Manage all your AI agents in one place with watsonx Orchestrate

Enterprises don’t need another way to build agents—they need a way to operationalize the agents they’ve already built. In large organizations, agents are being created everywhere—across different teams, tools and frameworks. Some are built in-house, some come from vendors and others are embedded in applications. As adoption grows, this diversity is only increasing.

Organizations want the flexibility to build and run AI agents from their tools of choice. In practice, most enterprises will continue to operate across multiple frameworks and development approaches. What has been missing is a way to manage that reality.

IBM watsonx Orchestrate is built on an open approach, bringing agents together into a single operational layer without requiring teams to rebuild what they already have. With its new agentic control plane capabilities, Orchestrate provides a simplified way to  manage and govern an organization’s agentic estate, regardless of how those agents were built or where they run.

Most companies will not standardize on a single way of building agents. Instead, they will continue to operate a mix of agents created using different technologies and frameworks, often across multiple teams.

Watsonx Orchestrate now begins to address this by supporting agents beyond its native environment. Today, this includes IBM native agents, Langflow agents, LangGraph agents, and agents built with the open A2A protocol, with broader interoperability coming soon. This provides a practical path to reduce fragmentation while preserving existing investments.

In practice, this means:

• Supported agents from frameworks such as LangGraph and A2A can be brought into Orchestrate
• Agents can be operated in secure, isolated environments with shared services
• Monitoring and evaluation can be applied more consistently across supported agents

This approach allows organizations to start consolidating operational visibility and control, without requiring a full rebuild or a shift to a single development framework.

Operating agents in production requires more than deployment. Teams need visibility into how agents behave, how well they perform and where improvements are needed. Watsonx Orchestrate introduces operational capabilities to support this:

• Observability and tracing across interactions and workflows
• Build-time and runtime evaluation to assess quality and performance
• Continuous optimization of performance, cost and outcomes

These capabilities help teams move from initial deployment to ongoing management, enabling more consistent performance and better outcomes over time.

The platform also improves how teams design, test and understand agent behavior before deployment. New capabilities include:

• Built-in evaluations and simulation against realistic scenarios
• Advanced debugging and workflow inspection
• Improved development experience for both native and imported agents

This supports faster development cycles while helping reduce risk before agents reach production.

As agents interact more deeply with enterprise systems, security and governance become essential. Watsonx Orchestrate includes enterprise-grade controls across the lifecycle:

• Centralized identity and credential management
• Control enforcement and audit logging
• Isolation and segmentation

These features help ensure that agents operate within defined boundaries, with appropriate levels of oversight and traceability.

A unified AI gateway provides centralized oversight of how supported agents, models and tools behave in production. Capabilities include:

• Runtime control enforcement
• Security and compliance guardrails
• Monitoring of control triggers

This allows organizations to apply consistent operational policies and maintain control over agent behavior.

A governed catalog provides structure and visibility across AI assets. Capabilities include:

• A centralized catalog of agents and tools with performance metrics
• Certification and publishing workflows
• Lifecycle management from development through production

This supports better reuse, visibility and governance as AI adoption expands across the organization.

As enterprises scale their use of AI, the number and diversity of agents will continue to grow. Managing that landscape effectively is becoming a core operational requirement.

IBM watsonx Orchestrate brings your entire agent ecosystem into one control plane—so you can see what’s happening, manage how agents work together, and scale what delivers results across your business.

• Built to be open, so it works with the agents, tools, and systems you already use—without forcing you to rebuild or replace them.
• Hybrid, so you can operate agents across clouds, on-prem, and existing systems without replatforming
• Trusted, with built-in security, governance, and compliance.
• Hybrid, so you can run AI where it makes the most sense—across cloud and on premises.

Rather than requiring standardization on a single technology stack, this approach allows organizations to maintain flexibility in how agents are built, while establishing a consistent way to manage, govern and optimize them.

For organizations moving beyond experimentation and into scaled production use of AI, this represents an important shift—from building individual agents to operating an integrated agent ecosystem.

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