What's new in IBM Blueworks Live
Learn about the new features and capabilities added to IBM Blueworks Live in the latest release and other releases this year. These updates reflect Blueworks Live's ongoing focus on delivering an intuitive, efficient, and AI-integrated user experience, while continuously improving performance and usability.
To learn more about the changes that happened in previous years, see Previous releases of IBM Blueworks Live.
June 2026
The latest release of IBM Blueworks Live introduces powerful AI capabilities to help you capture and edit workflows faster, a modernized interface for creating and editing process blueprints, and enhancements that improve reuse and governance across your platform.
- Blueworks Live IQ and AI enhancements (technology previews)
-
Explore next-generation AI capabilities in IBM Blueworks Live by using the Blueworks Live IQ chat assistant and AI-powered features to streamline your process modeling experience.Note: These experimental features are being deployed gradually. Only English is currently fully supported.
- Generate a process blueprint from text
-
Accelerate process documentation for new projects, complex migrations, and large modeling efforts with the new text-to-process AI capability. Create complete process blueprints by describing a process in plain language or by pasting meeting notes. AI generates a professional BPMN diagram with activities, gateways, swimlanes, and milestones. You can then continue working with the IQ chat assistant to refine flows and add details.
- Generate a process blueprint from an image
-
Reduce the manual effort of migrating static process maps from legacy or nonstandard tools. You can now generate fully functional process blueprints directly from images. This capability is a significant time-saver and helps speed up complex platform migrations or the conversion of whiteboard sketches into active workflows.
- Refine your process blueprints with Blueworks Live IQ
-
You can now modify process diagrams by simply describing the changes that you want directly in the Blueworks Live IQ chat assistant. This interactive co-designer helps you move seamlessly from identifying bottlenecks to resolving them in the same conversation. Before applying changes, the system automatically saves a snapshot of your diagram so you can experiment with different process flows and restore an earlier version if needed.
- Add guidelines to tailor AI behavior to your organization's needs
-
Control how AI works for your organization by customizing Blueworks Live IQ to always align its recommendations and guidance with your company’s operating model, industry regulations, and internal compliance requirements.
Instead of relying only on default suggestions, editors with administrator privileges who are also space managers can add custom AI guidelines to a space. These guidelines help ensure that when IQ acts as a co-designer or recommends process improvements, it intelligently aligns with your organization’s rules and standards.
- Modernized user experience for designing process blueprints (technology preview)
-
As part of the ongoing user interface modernization, you can now preview a redesigned interface for designing process blueprints. This update is a step further into a faster, cleaner, and more intuitive experience with improved zooming and scrolling, and optimized visual clarity across your active blueprints.
To try the new design, open a process blueprint and use the Switch to modern experience link in the header. This is a first preview and does not yet support all process modeling capabilities. You can switch back to the existing interface at any time to access any of the more advanced features.
Figure 1. Process blueprint modernized user interface 
- Export process blueprints as PDF files
-
You can now download your process diagrams as high-quality PDF files directly from the user interface. This export includes the same customization options that are available for Word documents, including options to include process diagrams and property details for each activity.
- More flexible workspace governance
-
Administrators can now enable governance without having to enforce one specific governance process app across the entire account. When governance is enabled but no process app is selected at the account level, administrators can selectively launch approval flows and strict notifications only in the spaces that require tighter compliance controls.
- Improved artifact lifecycle management and automated artifact expiration
-
Keep your account clean, organized, and compliant with new automated lifecycle tracking:
- Account administrators can now set custom expiration dates for artifacts, including process blueprints, process apps, policies, and decisions. These artifacts are automatically archived when the expiration date is reached.
- The new Artifact management tab in the Admin console provides a unified view of all active and archived artifacts, along with their expiration dates. This view gives you more visibility into all artifacts within your environment and helps you quickly identify which artifacts are about to expire.
Figure 2. Artifact management tab in Admin console 
- Documentation updates
-
- Use the new product glossary in the documentation to find terms faster and look up Blueworks Live terminology from one centralized location.
This glossary provides clear definitions for over 100 terms, including business process concepts, user interface elements, and product-specific features. Whether you need to understand BPMN notation, clarify the difference between a subprocess and a linked process, or learn about decision modeling terms, you can find consistent definitions that help you work more effectively. Access the glossary from the documentation navigation to resolve questions without interrupting your workflow.
- Use the new product glossary in the documentation to find terms faster and look up Blueworks Live terminology from one centralized location.
March 2026
This release delivers significant performance enhancements to Blueworks Live IQ and improved governance controls. This release also provides expanded API flexibility and more granular control over account customization for administrators.
New features and enhancements include:
- Improvements to Blueworks Live IQ assistant [technology preview]
-
Blueworks Live IQ now provides a more robust and seamless conversational interface, which helps generating faster and more reliable insights from your process maps.
Key improvements include:- Faster delivery of insights and recommendations.
- Improved visual structure of AI responses for a cleaner and more professional output.
- The ability to generate data‑driven business cases that support stakeholder alignment and informed decision‑making.
- Modernized Login page
-
As part of the ongoing user interface modernization, the login page now reflects the new design that was introduced in the Administration console in a previous release.
Figure 3. New login page 
- Improved governance to maintain workflow continuity
-
This release introduces smarter logic for workflow continuity. To ensure that work does not stall when a user is archived, their assigned workflows in process apps and work instances are automatically reassigned to the process app owner. If the owner is no longer available, the assignment is redirected to the account administrator.
- Enriched options for account-level management
-
- In the Customization tab of the admin console, you can now select Admins and Editors as the user types who are able to copy spaces to other Blueworks Live accounts.
- Custom number properties now support a length of up to 15 digits, which allows for more precise data capture and better alignment with external financial or tracking systems.
- API updates and deprecation
-
Blueworks Live API now provides better filtering and performance.
-
An improved Activity API (
GET /bwl/activities) is now available to retrieve detailed information about account activities with advanced filtering capabilities.
Learn more...
-
Planned change: A rate limit of 200 requests per hour will be applied to the
GET /blueprints/{blueprint-id}/exportendpoint in a future release. Review your integration patterns now to prepare for this upcoming change. -
Important: Deprecation noticeThe Export process diagrams to BPMN 2.0 format (
GET /BpmnExport) API is deprecated. Use the Export a revision of a BPMN 2.0 process (GET /export/process) API instead to ensure future compatibility.
Learn more...
-
- Documentation updates
-
A new series of tutorials is available to discover Blueworks Live IQ capabilities:
-
Identify process
improvements: Go through an end‑to‑end process assessment scenario where you learn how to
prompt the AI assistant, interpret its structured assessment, and refine insights to uncover
bottlenecks, inefficiencies, benchmark comparisons, and automation opportunities.
-
Verify process
completeness: Analyze your process blueprint to find potential gaps such as missing metadata,
understand why these gaps matter, and get AI‑assisted suggested values to help fix the process.
-
Build a business case:
Create a structured business-case that uses insights from Blueworks Live IQ analysis to formalize your targeted process
improvements plan.
-
February 2026
The latest release of IBM Blueworks Live introduces Blueworks Live IQ, an AI‑powered assistant that helps teams understand, analyze, and optimize their business processes with greater speed and confidence. This capability is released as a technology preview and is available to users with an Editor license. This release also delivers improvements to the Export a blueprint API.
- Blueworks Live IQ assistant [technology preview]
-
Integrated into the Blueworks Live AI assistant chat, Blueworks Live IQ provides industry‑aligned recommendations and context‑aware insights based on your process maps and metadata, all from a simple conversational interface. The assistant is available from process blueprints for users with the Editor user type.
With Blueworks Live IQ, you can:- Conversationally assess and explore process models, making advanced analysis more accessible to both business and technical audiences.
- Identify bottlenecks, delays, and inefficiencies more quickly, reducing manual analysis effort.
- Uncover missing or inconsistent metadata and receive suggested values to help you maintain complete, high‑quality process blueprints.
The Blueworks Live IQ assistant enables users to move beyond static process maps to dynamic, insight-rich workflows, which represents a significant step forward in how organizations analyze and optimize their processes.
Note: Blueworks Live IQ is being deployed gradually across countries, so it might not be available immediately. - Exporting process blueprints as PDF files with the Export a blueprint API
-
You can now select PDF as an output format when you export a process blueprint with the
blueprints/{blueprint-id}/exportAPI. All existing export options for .docx are also available for PDF, such as including process diagrams, activity numbering, and custom footers. This enhancement enables a more seamless experience when generating static process documentation.
- Documentation updates
- API documentation has fully migrated to IBM API Hub, IBM's dedicated platform for centralized API documentation and resources. The previous documentation section within IBM Docs is still available for review, but is no longer updated and might be removed in the future. Find the latest updates and documentation for Blueworks Live on IBM API Hub
.