IBM Think 2026 Showcases Agentic AI And Sovereign Cloud Strategy

IBM focused its product innovation news at its annual conference on ways to enable an ‘AI operating model’ that brings together data, agents, automation and hybrid cloud to deliver AI to business cores and move beyond collections of AI projects.

Private preview for a new iteration of Watsonx Orchestrate, public preview for the Concert operations platform and general availability of the IBM Bob agentic developer product and Sovereign Core software platform are some of the biggest news coming out of IBM Think 2026.

The Armonk, N.Y.-based technology vendor focused its product innovation news at its annual conference on ways to enable an “AI operating model” that brings together data, agents, automation and hybrid cloud to deliver AI to business cores and move beyond collections of AI projects, bringing to life a connected AI system. Think runs through Wednesday in Boston.

IBM’s AI opportunity extends to services partners, resell partners, build partners, ISVs and startups, IBM Chairman, President and CEO Arvind Krishna said in response to a CRN question during a virtual press conference Monday.

For systems integrators and services partners, a large amount of revenue opportunity is in connecting data sources to unlock AI agents and an AI operating model.

“That is the value that enterprises need—not just a chatbot or a consumerish application,” Krishna said. “Those are important, but they only get to the first 20 percent of the value. The next value comes from deploying hybrid cloud technologies.”

[RELATED: IBM Q1 2026 Earnings: CEO Krishna Says AI Is A Tailwind To The Business]

IBM Presents An AI Operating Model

Krishna recommended solution providers look to the OpenShift hybrid cloud platform or IBM subsidiary Red Hat or even the IBM Sovereign Core revealed during Think 2026. He also suggested investing in greater automation to remove human labor complexities where possible and move value to real time.

Rob Thomas, IBM senior vice president of software and chief commercial officer, said in answer to a CRN question during a virtual press conference that the vendor is looking for multidimensional partnerships, holding up its work with tax and consulting giant EY as an example.

With IBM Watsonx Orchestrate and IBM Bob, EY powered a new tax product, brought services and advising to market and can bridge the product into other products through its technology platform.

“It’s an example of a services partner that’s gone the next step to adopting AI, making it part of one of their solutions,” Thomas said. “And then together, we built a joint go-to-work with them.”

Bo Gebbie, president of Hamel, Minn.-based IBM solution provider Evolving Solutions—No. 162on CRN’s 2025 Solution Provider 500—told CRN in an interview that recent IBM acquisition HashiCorp, IBM Bob and automation tools have proven popular with clients lately.

“You think about people-cost increasing. You think about AI workloads. The automation side feeds into all of that,” Gebbie said.

The IBM Fusion infrastructure for AI and containers, bringing enterprise-grade performance across hybrid environments and unifying compute, storage and networking is also a big opportunity for Evolving Solutions, he said. “We are making a big push on skills and investment in that space.”

New IBM Agentic AI, Watsonx, Concert Releases

The new iteration of Orchestrate in private preview is now home to more third-party agents from companies including ServiceNow, Salesforce and Adobe, Thomas said during the press conference.

“Orchestrate is no longer just about IBM technology,” Thomas said. “It’s about the best agentic technology from any company in the world.”

Also in private preview is a Bob Premium Package for Z that extends Bob’s capabilities to mainframe environments, according to IBM.

IBM moved its context in Watsonx.data capability into private preview, giving users an open, federated context layer for reliable AI reasoning over business data. Users can apply semantic meaning, enforce governance at runtime and give explanations for decisions. Watsonx.data gains generally available integrations with Confluent Tableflow and Flink for real-time event streaming. A private preview of IBM Z Database Assistant gives Db2 and IMS database administrators an AI-powered workspace for performance monitoring, task automation and configuration optimization.

Another private preview puts Watsonx.data GPU-accelerated Presto in select users’ hands, reducing certain workload costs and processing times on large datasets.

Among the public previews revealed during Think 2026 is the IBM Concert AI-powered operations platform. Concert gives users signals across applications, networks, infrastructure and cost in one view without replacing existing tooling.

Concert promises cross-domain understanding to prevent silos and surface important data and has gained importance as the world frets over new risks imposed by Claude maker Anthropic’s Mythos, Thomas said. “Every customer is looking for how do I solve any problems with vulnerabilities that I’m not aware of?” he said. “Concert is really the only answer in the market today for that.”

Also in public preview is Concert Secure Coder for embedded security management in developer workflows. Secure Coder is available in IBM Bob and VS Code and generates automatic remediations for vulnerable code and patching middleware, packages, images and more.

HashiCorp Platform (HCP) Terraform powered by Infragraph is in public preview and allows for unified infrastructure visibility through centralized, event-driven knowledge graphs. Users connect data across cloud environments, infrastructure-as-code workflows, security tooling and operations platforms, according to IBM.

IBM has made its Bob agentic developer generally available. Bob allows for AI agent building with built-in security and cost.

IBM also has made Vault 2.0 generally available, with AI-driven analysis of leaked secrets for quick triaging, dynamic short-lived credentials across the major cloud providers and automated secrets rotation.

The vendor plans to make its Secure Secret Manager available in June to enhance Resource Access Control Facility mainframe environments. The manager integrates with Vault Self-Managed for Z and LinuxOne, according to IBM.

IBM Makes Sovereign Core Generally Available

IBM has made Sovereign Core generally available, giving users a software platform for AI-ready sovereign environments and control over infrastructure, operations and systems. The platform, which has been in preview for a couple of months and offers a way to deploy technology air-gapped from any international borders and on-premises, only managed by locals, Thomas said.

Sovereign Core aims to help AI users create consistent, auditable AI results so that the cutting-edge technology can enter operational reality faster, according to the vendor. Sovereign Core seeks to enable operational sovereignty and sovereignty over data at rest, in use and in motion. It also focused on technology sovereignty, avoiding vendor lock-in through open, modular architecture. And users gain AI sovereignty, controlling where models run and how to govern inference.

The platform’s control plane extends full authority over configurations, operations and life-cycle management. In-bound identity, encryption and data services give customers control over access, secrets, keys, logs and audit evidence. Sovereign Core has continuous compliance monitoring and evidence generation for real-time audit readiness. And it has preloaded regulatory frameworks for defining compliance postures across regions and industries quickly.

Sovereign Core allows for governing data, models, inference and agent behavior, controlling where AI processing happens and governance over access and updates, all important to highly regulated fields, including government, public sector, regional cloud operators and enterprises, according to IBM.

The platform already has prevetted third-party and open-source software and services from channel partners such as HCL and Atos–plus vendors including AMD, Palo Alto Networks, Cloudera, Dell, Intel, MongoDB, Mistral and Elastic.

Users provision CPU, GPU and AI inference environments with standardized templates and automated configuration profiles for consistent workload deployment and management, according to IBM.

New Offerings Spotlighted At IBM Think

The news around IBM Sovereign Core, IBM Bob, Watsonx Orchestrate and Concert were highlighted by CEO Krishna said in his IBM Think keynote speech Tuesday morning. “These are the building blocks of an AI-first enterprise,” he said, addressing thousands of attendees.

Krishna said that internally, IBM has already generated $4.5 billion in annualized productivity gains through the use of AI and hybrid cloud across the company’s operations. And more than 80,000 IBM developers are recognizing 45 percent average productivity gains using IBM Bob, he said.

“The gap between who is winning [in AI] and who is falling behind is increasing,” Krishna said. “Most enterprises run AI at the margins.” He distinguished between business and organizations that are using AI for simple “task augmentation” and those who are using AI for advanced workflow automation and business transformation.

“How deeply is AI embedded in your business,” Krishna said, challenging the attendees.

The CEO devoted a good deal of his keynote to the importance of hybrid cloud and quantum computing as foundational to AI.

“Hybrid cloud and AI aren’t two conversations, they are one,” Krishna said, arguing that hybrid cloud products—including IBM’s Apptio, Red Hat and HashiCorp acquisitions—provide the underlying architecture and “resilience” AI needs.

Krishna said AI and quantum computing “converge and complement each other” and that mainstream use of quantum computing is “closer than most people think.”

Originally Appeared Here