At the World Economic Forum in Davos on January 19, 2026, IBM and global technology group e& unveiled an agentic AI solution built on IBM watsonx Orchestrate, integrating more than 500 tools and domain-specific agents into e&’s core governance, risk and compliance systems. A joint proof of concept delivered in eight weeks by IBM’s Client Engineering team, Gulf Business Machines and e& demonstrated the solution’s ability to reason, orchestrate tasks and provide traceable, policy-aligned responses within IBM OpenPages. This marks one of the region’s first enterprise-scale deployments of AI that goes beyond NLP chatbots, embedding governance, explainability and 24/7 self-service into mission-critical workflows across 38 countries where e& operates.

In its most recent quarterly report, IBM’s Infrastructure segment delivered a 53 percent profit increase year-over-year, driven by robust demand for AI-optimized systems such as the new z17 mainframe, and strong customer adoption of hybrid cloud environments. Growth was supported by enterprise orders for inference workloads on the z17 platform and by expansion of Red Hat OpenShift deployments, while infrastructure revenue benefited from renewed customer investment following the 2021 spin-off of IBM’s low-margin hardware services business into Kyndryl. The segment’s margin expansion contributed to overall software and services profitability, underscoring IBM’s successful repositioning toward higher-value AI-driven offerings.

On January 19, 2026, IBM launched IBM Enterprise Advantage, an asset-based consulting service designed to help organizations build and govern internal AI platforms using existing cloud providers, AI models and infrastructure. Leveraging IBM Consulting Advantage—its AI-powered delivery platform—this service offers clients reusable AI assets, shared governance standards and a marketplace of industry-specific agents. Early case studies include a lifelong learning company that integrated human expertise with AI assistants for decision management, and a manufacturing firm that defined high-value use cases, tested prototypes and deployed AI agents under a secured, governed environment, resulting in accelerated time-to-value and a clear blueprint for enterprise-scale agentic AI deployment.

New research from the IBM Institute for Business Value, based on a survey of 2,007 C-level executives across 33 geographies and 20 industries, predicts that AI investment will rise by approximately 150 percent between 2025 and 2030, with AI-driven productivity gains of up to 42 percent fueling reinvestment in growth initiatives. By 2030, respondents expect 62 percent of AI spend to focus on innovation rather than efficiency, and anticipate that small language models will overtake large models in multi-model environments. Despite 79 percent forecasting significant AI-driven revenue contributions by 2030, only 24 percent have clarity on revenue sources today, highlighting the need for strategic alignment between AI pilots and core business operations.