IBM and global technology group e& announced at the World Economic Forum in Davos a strategic collaboration to embed enterprise-grade agentic AI into e&’s governance, risk and compliance (GRC) systems. Built on IBM watsonx Orchestrate and integrated with IBM OpenPages, the solution offers more than 500 prebuilt tools and domain-specific agents. A joint proof of concept delivered within eight weeks by IBM’s Client Engineering team, GBM and e& demonstrated enterprise-scale reasoning, task orchestration and audit-ready traceability. e& reports that embedding this agentic AI into core policy and compliance workflows will reduce manual review cycles by up to 40% and enable 24/7 self-service access for over 10,000 auditors and business users across 38 countries.

IBM launched Enterprise Advantage, an asset-based consulting service combining the firm’s AI-powered delivery platform, Consulting Advantage, with industry-specific reusable AI assets. The service has already supported more than 150 client engagements, boosting consultant productivity by up to 50%. Clients such as Pearson and a major manufacturing customer have used Enterprise Advantage to define high-value AI use cases, prototype agentic assistants and deploy governed AI agents across multiple cloud environments without changing existing infrastructure. IBM projects that clients adopting this framework will achieve AI-driven productivity gains of 30–45% within 12 months and accelerate time-to-value for new AI applications by 60%.

In its latest quarterly results, IBM’s Infrastructure segment reported a 53% year-over-year profit increase, driven by strong demand for AI-optimized mainframes and hybrid cloud solutions. The new z17 inference-accelerated system saw unit shipments grow by 70% compared with the prior year, while perimeter and storage revenues rose by 18%. IBM attributes the strength to enterprises scaling AI workloads on private and public cloud platforms and modernizing mission-critical applications. Management reaffirmed its full-year guidance for double-digit operating profit growth in the segment and highlighted a pipeline of more than 200 large enterprise deals scheduled for deployment over the next 12 months, collectively valued at over $2 billion.