IBM, Microsoft launch Imagine Enterprise AI agent platform

IBM and Microsoft on Tuesday announced Imagine Enterprise, a joint platform meant to help companies — especially in regulated industries — build, run and govern AI agents for industry-specific work, combining IBM Consulting’s agents and expertise with Microsoft’s AI, cloud and security technology. Both companies are also providing forward-deployed engineers to help customers move from pilots to production for qualifying engagements.

IBM Consulting brings more than 6,000 prebuilt AI agents and assets built on its IBM Consulting Advantage delivery platform, along with tools — Process Studio, Context Studio and Advantage Core — meant to help organizations design, deploy and govern their own agents. Microsoft supplies the underlying AI, data, identity, security and cloud layer through products including Microsoft Foundry, GitHub Copilot, Microsoft Copilot Studio, Microsoft Fabric, Microsoft 365, Entra, Purview, Defender and Azure. The companies frame the platform around three ideas: starting customers off with ready-made agents and industry expertise rather than a blank slate, fitting into whatever systems and data a company already has, and giving people and AI agents shared access to a company’s accumulated knowledge.

Financial-services firm SEI, which manages, advises or administers roughly $2 trillion in assets as of the end of September, is using IBM Consulting and Microsoft’s technology to explore agentic tools as part of a broader push to modernize how it operates, according to the companies. “Clients are no longer looking for AI that simply helps people do the same work a little faster. They want to build an agentic business,” said Mohamad Ali, IBM Consulting’s senior vice president and head.

Imagine Enterprise initially covers financial services, insurance and retail, with IBM and Microsoft describing it as a template they plan to extend to manufacturing, energy, the public sector, mobility and other industries. Customers can have IBM Consulting deploy and run the platform on their behalf, co-build it with IBM, or manage it themselves.

Why it matters

Bundling thousands of prebuilt agents with Microsoft’s security and compliance stack is IBM and Microsoft’s bet that regulated industries will adopt agentic AI faster through a vendor-managed platform than by building it themselves — a pitch aimed squarely at large, compliance-heavy enterprises still wary of handing workflows to AI agents.