IBM updates watsonx Orchestrate with new agent-building capabilities

IBM has updated its AI platform for workflow and task automation, watsonx Orchestrate (WXO), with new agent-building and observability capabilities to help developers more quickly build agents that can take on repetitive tasks in the enterprise.

CEO Arvind Krishna said the updates underpin the company’s shift from AI assistants to AI agents for workflow and task automation. The company is aiming to capture a larger share of the market for building generative AI applications as enterprises double their AI investments over the next few years, he said at a media briefing ahead of the company’s annual Think conference.

Agentic AI applications that can complete tasks without manual intervention while learning from new data are attracting the attention of enterprises looking to automate more work.

“We’re now evolving the capabilities of WXO to easily build, deploy and manage all your agentic AI systems within a simple and unified user experience optimized to scale,” an IBM spokesperson said.

watsonx Orchestrate gets new agent building tools

Watsonx Orchestrate (WXO) is part of the broader watsonx portfolio of tools, automations, assistants, and other integrations. One of the newest WXO components is Agent Builder, a no-code studio that enables the creation of agents with drag and drop tools. “The studio will also allow developers to import outside tools and automations such as open source frameworks, third party or custom tools and automations to build a custom agent,” an IBM spokesperson said.

IBM is not the first to offer no-code tools for agent creation: Salesforce, AWS, Microsoft, and Google, among others, already have similar offerings.

Gartner vice president analyst Jim Hare sees developers mostly staying in their lane with these tools: “It is unlikely that watsonx Orchestrate will get traction outside of customers already part of the IBM ecosystem and already using other IBM products including other watsonx products,” he said. “There might be few exceptions —customers who are in requirement of a hybrid, on-prem, or edge deployment.”

Other additions to WXO include a new agent development kit (ADK) that professional developers can use to create highly specialized agents from scratch.

There again, IBM is not alone in offering such capabilities. Last month at Cloud Next, Google introduced a new open source framework under the same name, Agent Development Kit, which it said will enable developers to build an AI agent in under 100 lines of Python code.

Pre-built agents and the Agent Catalog inside watsonx Orchestrate

IBM is also adding over 150 pre-built agents to WXO via the new Agent Catalog. It developed some itself, while others are from partners including Box, MasterCard, Oracle, Salesforce, and ServiceNow, the IBM spokesperson said.

The agents can be embedded in systems for web research, performing calculations, or other tasks, and also can be used as templates for creating new agents in Agent Builder, the spokesperson added.

IBM said it plans to offer revenue sharing agreements to supporting partners for agents they build with WXO and publish in the catalog, but didn’t provide details.

This is another area in which IBM is playing catch-up: Vendors including Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Microsoft already offer such marketplaces with their agent-building platforms.

Multi-agent orchestrator inside watsonx Orchestrate

IBM has made changes throughout WXO to enable orchestration of multiple agents, whether they were built by IBM, a customer, or a third party.

“Think of it as an agent supervisor capability which analyzes user requests, routes tasks to the correct agents and allows them to share information and tackle complex, multi-step processes together,” the IBM spokesperson said.

Other additions to WXO include a set of observability tools to help developers monitor their agents, IBM said. These tools include capabilities for monitoring AI performance, reliability, and enforcing AI guardrails, it said.

Watsonx Orchestrate is generally available with pricing based on consumption. For clients just starting out with WXO, the “Essentials” version offers entry-level pricing, IBM said.