Meet Bob, a productivity tool that helps developers scale for enterprise

Many coding assistants promise developers faster delivery and improved workflows. But when developers code for enterprise, they need tools that can adapt to their environment and work. Enter Project Bob: IBM’s AI-first developer productivity platform.

“We call it automate the obvious, automate the mundane task. There’s a bunch of tasks at every stage that are mundane,” said Neel Sundaresan, a General Manager of Automation and AI at IBM, during an interview with IBM Think. “How do I automate that? And then there are complex tasks: how do I augment my work?”

Bob, an assistant for the age of AI, is meant to be a friendly “buddy” for developers. It uses natural language, so that developers can use it to write or modernize code. Bob doesn’t only speak to humans, but also to agents. Agents converse in natural language and automate tasks across systems without requiring humans to write complex scripts.

“Increasingly, as we go into what I call software 4.0, agents are talking to agents automatically in human language,” Sundaresan said. “So suddenly you’ve got computers talking human languages rather than humans talking computer languages.”

But Bob is more than just a companion. It is enterprise-ready. Bob uses guardrails to help ensure security and compliance, and it supports on-premises and mainframe (IBM Z) environments for regulated industries such as finance and the federal government. And security is critical, because AI introduces new risks like prompt injection, where malicious instructions can slip into natural language commands.

“Think of anything that can go wrong when instructions are in plain English, like exposing sensitive information or triggering harmful actions,” Sundaresan said. “These risks become even greater when agents generate or interpret those instructions, so we need strong guardrails and a framework to catch them.”

Bob is also cost-optimized and automatically selects the right model for each experience.

“If anybody builds a software system and goes directly to one of the frontier model providers, let’s say it costs you a dollar. On Bob, it will cost you more like 35 cents, 40, 45 cents,” Sundaresan said.

Bob launched as an internal project in April, with only a hundred users. Today, it is used by more than 10,000 IBM developers across software, consulting and infrastructure. Sundaresan reports a productivity boost of 45% across Bob’s users, and he says that Bob received a lot of positive feedback.

“We have built an ecosystem that’s pretty powerful in terms of making not only developers productive, but also kind of enjoying their jobs,” he said.

Bob will launch publicly next year.