IBM announcements at Think 2026 to advance the agentic era
The agentic era isn’t coming—it’s here. At Think 2026 in Boston, IBM makes it official with a wave of new products, capabilities, and partnerships across its entire portfolio.
Think 2026, 4 - 7 May in Boston, MA, is where bold organizations are making the agentic leap—redesigning their businesses with AI at the core to unlock unprecedented ROI. This year’s event brings together visionary leaders, practitioners, and global pioneers to chart the path toward smarter, AI-first enterprises.
Across four days of keynotes, sessions and innovation previews, IBM is unveiling a sweeping set of announcements spanning agentic AI, hybrid cloud, automation and beyond. Here’s a look at everything IBM announced at Think 2026.
IBM Bob SaaS
IBM Bob (Pro, Pro+, Ultra, and Enterprise SaaS Plans) - IBM Bob is an AI-powered software development solution designed to transform how enterprises build, modernize, and manage applications. Unlike traditional coding assistants, Bob acts as an end-to-end development partner for the SDLC; supporting everything from code generation to testing, security, and deployment. Built with agentic AI and multi-model awareness, Bob understands your codebase, workflows, and enterprise standards to automate complex tasks, improve productivity, and deliver secure, production-ready software faster across modern and legacy systems.
Concert platform
IBM Concert is an agentic operations platform that connects signals from your existing tools into shared, system-wide context and coordinated action across your hybrid estate. It builds on the strengths of Concert, Instana, Turbonomic, SevOne and Cloud Pak for AIOps by bringing their insights together, correlating what matters and enabling teams and AI agents to investigate, decide, and act as one—helping you anticipate issues, resolve incidents faster and continuously optimize performance, cost and resilience.
IBM Sovereign Core
IBM Sovereign Core enables enterprises, governments and service providers to deploy and operate AI-ready sovereign environments with full customer control over data, operations and governance. It delivers a cohesive ready-to-run sovereignty software stack—combining a customer-operated AI control plane, continuous compliance evidence, and governed agentic workflows across any hybrid environment. IBM Sovereign Core includes an extensible catalog that organizations can curate for their own users, with their own applications, or populated with pre-vetted IBM, third-party or open source software and services from an ecosystem of partners that includes: AMD, ATOS, Cegeka, Cloudera, Dell, Elastic, HCL, Intel, Mistral, MongoDB and Palo Alto Networks.
Confluent
Now part of IBM, Confluent is the world’s leading Data Streaming Platform, powering real-time data for more than 40% of the Fortune 500. Together, IBM and Confluent provide an open, hybrid data foundation that turns live business events into governed, AI-ready data for applications, analytics and AI agents across the enterprise. Confluent offers a complete platform to stream, connect, process, and govern data in real time, built on open standards including Kafka, Flink and Iceberg. Confluent’s platform is natively integrated with IBM’s portfolio including watsonx, IBM Z and IBM webmethods hybrid integration. For example, IBM watsonx.data and Confluent Tableflow work together to make real-time streams of data immediately available as open table formats for analysis and business intelligence.
Agentic Control Plane
AI adoption is accelerating—but most enterprises are left managing a fragmented landscape of agents, tools and systems. IBM watsonx Orchestrate provides a unified agentic control plane to bring order to that complexity—giving clients centralized visibility, control, and optimization across their entire AI ecosystem so they can move from isolated pilots to production-scale AI securely, efficiently, and with measurable business impact.
AI Editions of Core Software
AI Editions for Core Software bring together IBM’s portfolio of purpose-built AI assistants, agents and agentic toolkits across DB2, Cognos Analytics, CP4BA, Content Cortex, ACE, CP4I, ELM, MQ, B2Bi SaaS and OMS. Integrated directly into enterprise systems and workflows, these capabilities enable users to interact in natural language, surface relevant context, diagnose issues, optimize performance, automate takes and take next-best actions with enterprise-grade controls, transparency and human oversight. They help enterprises move from fragmented, expert-dependent work to AI-native execution—embedding governed, domain-specific AI across IBM Core Software to improve productivity, resilience and time to value.
Vault Enterprise 2.0
Vault Enterprise 2.0 introduces updates to modernize identity-based security, helping organizations secure, scale and simplify secrets management across hybrid and multi-cloud environments. It focuses on eliminating long-lived credentials through workload identity federation, improving credential lifecycle automation and enabling high-performance encryption for large-scale and emerging workloads. The release also enhances integrations, usability and onboarding while adopting a new versioning and support model, making it easier for platform and security teams to operationalize Vault at enterprise scale.
IBM zSecure Secret Manager
IBM zSecure Secret Manager introduces policy-driven, automated certificate lifecycle management for IBM z/OS environments. By integrating with enterprise certificate authorities, such as IBM Vault Self-Managed for Z and LinuxONE, IBM zSecure Secret Manager enables organizations to automate certificate renewal on z/OS.
IBM Cyber Fraud
IBM Cyber Fraud introduces an AI-assisted fraud investigation platform that automates data collection, orchestrates investigation workflows, and enables natural language-driven analysis across fraud, payment and security systems. By unifying fragmented data into a single investigation workspace, it helps teams accelerate decision-making, improve consistency and reduce manual effort. With up to 90% faster investigations, organizations can resolve fraud more efficiently, lower operational costs and limit financial losses.
Infragraph Public Preview
HCP Terraform powered by Infragraph is now available in Public Preview. Infragraph helps organizations overcome their complex data silos by delivering a single pane of glass view of their hybrid estate through a centralized, event-driven knowledge graph. This delivers infrastructure insights that can be used to help streamline operations and automate remediation.
Context on watsonx.data
Real-time context on watsonx.data provides AI agents with data that continuously accessible as it changes, delivered with the business meaning, semantics and policies required for agents to understand what that data represents. Together with Confluent’s Real-Time Context Engine, it combines streaming and enterprise data with semantic enrichment and governance, so agents can retrieve complete, accurate insights and make decisions that are informed and reliable.
Agentic Data Integration
Agentic Data Integration (preview in IBM watsonx.data integration) helps accelerate data delivery for business users while freeing engineering teams to focus on higher-value innovation. Business users can request data in natural language, and AI agents translate those requests into production-ready pipelines that deliver data quickly, with governance and human-in-the-loop controls built in. By moving beyond manual and fragmented approaches, data teams can scale more effectively to meet growing AI and analytics demand.
IBM DataPower Interact Gateway
IBM DataPower Interact Gateway is the AI mediation governance gateway that governs, secures and observes all interactions between agents, models, and tools with enterprise APIs and data. Unlike traditional API gateways retrofitted for AI traffic, we deliver a context-aware unified gateway that enforces security, governance and observability directly at the AI interaction layer, enabling enterprises to securely manage and scale AI safely without rebuilding their architecture.
Request a demo. Explore the features and benefits with a custom demo from API Connect, featuring the Interact Gateway.
IBM Z Database Assistant
IBM Z Database Assistant brings intelligence directly into Db2 and IMS operations, continuously assessing database health, surfacing insights and guiding actions to reduce manual effort. By shifting from reactive troubleshooting to proactive database management, it ensures data remains continuously available and optimized—enabling enterprises to unlock the full value of trusted IBM Z data for AI at scale.
Content Cortex
Content Cortex is a next-generation intelligent content services system that empowers enterprises to prepare, govern and activate their content for agentic automation. The platform is built to provide best-of-breed ingestion, compression and retrieval performance for static content such as quarterly statements and tax documents. Teams that spend too much time searching for, reading, validating and reconciling content across systems will be able to work in ways that fundamentally transform how quickly and confidently employees can operate.
Learn more and sign up for the private preview
IBM SQL Data Insights Pro
Introducing IBM SQL Data Insights Pro at Think 2026—the intelligence layer for Db2 for z/OS that transforms raw SQL queries into real-time, decision-ready insights without any data movement. By combining automated semantic pattern detection with natural language explanations, it reveals hidden trends, flags anomalies and optimizes performance in place—empowering teams to move from data to action with speed, precision and confidence.
Docling for IBM watsonx
Docling for IBM watsonx is a document intelligence platform that helps teams turn documents into structured, AI-ready data formats such as Markdown, JSON and HTML. It simplifies how documents are prepared for search, RAG, and agentic workflows, while preserving structure and context which are essential for high-quality information retrieval and interpretation by AI.
OpenRAG on watsonx.data
OpenRAG on watsonx.data is an open, agentic RAG framework that connects AI to fragmented enterprise knowledge, enabling agents to search, reason and validate—so teams can build more reliable AI workflows faster and with less effort. It combines Docling for document processing, OpenSearch for hybrid search and retrieval, and Langflow for agent orchestration into a composable stack that is ready to go out-of-the-box, reducing the work of building across ingestion, search, retrieval and orchestration.
IBM watsonx.data with MCP Server Integration
Enterprises are shifting from human-driven data interfaces (APIs, dashboards) to AI agents that can reason, orchestrate workflows and take actions. With watsonx.data 2.3.2, IBM introduces a managed MCP server that exposes data platform capabilities as standardized, discoverable tools, enabling agents to securely and dynamically interact with data. IBM watsonx.data is now positioned as an agent-ready platform while ensuring all actions remain governed under enterprise security and compliance controls.
GPU Acceleration for IBM watsonx.data
IBM is launching a private technical preview of GPU-accelerated query processing for watsonx.data Presto C++, built in collaboration with and powered by NVIDIA GPUs. By shifting analytics workloads from CPUs to GPUs, it delivers faster insights and lower costs with no changes to existing SQL or data pipelines. Organizations looking to scale AI and analytics more efficiently are invited to join the preview and help shape what’s next.
That’s just the start. Be sure to check back here for updates throughout the week as IBM’s latest Think 2026 announcements go live. Follow along with the Think News team for ongoing coverage from the floor and stay close on the most important tech industry trends with exclusive coverage on the biggest stories coming out of Think.