Empowering IBM Z users with agentic AI

Whether users are surfacing insights, accelerating system upgrades, simplifying day-to-day tasks or automating incident responses via IT service management solutions, IBM Z’s agentic framework is built to bring streamlined intelligence across the platform.

Building on the momentum of the innovative IBM z17™ launch earlier this year, this isn’t just an evolution—it’s a complete reimagination of the IBM Z experience.

Our strategy is elegantly simple yet powerfully deliberate: build AI agents around real users and real use cases, starting with two of the most impactful groups, IT operations and application development teams for IBM Z.

These new features help IT operators resolve issues more efficiently by understanding conversational context, reasoning through multi-step interactions, making goal-driven decisions and automating complex workflows. This represents a meaningful shift from reactive troubleshooting to proactive, intelligent system management. IBM watsonx Assistant for Z powers the AI chat and agent runtime experience behind products like IBM Concert® for Z, enabling context-aware responses that support effective incident remediation.

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IBM watsonx Code Assistant® for Z helps you accelerate every phase of the mainframe application development and modernization lifecycle, by leveraging AI and automation. For example, Egypt’s National Organization for Social Insurance (NOSI) set out to modernize its core applications to meet rising business demands and support future scalability. With watsonx Code Assistant for Z, they observed up to a 94% reduction in time to analyze intricate COBOL code and up to 79% reduction in time to understand complex applications¹. With the newest enhancements to watsonx Code Assistant for Z, developers can now:

• Leverage generative AI (gen AI) to uncover and document business rules embedded in COBOL applications, using gen AI-powered chat to quickly search on business terms and concepts across thousands of programs.
• Accelerate understanding of mission-critical Assembler code on IBM® z/OS® by generating clear, natural language explanations that reveal the underlying business logic.

IBM Z is evolving to support enterprise-grade AI with a set of foundational services designed to make AI integration secured, scalable and impactful. These services form the backbone of the IBM Z AI ecosystem and are built to work with an organization’s existing infrastructure to:

• Simplify how AI accesses data and executes commands across z/OS and middleware, including Db2® for z/OS, CICS®, IMS and MQ. The Model Context Protocol (MCP) acts as a universal integration layer between AI agents and IBM Z systems which means fewer custom integrations and a more consistent, way to deploy AI across the enterprise.
• Support a range of Large Language Models (LLMs), including IBM’s own Granite® models, third-party options from Meta and Mistral, and open-source models. Granite is optimized for business tasks and runs efficiently on the new IBM Spyre™ Accelerator on IBM z17, enabling high-performance AI directly on the mainframe.
• Provide an Agentic AI Framework and Agent builder embedded in watsonx Assistant for Z that allows intelligent agents to reason, plan and act. This helps orchestrate workflows, reduce manual effort and accelerate onboarding which is especially valuable for teams managing complex environments or transitioning to AI-driven operations.
• Make AI adoption easier with the IBM AI Optimizer for Z that helps enterprises deploy, integrate and monitor AI solutions designed to reduce time, cost and complexity. It’s a practical solution that helps organizations scale AI without disrupting existing operations.

For decades, IBM Z has been the unshakable backbone of mission-critical workloads across industries worldwide. In April 2025, we launched the IBM z17, empowering clients to deploy and scale AI use cases directly on-platform. This brought insights closer to the data and transactions, streamlined complex workflows, and accelerated enterprise agility in ways never before possible.

Building on that momentum, this week we introduced the IBM Spyre Accelerator on IBM z17 designed to work seamlessly with the advanced IBM Telum® II processor. Together, they form a powerful, synergistic combination that dramatically enhances AI performance on IBM Z. This pairing creates an ideal environment for running sophisticated AI models—including generative AI—right where your data lives.

IBM Z is not just AI-capable, it’s AI-driven. With AI foundational services that support security integration, scalable performance and real business impact, organizations can bring AI into their core systems to unlock new levels of productivity and insight.

Agentic AI on IBM Z is a strategic shift in how enterprises harness the power of the mainframe. By putting users at the center and enabling intelligent context-aware agents, we’re delivering productivity, simplicity, and efficiency while upskilling teams. This is the next chapter in our commitment to innovation and we’re just getting started.

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