At the World Economic Forum in Davos on January 19, 2026, IBM announced a partnership with global technology group e& to deploy enterprise-grade agentic AI across mission-critical governance, risk and compliance systems. Built on IBM watsonx Orchestrate and integrated with IBM OpenPages, the solution leverages more than 500 pre-built tools and domain-specific agents to deliver traceable, action-oriented responses. A joint proof of concept—delivered by IBM, Gulf Business Machines and e& within eight weeks—demonstrated the platform’s ability to reason, orchestrate tasks and maintain alignment with enterprise governance controls at scale, supporting faster decision-making and consistent policy interpretation.

On January 19, 2026, IBM unveiled Enterprise Advantage, an asset-based consulting service designed to accelerate enterprise AI adoption by providing a secured platform, shared standards and reusable AI assets. Built on IBM’s internal AI-powered delivery platform, IBM Consulting Advantage, the new service draws on a marketplace of industry-specific AI agents and has supported over 150 client engagements to date, boosting consultant productivity by up to 50%. Early clients include a lifelong learning company deploying AI assistants for routine decision-making and a manufacturer implementing generative AI prototypes aligned to a platform-first strategy, all within governed, multicloud environments.

In its most recent quarterly update, IBM’s Infrastructure segment posted a 53% year-over-year increase in operating profit, driven by increased demand for AI-optimized mainframes and hybrid cloud solutions. Sales of the new z17 inference-optimized system outpaced internal forecasts, while Red Hat OpenShift deployments grew as enterprises sought to run AI workloads across multiple cloud environments. The segment’s margin expansion contributed materially to IBM’s overall gross margin improvement, reinforcing the company’s pivot away from low-margin legacy services towards high-value, AI-driven offerings.

New research from the IBM Institute for Business Value, based on a survey of 2,007 C-suite executives across 33 geographies, projects that 79% of respondents expect AI to contribute significantly to their revenue by 2030, up from 40% today. Executives anticipate a 150% increase in AI investment over the next four years, with AI spend shifting from 47% on efficiency to 62% on innovation. The study also forecasts a 42% productivity gain fueled by AI, 67% of leaders expecting resource constraints to be eliminated, and 82% planning for multi-model AI capabilities—underscoring the opportunity for IBM’s hybrid cloud and watsonx governance portfolio to capture enterprise growth.