IBM details its plans to help enterprises to actually do more with AI, with an expanded set of agentic AI capabilities.
Enterprise AI in 2025 is moving from experimentation to implementation and deployments are evolving from AI assistants to AI agents.
That’s the primary theme of the IBM Think 2025 conference, which gets underway today. At the event, IBM is announcing an extensive list of new enterprise AI services as well as enhancements to existing technologies to help move more enterprise AI efforts into real-world deployment. The core of IBM’s updates are a series of updates for its watsonx platform that was first announced at Think 2023. At the Think 2024 event, the big theme was the introduction of orchestration and the ability to help enterprise build their own AI assistants. In 2025, AI assistants are table stakes and the conversation across the industry and in every enterprise is how to build, use and benefit from agentic AI.
IBM is announcing a series of agentic AI capabilities, including:
AI Agent Catalog: A centralized discovery hub for pre-built agents.
Agent Connect: A partner program for third-party developers to integrate their agents with watsonx Orchestrate.
Domain-specific agent templates for sales, procurement and HR.
No-code agent builder for business users without technical expertise.
Agent development toolkit for developers.
Multi-agent orchestrator with agent-to-agent collaboration capabilities.
Agent Ops (in private preview) providing telemetry and observability.
IBM’s fundamental goal is to help enterprises bridge the gap between experimentation, real-world deployments, and business benefits.
“Over the next few years, we expect there will be over a billion new applications constructed using generative AI,” IBM CEO Arvind Krishna said in a briefing with press and analysts. “AI is one of the unique technologies that can hit at the intersection of productivity, cost savings and revenue scaling.”The enterprise AI challenge: How to get real ROI
While there is no shortage of hype and interest in AI, that’s not what actually makes a real difference for an enterprise concerned with the bottom line.
Research sponsored by IBM shows that enterprises only get the return on investment (ROI) they expect approximately 25% of the time. Krishna noted that several factors impact ROI. They include access to enterprise data, the siloed nature of different applications, and the challenges of hybrid infrastructure.
“Everybody is doubling down on AI investments,” Krishna said. “The only change over the last 12 months is that people are stopping experimentation and focusing very much on where is the value to the business.
