From Agentic Orchestration to Infrastructure Automation, New and Upcoming Capabilities Support Productivity for Developers, Lines of Business and Infrastructure

By IBM Corporation

Today, at TechXchange 2025, IBM’s annual event for developers and technologists, the company unveiled new and upcoming product capabilities designed to help enterprises move beyond AI experimentation and unlock productivity gains across development, operations and business workflows. Drawing thousands of attendees from around the world, TechXchange serves as a launchpad for IBM’s latest advancements in agentic AI, hybrid cloud, quantum computing and intelligent infrastructure.

Generative AI has the potential to add trillions in economic value in the coming years. Yet, many organizations face barriers to adoption – ranging from fragmented hybrid environments to gaps in data quality and AI readiness. IBM’s latest announcements address these challenges with products built for production readiness, real-time governance and seamless integration across hybrid cloud ecosystems.

“AI productivity is the new speed of business. These features will help clients remove bottlenecks across their entire technology lifecycle,” said Dinesh Nirmal, Senior Vice President of Products, IBM Software. “With these enhancements across our portfolio, we’re giving customers capabilities that take developer productivity, agentic orchestration and infrastructure intelligence to the next level.”

Enhancing Performance for Agentic Orchestration

Core to IBM’s agentic AI framework is watsonx Orchestrate, a product offering more than 500 tools and customizable, domain-specific agents from IBM and its partners. Orchestrate is designed to be tool-agnostic and adaptable to any environment, enabling scalable deployment and governance of AI agents.

Capabilities include AgentOps, a built-in agentic observability and governance layer that provides full lifecycle transparency. With real-time monitoring and policy-based controls, AgentOps help assess agents’ reliability.

Consider an HR agent onboarding new employees:

• Without AgentOps: The agent sets up benefits and payroll, but teams lack visibility into whether it’s applying policies correctly or how it’s handling sensitive data until problems surface.
• With AgentOps: Every action is monitored and governed, allowing anomalies to be flagged and corrected in real-time and helping drive a seamless onboarding experience from start to finish.

Businesses also require products that simplify agent setup and orchestration for both developers and non-technical teams. The following enhancements in watsonx Orchestrate aim to meet these needs:

• Agentic workflows: Developers often rely on brittle scripts that break when scaled. With Agentic workflows, now generally available, they can use standardized, reusable flows that sequence multiple agents and tools consistently.
• Langflow integration: Teams without deep coding expertise can use Langflow’s drag-and-drop visual builder to help build an agent in minutes. This integration is currently in tech preview and is expected to be generally available end of October.

Additionally, IBM plans to extend these capabilities to the mainframe with the upcoming watsonx Assistant for Z. Purpose-built IBM Z agents will enable the shift from reactive troubleshooting to proactive system management by understanding conversational context and automating operational processes while maintaining security and compliance. Building on the IBM z17 launch, this redesigned experience aims to streamline workflows and deliver greater productivity to mainframe users.

Advancing The Foundation That Gives Agents Trusted Context

Following its acquisition of HashiCorp, IBM announced Project infragraph which replaces fragmented tools and manual processes with a unified, intelligent control plane for observability. As enterprises scale across hybrid and multi-cloud environments, tool sprawl creates information silos.

For example, when a critical Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) is discovered, the standard process is an individual will email dozens of teams across the organization and build a spreadsheet to manually track and ensure all known instances of the vulnerable component have been patched. Through Project infragraph, an organization can have one view of its entire infrastructure estate and security posture, without silos. It provides a live view — rather than manual CSV-based reporting — of what's being managed within HashiCorp Cloud Platform (HCP) and outside of it. The platform also allows users to drill down into any resource clusters in its infrastructure estate (such as any container running in a VPC) to see all components with near real-time data.

Project infragraph is planned to be delivered as a capability within HCP. In the future, Project infragraph plans to extend HCP to connect to IBM’s broader software portfolio, including Red Hat Ansible and OpenShift, watsonx Orchestrate, Concert, Turbonomic, and Cloudability. This approach aims to help customers unify infrastructure, security, and applications under a consistent data and policy model.

HashiCorp is now accepting applications for the private beta program for Project infragraph, which is expected to open in December 2025.

Powering Developer Productivity

Project Bob – now in private tech preview – is a new, AI-first integrated development environment (IDE) designed with advanced task generation capabilities for enterprise software development lifecycles (SDLC), including software modernization.

Moving beyond today’s AI coding assistants, Project Bob seeks to fundamentally transform SDLC by working alongside developers to write, test, upgrade and help secure software. Project Bob uses and orchestrates between industry-leading LLMs including Anthropic Claude, Mistral AI, Llama, and IBM Granite.

Key capabilities include:

• Application modernization at scale: Automated system upgrades and framework migrations and multi-step refactoring with context-awareness across large-scale codebases.

• Intelligent code generation and review: AI assistance that understands enterprise architecture patterns, security requirements, and compliance obligations.
• End-to-end orchestration: From initial development through testing, deployment, and maintenance, orchestrates modernization, testing and remediation tasks seamlessly while maintaining context across sessions.

• Security-first development: Embedding security directly into workflows, enabling “shift-left” vulnerability scans, expedited FedRAMP hardening and facilitating quantum-safe cryptographic migration.

To request access to Project Bob, click here.

Accelerating Enterprise AI Adoption With Choice

A critical barrier preventing businesses from harnessing AI's full potential is the inability to access and deploy these technologies in ways that align with their unique enterprise requirements. Organizations need the flexibility to choose where, how, and with which AI technologies they operate without being locked into a single vendor's platform.

IBM's expanding AI partner ecosystem aims to alleviate this challenge by delivering advanced AI tools, products, and services across IBM and other partner portfolios that can integrate seamlessly into a business’s existing environment and workflows.

To that end, IBM is announcing a new partnership with Anthropic that continues this commitment to choice and flexibility. IBM will integrate Anthropic's large language models (LLMs) directly into select IBM software products, starting with Project Bob, its new AI-first IDE. IBM has also created a first-of-its-kind guide verified by Anthropic – Architecting Secure Enterprise AI Agents with MCP – focused on the Agent Development Lifecycle (ADLC), a structured approach to designing, deploying and managing enterprise AI agents.

Learn More

• From orchestration to outcomes: New agentic workflows and domain agents in IBM watsonx Orchestrate
• Empowering IBM Z Users with Agentic AI

IBM TechXchange 2025 takes place October 6-9 in Orlando, FL. Stay up to speed on this news and more by visiting the IBM Newsroom.

To read IBM recent client & partner testimonials, click here.

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