Summary Bullets:

• Cloud will have a role in the AI journey, bit no longer the destination. The world will be hybrid, and multi-vendor.

• Agentic AI manifests from this new platform but will be double-edged sword. Autonomy is proportionate to risk. Any solution that goes to production needs governance.

The AI triathlon is underway. A year ago the race was about the size of the GenAI large language model (LLM). Today, it is the number AI agents connecting to internal systems to automate workflows, moving to the overall level of preparedness for the agentic enterprise. The latter seems about giving much higher levels of autonomy to AI agents to set own goals, self-learn and make decisions, possibly manage other agents from other vendors, that impact customers (e.g., approving home loans, dispute resolution, etc.). This, in turn, influences NPS, C-SAT, customer advocacy, compliance, and countless other metrics. It also raises many other legitimate legal, ethical, and regulatory concerns.

Blending Tech with Flexible Architectures

While AI in many of its current forms are nascent, getting things right often starts with placing the right bets. And the IBM vision, as articulated, aligns tightly to the trends on the ground. This is broadly automation, AI, hybrid and multi-cloud environments and data. Not every customer will go the same flight path, but multiple options are key in the era of disaggregation.

In February 2025 IBM acquired HashiCorp. This was a company that foresaw public cloud and on-prem integration challenges decades ago and invested early in dev tools, automation, and saw infrastructure as code. Contextualize to today’s language models, enterprises still will continue to have different needs. While public cloud will likely be the ideal environment for model training, inferencing or fine tuning may better at the edge. Hybrid is the way, and automation is the solution glue. The GlobalData CXO research shows that AI is accelerating edge infrastructure, not cloud. And there are many considerations such as performance, security, compliance, and cost causing the pendulum to swing back.

Watsonx Orchestrate

The acquisition of Red Hat six years ago helped to solidify the ‘open source’ approach into the IBM DNA. This is more relevant for AI now. Openness also translates to middleware and one of the standouts of the event with is the ‘headless architectures’ with Watsonx. The decoupling of UI/UX at the frontend with the backend databases and business logic focuses less on the number of agents, but rather how well autonomous tasks and actions are synchronized in a multi-vendor environment. Traditional vendors have a rich history of integration challenges. An open platform approach working across many of the established application environments with other frameworks is the most viable option. In this context, IBM shared examples of working with a global SaaS provider using Watsonx to support its own global orchestration roll-out; direct selling to the MNC with a large install base of competing solutions, to other scenarios of partners who have BYO agents. IBM likely wants to be seen as having the most open, less so the best technology in a tightly coupled stack.

The Opportunity

Agentic AI’s great potential has a double-edged sword. Autonomy is proportionate to risk. And risk can only be managed with governance. These can include guardrails (e.g., ethics) and process controls (e.g., explainability, monitoring and observability, etc.). Employees will need varying levels of accountability and oversight too. While IBM is a technology company with its own products and infrastructure, it also has its own consulting resources with 160,000 global staff. Most competitors will lean towards the partner-led approach. Whichever path is taken, both options are on the table for IBM. This is important for balancing risk with technology evolution. Still, very few AI peroof of concepts ever make it to production. And great concepts will require the extra consulting muscle, especially through multi-disciplinary teams, to show business value. Claims of internal capability needs to walk that tight rope with vendor agnosticism to keep both camps motivated and the markets confident.