# Think 2026: IBM Delivers the Blueprint for the AI Operating Model as the AI Divide Widens

- Link: https://www.thailand-business-news.com/pr-news/think-2026-ibm-delivers-the-blueprint-for-the-ai-operating-model-as-the-ai-divide-widens
- Published: 2026-05-05T11:35:00+07:00
- Author: PR Newswire

◦ _Next-generation agent orchestration and agentic development give enterprises
   a unified way to plan, build, deploy, and govern AI agents at scale_
 ◦ _Real-time, AI-ready data foundation gives enterprises the governed, connected
   information agents need to act with speed _
 ◦ _AI-powered hybrid cloud management connects infrastructure, security, and operations
   across hybrid environments_
 ◦ _Built-in governance and sovereignty controls let enterprises run AI at scale_

BOSTON, May 5, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Today, at its annual Think conference, IBM (NYSE:
IBM) announced its most comprehensive expansion of enterprise AI and hybrid cloud
management capabilities to date. Products and capabilities unveiled today include
the next generation 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.

 [⌊IBM Corporation logo.⌉](https://mma.prnasia.com/media2/2319830/IBM_LOGO_1.jpg?token=br5thbnr6EXk8U0Rrhk635RCe5rM212voX7CbgMbzr8y%2BdDZ6WZb61VA7RLVWutZ3jK7%2Bb24n5WtsqeU3ypgZQAMsJ3Zx7ufcJBzhCsR%2F0UHWaqY8XNl?p=medium600)

IBM Corporation logo.

The announcements address the defining challenge facing enterprises: many have invested
heavily in AI, but only 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
organizations to manage AI-driven systems with the same rigor, governance, and scale
as their most critical infrastructure."_

**A New Operating Model for the Agentic Enterprise 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.

**Agents: Orchestration and Development at Scale As organizations 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 announcing the next generation of watsonx Orchestrate (available in private
preview), evolving it into an agentic control plane for the multi-agent era, where
organizations can deploy agents from any source with consistent policy enforcement
and accountability.

Alongside watsonx Orchestrate, IBM recently 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.

**Data: AI-Ready Foundation For most enterprises, data is siloed and without meaning.
To effectively power agentic systems with up-to-date data, IBM is delivering, 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.

**Additional announcements include:**

 ◦ **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 **Tableflow **integration with **watsonx.data **(generally 
   available) and **Confluent** and **Flink **integrations with watsonx.data deliver
   unified AI and analytics across all data, connecting real-time event streaming
   with batch workloads across the hybrid enterprise.
 ◦ **watsonx.data GPU-accelerated Presto **(available in private preview) showed
   the potential to significantly reduce the cost of running certain workloads and
   processing time on large enterprise datasets in internal benchmark testing with
   NVIDIA. In a proof of concept with Nestlé, the engine delivered 83% cost savings
   and an overall 30x price-performance improvement on a global data mart spanning
   186 countries.
 ◦ **IBM Z Database Assistant** (available in private preview) gives Db2 and IMS
   database administrators an AI-powered workspace to monitor performance, automate
   routine tasks, and optimize configurations across complex IBM Z environments.
 ◦ **HCP Terraform powered by Infragraph **(available in public preview) delivers
   unified infrastructure visibility through a centralized, event-driven knowledge
   graph by connecting data across cloud environments, infrastructure-as-code workflows,
   security tooling, and operations platforms to help streamline operations and 
   automate remediation.

**Automation: Intelligent 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 announcing **IBM Concert platform **(available in public preview), an AI-
powered operations platform to move organizations 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 organizations 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 organizations from insight to action 
with built-in governance and human oversight.

The threat landscape is changing— AI can now identify and exploit vulnerabilities
in hours, not days. IBM Concert Secure Coder (available in public preview) addresses
this by embedding security management directly into the developer workflow. Available
in IBM Bob and VS Code, it identifies and prioritizes risks as code is written, 
and can generate automatic remediations to fix vulnerable code, or patch OS, middleware,
packages and images. This makes security continuous and proactive and can help identify
vulnerabilities before they are exploited.

Additional announcements include:

 ◦ **HCP Terraform powered by Infragraph** (available in public preview) transforms
   infrastructure into a live, intelligent system with real-time visibility and 
   context-aware automation across the infrastructure lifecycle.
 ◦ **IBM Vault 2.0** (generally available) introduces AI-driven analysis of leaked
   secrets for rapid triage, dynamic short-lived credentials across major cloud 
   providers, and automated secrets rotation to reduce credential sprawl.
 ◦ **IBM zSecure Secret Manager** (planned availability June 2026) brings enhanced
   security automation to RACF mainframe environments, integrating with IBM Vault
   Self-Managed for IBM Z and LinuxONE to streamline certificate lifecycle management.

**Hybrid: Operational Sovereignty AI embedded into the core of business means it
operates in the most sensitive and complex environments: regulated data, critical
infrastructure, cross-border jurisdictions. For those contexts, compliance cannot
be a configuration choice.

IBM is announcing the general availability of** IBM Sovereign Core**, a platform
that embeds policy at the infrastructure runtime level, so governance can be addressed
as regulatory requirements evolve, while prioritizing workload portability. IBM 
Sovereign Core includes an extensible catalog that organizations can curate for 
their own users, with their own applications, or populated with pre-vetted IBM, 
third-party and open-source software and services from an ecosystem of partners 
that includes: AMD, ATOS, Cegeka, Cloudera, Dell, Elastic, HCL, Intel, Mistral, 
MongoDB and Palo Alto Networks.

Built on open, enterprise-grade technologies like **Red Hat OpenShift** and **Red
Hat AI**, IBM Sovereign Core enables organizations to extend existing investments
across hybrid and partner environments.

**Supporting Materials: Blog: [Manage all your AI agents in one place with watsonx Orchestrate](https://www.ibm.com/new/announcements/manage-all-your-ai-agents-in-one-place-with-watsonx-orchestrate)

Blog: [Shifting from AI-assisted coding to AI-assisted delivery with IBM Bob](https://www.ibm.com/new/announcements/shifting-from-ai-assisted-coding-to-ai-assisted-delivery-with-ibm-bob)
Blog: [Real-time context for AI across hybrid environments](https://www.ibm.com/new/announcements/real-time-context-for-ai-across-hybrid-environments)
Blog: [Introducing GPU acceleration for IBM watsonx.data](https://www.ibm.com/new/announcements/technical-preview-of-gpu-acceleration-for-presto-c-in-watsonx-data)
Blog: [IBM Data Gate for Confluent: Turning Z data into real-time action](https://www.ibm.com/new/announcements/ibm-data-gate-for-confluent-turning-z-data-into-real-time-action)
Blog: [IBM Z Database Assistant brings intelligent operations for the AI era](https://www.ibm.com/new/announcements/ibm-z-database-assistant-brings-intelligent-operations-for-the-ai-era.html)
Blog: [Introducing IBM Concert platform: Closing the gap between insight and action](https://www.ibm.com/new/announcements/from-insight-to-action-closing-the-gap-in-modern-it-operations)
Blog: [Announcing IBM Concert Secure Coder: Bringing security to the moment code is written](https://www.ibm.com/new/announcements/announcing-ibm-concert-secure-coder-bringing-security-to-the-moment-code-is-written)
Blog: [Introducing HCP Terraform powered by Infragraph: Now in public preview](https://www.ibm.com/new/announcements/introducing-hcp-terraform-powered-by-infragraph-in-public-preview)
Blog: [Vault Enterprise 2.0 modernizes identity security at scale](https://www.hashicorp.com/en/blog/vault-enterprise-20-modernizes-identity-security-at-scale)
Blog: [Introducing IBM zSecure Secret Manager: Bringing automated certificate lifecycle management to IBM z/OS](https://www.ibm.com/new/announcements/introducing-ibm-zsecure-secret-manager-modernizing-certificate-lifecycle-management-on-z-os)
Blog: [IBM Sovereign Core creates AI-ready sovereign environments with verifiable control](https://www.ibm.com/new/announcements/ibm-sovereign-core-the-new-end-to-end-system-for-sovereign-ai)

_Statements regarding IBM’s future direction and intent are subject to change or
withdrawal without notice and represent goals and objectives only. _

_Examples presented are illustrative only. Actual results will vary based on client
configurations and conditions and, therefore, generally expected results cannot 
be provided._

**About IBM **

IBM is a leading provider of global hybrid cloud and AI, and consulting expertise.
We help clients in more than 175 countries capitalize on insights from their data,
streamline business processes, reduce costs and gain the competitive edge in their
industries. Thousands of governments and corporate entities in critical infrastructure
areas such as financial services, telecommunications and healthcare rely on IBM’s
hybrid cloud platform and Red Hat OpenShift to affect their digital transformations
quickly, efficiently and securely. IBM’s breakthrough innovations in AI, quantum
computing, industry-specific cloud solutions and consulting deliver open and flexible
options to our clients. All of this is backed by IBM’s long-standing commitment 
to trust, transparency, responsibility, inclusivity and service.

Visit [www.ibm.com](http://www.ibm.com/) for more information.

**Media contact:**

Kate Lehman
IBM[Kate.Lehman@ibm.com](https://www.thailand-business-news.com/pr-news/Kate.Lehman@ibm.com)

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