IBM Data Roadmap
Business innovation driven by generative AI is fueled by open data stores, formats, and engines; a product-oriented data fabric; and the infusion of AI at all levels to radically improve data consumption.
Data
Roadmap
Strategic milestones
All information being released represents IBM’s current intent, is subject to change or withdrawal, and represents only goals and objectives.
You can learn more about the progress of individual items by downloading the PDF in the top right corner.
2026
Leverage AI to automate the management of an enterprise’s data and democratize its use.
By 2026, we will make available a combination of structured and unstructured data for generative and agentic AI to leverage as it moves from self-service retrieval to more complex tasks such as causal and predictive analytics. We will use such generative and agentic AI to manage the data platform.
Why this matters for our clients and the world
Enterprise employees in every role and at every skill level will leverage data to increase efficiencies and competitiveness and gain advantages. AI agents will help manage data systems and address daily issues, freeing support staff to focus on higher value tasks.
The technologies and innovations that will make this possible
We will enhance the data platform to support permissioned multimodal data at orders of magnitude greater scale. Data integration tools will continue to grow in scale and become more intelligent in determining which data has value. Agents and assistants will support database administrators, data reliability engineers, data engineers, and the like with common and daily tasks.
How these advancements will be delivered to IBM clients and partners
watsonx will support highly scalable storage of unstructured data and embeddings with consistent security and governance. Our data products will integrate agents to support human operators. Data integration will unify processing of all classes of data.