IBM unveils AI and hybrid cloud management tools at Think conference

IBM (NYSE: IBM) announced a suite of enterprise AI and hybrid cloud management capabilities at its annual Think conference on May 5, 2026, according to a company statement. The announcements include the next generation of IBM watsonx Orchestrate for multi-agent orchestration, IBM Confluent for real-time data streaming, IBM Concert platform for intelligent operations, and IBM Sovereign Core for operational independence.

The new watsonx Orchestrate, available in private preview, functions as an agentic control plane that allows organizations to deploy agents from various sources with consistent policy enforcement. IBM also announced IBM Bob, now generally available, which serves as an agentic development partner for building agents with built-in security and cost controls.

"The enterprises pulling ahead are not deploying more AI – they're redesigning how their business operates," said Arvind Krishna, Chairman and CEO of IBM. "Running AI in the enterprise requires a new operating model, and IBM is enabling organizations to manage AI-driven systems with the same rigor, governance, and scale as their most critical infrastructure."

The data foundation offerings include new capabilities for watsonx.data with a context layer available in private preview, and integrations between Confluent, Tableflow, and Flink with watsonx.data that are generally available. IBM also introduced watsonx.data GPU-accelerated Presto in private preview, which in internal testing with NVIDIA showed potential for significant cost reductions and performance improvements.

The IBM Concert platform, available in public preview, provides AI-powered operations management that correlates signals across applications, infrastructure, and networks. IBM Concert Secure Coder, also in public preview, embeds security management into developer workflows and is available in IBM Bob and VS Code.

IBM Sovereign Core, now generally available, embeds policy at the infrastructure runtime level for governance and regulatory compliance. The platform includes an extensible catalog and is built on Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat AI technologies.

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