LONDON: IBM on Tuesday unveiled its most comprehensive set of enterprise artificial intelligence products to date at its annual Think conference in Boston, while also claiming that a competitive gap is widening between companies that have integrated AI into their core business and those that are still experimenting with it.
CEO Arvind Krishna spoke to the media ahead of the four-day event and unveiled what IBM calls its “AI operating model.” It is a set of tools built around four areas: how to manage AI agents, automate operations, leverage business data in real time, and maintain governance across complex regulatory environments.
Krishna said the focus this year is on helping companies move beyond isolated AI projects to what he calls a complete operational model, where AI drives productivity and revenue growth across the business.
“By 2030, high-performing companies will leverage AI to capture 40% of their price productivity. More importantly, 60% will capture new revenue streams and new business model sources,” he said.
“But we need to act where the data is. More than 70% of all data still resides within the enterprise, in systems that are close to the core of the enterprise.”
Central to agent promotion is the upgraded watsonx Orchestrate platform. It acts as a control layer that coordinates AI agents built by different teams within your organization, ensuring that agents remain accountable even as their numbers grow.
IBM also launched IBM Bob, an AI development tool that has already been deployed internally by tens of thousands of staff and is now commercially available. More than 80,000 IBM employees self-reported a 45% increase in productivity using this tool.
“We decided to release this to the market, and so far the uptake has actually been dramatic, primarily through e-commerce,” said Rob Thomas, IBM’s senior vice president and chief commercial officer of software.
“Users and clients understand the value of what I call multi-model, orchestration, and optimization. You get all the benefits of the best models without always paying the best to get the performance you want.”
Rather than competing to build cutting-edge AI models, the company routes its entire portfolio of partners, including Anthropic, OpenAI, Mistral, and Meta, while maintaining its own smaller Granite models for on-premises and regulated use cases.
When it comes to data, IBM showed results from its $11 billion acquisition of Confluent, which closed in March. This allows AI systems to leverage live business data that is continuously updated, rather than the static snapshots that previously hindered deployment.
With a new data processing engine built with NVIDIA, Nestlé reduced costs by 83% and achieved 30x better performance across its operations in 186 countries.
“AI is really about productivity, and AI is only as valuable as the data. Data informs everything we do with both AI and hybrid cloud,” Thomas said.
IBM announced the general availability of IBM Sovereign Core for companies in regulated sectors to build compliance directly into their infrastructure so that it cannot be disabled as laws evolve. Launch partners include Dell, AMD, and French AI company Mistral.
The announcement came after IBM reported a 15% increase in first-quarter net income to $1.2 billion, but investors were spooked ahead of sinks as revenue growth slowed compared to the previous quarter.
When it comes to quantum, IBM ended the week with what may be its most significant announcement yet.
Scientists at IBM, the Cleveland Clinic, and Japan’s RIKEN used IBM quantum hardware to simulate a protein complex consisting of 12,635 atoms. This is the largest simulation of a biologically meaningful molecule on record and has direct implications for drug discovery.
Pledging to deliver the world’s first large-scale, fault-tolerant quantum computer by 2029, Krishna cited small molecule drug research as the most pressing commercial frontier.
Moderna is already working with IBM to explore quantum applications in mRNA medicine. According to Krishna, science is no longer a laboratory experiment, but a countdown.
“Quantum is literally just around the corner,” Krishna said, although he was careful to temper expectations. “I’m not pointing to quantum as a big commercial opportunity yet.”
