IBM watsonx Assistant for Z: Bringing intelligence and automation to mainframe IT management with agentic AI

This version marks the beginning of a journey to further simplify and transform how operators engage with the mainframe to unlock new levels of productivity.

Since its launch in 2024, watsonx Assistant for Z has strived to simplify the mainframe user experience with integrated conversational AI grounded in IBM Z expertise and enterprise knowledge. Clients have been able to link their existing automation to the Assistant’s AI Chat, designed to allow authorized users to trigger trusted workflows and streamline tasks.

With this new version, we are taking productivity a step further by introducing agentic AI capabilities. watsonx Assistant for Z moves beyond generative AI to deliver data-driven intelligence and customizable workflow automation.

Traditional automation is typically limited to predetermined situations or manual workflows. With AI agents now driving responses, watsonx Assistant for Z goes further: engineered to understand conversational nuances, reason through multi-step interactions, and make decisions based on goals rather than fixed rules. This shift transforms both user and builder experiences, for the automation and execution of complex workflows with minimal supervision and added manual control when needed. Here’s how watsonx Assistant for Z delivers these new capabilities:

This launch brings a scalable architecture for building and managing AI agents across the mainframe ecosystem. It includes multi-agent orchestration enabling collaboration between AI Agents and Assistants, to help automate complex workflows.

The new Agent Builder allows teams to create custom agents for workflows ranging from simple to complex. It offers a no-code feature for rapid task-specific agent creation, a pro-code option with the Agent Development Kit (ADK) for advanced agent capabilities, and analytics for agent usage, performance, and reliability. This empowers teams to democratize expertise, by creating agents that leverage their organization’s existing automation designed for goal-driven intelligence and scalable workflow automation.

IBM watsonx Assistant for Z includes pre-built AI agents and services that are designed to boost productivity and provide a faster path to value. Agents built across the IBM Z software stack provide clients with a rich collection of agents designed to accelerate productivity and simplify operations. This framework is built to enable easy deployment of pre-built agents, IBM Z product agents, and custom third party agents. These agents span areas such as system monitoring, workload scheduling, automation, and support, enabling IT operators to gain insights, act on critical events, and streamline workflows. Whether it’s surfacing insights from OMEGAMON, automating incident response through ServiceNow, or accelerating Z upgrades, the agentic framework helps build consistent intelligence across the mainframe. To get started quickly or to build custom extensions, you can explore our GitHub repository for documentation, examples, and developer resources.

Select IBM Z Software products are now powered by watsonx Assistant for Z to take advantage of its conversational AI chat and agentic framework to deliver rich new capabilities designed to increase productivity and simplify the mainframe user experience.

Watsonx Assistant for Z is engineered to support IT operators in guiding users from monitoring alerts toward resolving issues. Acting as a facilitator, it can eliminate the need to toggle between interfaces of multiple tools by routing requests to the right AI agents which then surface root causes, historical context, and recommended next actions in a single conversational flow. In powering the AI chat and agent runtime experience behind products like IBM Concert for Z, Watsonx Assistant for Z drives context-aware responses that support incident remediation.

The result: operators can prioritize the most critical alerts, swiftly understand issues, and take corrective action directly within the Assistant. This is designed to help reduce mean time to resolution, improve system reliability, and enable teams to focus on higher-value work.

Coming soon in Q4, IBM Spyre Accelerator support will allow clients to run watsonx Assistant for Z entirely on IBM Z with agentic AI, while preserving the platform’s security and qualities of service. Agents rely on the LLMs to properly route request, collate the responses and return meaningful responses to the user. With Spyre Cards, these requests, decisions and actions never leave the mainframe, ensuring all occur with the highest level of security. Click here to know more on Spyre.¹

Experience the future of mainframe operations by learning more on the watsonx Assistant for Z product page. To read more on how IBM Z is transforming the mainframe experience, read the IBM Blog. For more information on how IBM is reimagining how work gets done with Agentic AI, read the IBM press release.