Today as IBM kicked off its annual developer event TechXchange 2025, it announced several new capabilities to enable organizations to unlock value from agentic AI.

“There’s certainly been a lot of buzz in the industry,” said Bruno Aziza, vice president of Data, AI, and Analytics Strategy at IBM Software. “I think if you look at the context of everything that’s going on, customers are struggling. They’re struggling to get value from their investment.

It announced many updates to its AI agent orchestration platform, watsonx Orchestrate. The platform now includes AgentOps, an observability and governance layer for AI agents; Agentic Workflows, standardized and reusable flows that can be used to build and sequence multi-agent systems; and Langflow integration to reduce agent setup time.

“The thing we’ve learned here is that it’s not just about the agents themselves,” said Aziza. “It’s about the ability to run agents in concert with everything else that’s going on: your rules, your tools, your assistants. IBM is in a really unique position where we’re not telling customers that they need to have a future that’s only about agents. They need to have a future that’s about building agentic workflows in production, at scale, reliably.”

These new capabilities are also being added to watsonx Assistant for Z so that they can be used in mainframe environments. According to IBM, this helps mainframe users “shift from reactive troubleshooting to proactive system management by understanding conversational context and automating operational processes while maintaining security and compliance.”

IBM also announced a preview for Project Bob, an AI-based IDE that works across the entire SDLC. Project Bob can leverage LLMs like Claude, Mistral AI, Llama, and IBM Granite to assist with code generation, testing, upgrades, and security.

It understands the full context of large codebases, enabling it to automate system upgrades, framework migrations, and multi-step refactoring. It also understands enterprise architecture patterns, security requirements, and compliance obligations.

“AI productivity is the new speed of business. These features will help clients remove bottlenecks across their entire technology lifecycle,” said Dinesh Nirmal, senior vice president of Products at IBM Software. “With these enhancements across our portfolio, we’re giving customers capabilities that take developer productivity, agentic orchestration and infrastructure intelligence to the next level.”