting for future AI systems.
“For decades, interacting with powerful enterprise systems required specialized knowledge to navigate a vast network of complex interfaces. AI agents will lower the barrier to accessing AI’s power,” wrote Ritika Gunnar, general manager of product management for data and AI at IBM, in a blog post about the news. “By enabling interaction through conversational interfaces, users can simply state their goals—while networks of agents take on the necessary actions across backend systems. This democratization means every person, regardless of their technical expertise, can leverage AI to automate complex tasks, gain insights and drive productivity across functions like HR, finance, IT and customer service.”
To that end, IBM is announcing a suite of agent capabilities in watsonx Orchestrate, a natural language processing platform that can manage and automate agent activity.
The platform includes integration with more than 80 enterprise applications from providers such as Adobe, Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce Agentforce, SAP, ServiceNow, and Workday. Pre-built agents with specific skills are available for certain business functions, beginning with HR, sales, and procurement. There are plans for additional domains, such as customer care and finance, in the coming months, according to Gunnar.
In addition, the new Agent Catalog in watsonx Orchestrate can simplify access to more than 150 agents and pre-built tools from IBM and its partners, which include Box, MasterCard, Oracle, Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Symplistic.ai.
IBM is also rolling out an agent builder tool in June that will let customers build their own agents in less than five minutes, IBM stated.
Multi-agent orchestration capabilities will take things a step further, allowing AI agents to work in concert and enabling advanced, agent-to-agent collaboration. “This allows specialized agents, whether built in-house, by partners, or using open source, to share information, and tackle complex, multi-step processes together. Companies can embed these capabilities into their agentic systems to analyze user requests and route instructions across the right agents, assistants, and skills in real time,” Gunnar wrote.
watsonx Orchestrate enables collaboration across agents and with companies’ existing technology investments, including their existing automations, APIs, data sources, and core applications, Gunnar stated.
On the monitoring front, IBM is offering tools to monitor AI performance and reliability and to help scale AI resources, according to Gunner: “For instance, we have tools that help companies evaluate and select which AI models to use based on specific goals like cost-efficiency or performance,” she wrote. “We’re also developing tools that help with the discovery and orchestration of agents and tools, enabling tasks to be designed and executed more effectively. Additionally, our industry-leading AI governance capabilities can give companies greater visibility and control over agentic systems, helping manage accuracy, performance and risk.”
Another new integration solution, webMethods Hybrid Integration, is a platform that automates the integration of applications, APIs and data regardless of their location. The idea is to let agents work with and automate hybrid workflows, IBM stated.
Other related AI news from IBM included:
- New integration between Amazon Q index and IBM watsonx Orchestrate. The Amazon Q index lets customers create a central data repository and serves as a powerful foundation for retrieving relevant content across various enterprise data sources.
- A collaboration between Big Blue and Lumen to develop AI applications at the edge by integrating watsonx and IBM’s AI portfolio with Lumen’s Edge Cloud infrastructure and network. The idea is to support real-time AI inferencing application development, IBM stated.
- IBM grew its GPU and accelerator partnerships for compute-intensive AI workloads. The AMD Instinct MI300X GPU is now available on IBM Cloud, with integration planned across the watsonx platform and Red Hat AI platforms. IBM Fusion HCI adds support for AMD Instinct MI210 GPUs, offering additional cost-effective options. IBM is also using next-generation Nvidia GB200 NVL72 rack-scale systems to support its Granite family of enterprise-grade foundation models, and recently announced support for Nvidia H200 GPUs.
Source:: Network World