What's new in IBM® watsonx Orchestrate®

You can learn about the new features and capabilities added to IBM watsonx Orchestrate for April 2025 here. Refer to Previous releases to learn more about changes that happened in the previous months.

Note: Do you want to get updates on new features, bug fixes and security fixes for IBM watsonx Orchestrate on-premises? See Release notes for IBM watsonx Orchestrate for on-premises.

30 April 2025

The following sections outline the changes that happened on the release of 30 April 2025 for IBM watsonx Orchestrate on IBM Cloud® and on Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Unlocking business productivity with AI agents and Agent builder

IBM watsonx Orchestrate unveils AI agents, a feature that lets you build and manage agents tailored to your business needs. This feature is available in technology preview for a limited set of customers.

AI agents are processes that perform actions on behalf of users, either on a regular schedule or without user intervention. Powered by large language models (LLMs), these agents can operate with minimal supervision, handling tasks ranging from simple actions to complex multistep processes.

In IBM watsonx Orchestrate, agents can:

Use tools to accomplish complex tasks, integrating with other systems
Collaborate with other agents and tools to extend the agent capabilities and automate tasks.
Take advantage of contextual knowledge grounded on your business needs
Follow defined behavior tailored to your quality standards

AI agent — Figure 1. Delivering value with IBM watsonx Orchestrate AI Agents

Key features

Agent icon Automation - made easy

Use AI agents to take action, provide informed responses, and collaborate with other agents to complete tasks.
Automate routine or complex processes, so your team can focus on what matters most.

Agent icon Discover the best tools and agents

Discover a catalog of prebuilt agents and tools, ready to use or customize.
Filter by category to find what fits your goals.
Reuse existing agents as templates to speed up your build.

Agent icon Use Agent builder

Create agents from scratch or start from templates.
Add tools and other agents required to achieve your goal.
Provide data as Knowledge to guide your agent’s actions.
Integrate existing AI agents from watsonx.ai or Salesforce.
Define agent behavior, when and how the agent should respond.
Preview, and deploy your agents.

Agent icon Take advantage of domain expertise with prebuilt agents

Use specialized agents built for business areas like HR, procurement, sales, and productivity.
Accelerate time to value with domain-specific use cases.

Agent icon Extend agent capabilities with tools

Enhance agent capabilities with a wide selection of tools built for different tasks.
Tools work as building blocks your agents can use to take action or retrieve information.

Agent icon Use multi-agent orchestration

Collaborate with multiple agents to handle more complex workflows. With the multi-agent orchestration your agent can team up with multiple agents from various sources, such as prebuilt and custom agents built by IBM and your team, agents from third-party platforms and watsonx.ai, and AI assistants from IBM watsonx Assistant instances. Collaborator agents are designed to operate within specialized domains or industries, allowing them to complete tasks with greater speed, accuracy and intelligence.

By adding collaborator agents, you can:
- Accelerate complex task completion by dividing the task across multiple agents, each handling a piece more efficiently.
- Expand your system by adding agents to manage more tasks.
- Let agents work independently to handle a wider variety of tasks and quickly respond to user requests.
- Gather valuable insights from employee and customer interactions so agents can evolve and deliver even better results over time.

IBM watsonx Orchestrate brings all these capabilities into a single, streamlined experience for you to create powerful AI agents without much technical expertise. If you are interested, enroll by using the IBM watsonx Orchestrate Agent builder: Preview Access Request form.

To learn more about the agentic experience, see Learn about the new experience.

Attention: With the introduction of the new agentic experience, prebuilt skills are no longer provisioned by default for existing tenants in the following data centers: London, Toronto, Tokyo and Sydney (IBM Cloud), and Singapore (AWS). If your tenant is in one of these regions and was created before this change, prebuilt skills can be made available upon request. To request specific prebuilt skills, raise a support ticket.

Building agents by using IBM watsonx Orchestrate ADK

Agent development kit (ADK) is now available for IBM watsonx Orchestrate. The ADK enables you to build, deploy, and integrate agents within watsonx Orchestrate. You can use watsonx Orchestrate ADK to integrate with other agent frameworks, build tools and for multi-agent collaboration.

Key highlights:

Agents creation: The ADK provides a Python library and command line tools to develop agents. With the ADK, you can import, create, remove, and list agents.
Tools integration: Easily integrate existing tools or create new ones to enhance your agent capabilities.
Cross-framework integration: The ADK supports integrating agents and tools built on other frameworks.

To explore how to create and customize agents and tools, and to learn more about the full capabilities of the ADK, refer to IBM watsonx Orchestrate ADK documentation.

Explore IBM watsonx Orchestrate with a 30-day trial on IBM Cloud

You can now try watsonx Orchestrate with a 30-day free trial on IBM Cloud. During the trial period, you get access to all the features available in the Standard plan.

For more information on how to initiate the trial access, see Trial access on IBM Cloud.

New data centers available on IBM Cloud

The IBM Cloud data centers are now expanded to include the following regions:

Sydney

IBM watsonx Orchestrate data center now expands to Sydney. With this new data center, watsonx Orchestrate offers secure and compliant data storage solutions for Australian users.

For more information, see Outbound IP addresses.

Tokyo

IBM watsonx Orchestrate data center now expands to Tokyo. With this new data center, watsonx Orchestrate offers secure and compliant data storage solutions for users in Japan.

For more information, see Outbound IP addresses.

Secure connectivity with TLS tunnel

You can now create a secure connection between IBM watsonx Orchestrate on IBM Cloud and your third-party Cloud or on-prem services by using a TLS tunnel. Set it up by using the Satellite connector. After configuring the TLS tunnel, you can use external apps and skills within watsonx Orchestrate and keep your data protected. For more information, see Configuring TLS tunnel.

Usability improvements in document extractors

You can optimize your document extractor by selecting the data type when you edit a field. Available data types are string, number and date.

In the document preview, you can also search the document for specific occurrences, for example, when you need to find text to provide as example to the LLM to understand the output. It saves you time especially if you are searching through long documents. For more information, see Creating document extractors.

Inspection of results from conversational search

Now you can inspect the results of a conversational search from the search inspector, improving the troubleshooting of potential inaccurate search results. When assistants use conversational search to answer to user prompts, they consider only a subset of the results to generate the response.

Improvements on error messages from conversational search results

Error messages in conversational search now include the following updates:

Clearer error notifications

When a conversational search fails, the assistant now shows a detailed message explaining the issue.
Specific error types

Messages indicate whether the problem is a timeout, retrieval error or connection issue with watsonx.ai.

This feature improves transparency, making it easier to quickly understand and resolve search errors.

IBM® watsonx Orchestrate® API updates

See the updates in the IBM watsonx Orchestrate API for this release.

Updated sections

Register an external agent section is updated to include the provider type salesforce. You can now integrate Salesforce agents built in Agentforce with watsonx Orchestrate.
Register AI Assistant instances API is updated to add descriptions for properties: api_key, crn and authorization_url.
The IBM watsonx Orchestrate API known issues and limitations topic now has the following entry:
- Skills and skill sets
  - The Get all scheduled events from Calendly skill does not return any output

Other enhancements and changes

The following table details the enhancements that are delivered in the current release corresponding to the user role:

Enhancements	Description	Affected role
The Intro to watsonx Orchestrate video is updated to include the latest features	Updated the Intro to watsonx Orchestrate video with the latest product experience.	User or WO User
Enhanced Apply button validation for file uploads	The Apply button for the file uploads is provided with validation checks. Now, the button is disabled if the uploaded file contains no data or if any required fields are missing, helping ensure users can proceed only when all criteria are met.	User or WO User

The following table details the fixes that are delivered in the current release corresponding to the user role:

Bug fixes	Description	Affected role
The IBM Process Mining app did not appear in the Skill catalog	Fixed an issue where the IBM Process Mining app did not appear in the Skill catalog for instances of watsonx Orchestrate in Toronto (ca-tor) and London (eu-gb) regions.	User or WO User
IBM watsonx.ai skills fail to run	Fixed an issue where the watsonx.ai the skill execution fails with a 504 Gateway Timeout error or 401 Unauthorized error.	WO User

Documentation updates

See the updates in the watsonx Orchestrate documentation and other contents for this release.

New sections

Learn about the new experience is added to provide detailed information about the new agentic experience in watsonx Orchestrate. This section contains information about:
Managing settings in watsonx Orchestrate is added to provide information about all the settings options in one place.
Connecting watsonx Employee Support agents to Slack section is added to provide the steps on how to connect IBM watsonx Employee Support agents to Slack. This feature enables you to quickly use the capabilities of AI agents built-in for HR use cases right from your Slack workspace.

Updated sections

The Troubleshooting section is now updated to add a solution for "Trouble logging in issue".

The Known issues and limitations topic now has the following entry:
- Prebuilt apps and skills
  - Error connecting to a skill
- watsonx Orchestrate new experience
  - Non-secured embed chat
  - LLM in agents
  - External agents
  - Agent tools