Photo by Dan Farber via Flickr. Tech giant IBM is making a renewed push into the competitive artificial intelligence landscape, unveiling new agent-building tools designed to empower businesses to rapidly develop, integrate, and manage AI agents for key applications.
At the annual Think conference, IBM CEO Arvind Krishna outlined the company’s strategy for expanding its footprint in generative AI and cloud infrastructure.
IBM launches lightning-fast AI agent tools to compete in hybrid cloud era
At the heart of IBM’s latest offering is a platform that enables customers to build and deploy AI agents quickly using IBM’s Granite family of AI models, along with third-party alternatives such as Meta Platforms’ LLaMA and Mistral’s open-weight models.
Watsonx Orchestrate enables businesses to build AI agents in less than five minutes. The system includes over 150 prebuilt agents, integrations with more than 80 enterprise applications, and orchestration tools that enable multiple agents to collaborate across complex workflows.
According to Krishna, the tools support seamless integration with existing AI agents from major enterprise providers like Salesforce, Workday, and Adobe. The CEO emphasized the user-friendly nature of these tools, highlighting their potential to drive significant returns on investment by automating tasks and optimizing business processes.
Krishna said IBM’s goal is to help clients integrate their AI systems by meeting them at their current stage of technological adoption.
He emphasized the company’s role as a unifying layer in a fragmented AI ecosystem. Krishna noted the increasing demand for hybrid AI architectures, where different models are applied to specific business needs — a space where IBM sees itself well-positioned to lead.
The move signals IBM’s ambition to carve out a larger share in the fast-evolving AI market, which is increasingly dominated by hyperscalers like Microsoft and Amazon Web Services.
While the tech company remains a smaller player in the cloud market, its hybrid approach, catering to businesses that operate across multiple clouds or on-premise data centers, has fueled the development of what the company describes as a $6 billion “book of business” in generative AI alone.
Krishna stated that the new agent-building tools are expected to significantly accelerate the company’s current growth trajectory in the AI sector.
IBM backs U.S. tech future with $150B bet on AI, quantum, and mainframes
In addition to its AI expansion, IBM reaffirmed its long-term commitment to the U.S. technology sector with plans to invest $150 billion over the next five years.
This investment will span manufacturing, research, and infrastructure, focusing on artificial intelligence, mainframe systems, and quantum computing.
Krishna noted that between mainframe, artificial intelligence, and quantum computing, they think a very healthy market will behoove them to invest in and leverage. He added that IBM will continue manufacturing its quantum computing hardware in the United States.
Krishna also noted that a favorable regulatory climate, referring to deregulatory efforts under President Donald Trump, could help foster innovation and economic growth, further justifying the scale of the company’s domestic investment.
As enterprises increasingly look to operationalize AI across healthcare, finance, and logistics sectors, IBM hopes its latest moves will help it reclaim a leadership position in enterprise technology.
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