IBM and Microsoft Launch Imagine Enterprise for Industry AI Agents

What happened

IBM Consulting and Microsoft announced Imagine Enterprise on November 10, 2026, a jointly developed platform for creating, operating and overseeing AI agents (AI that carries out multi-step tasks rather than answering one question) tailored to industry processes, drawing on IBM Consulting’s inventory of more than 6,000 pre-built AI agents and assets. Forward-deployed engineers from both companies can work with customer teams on qualifying engagements to help move projects from experimentation into production.

Manufacturing, energy, the public sector and mobility are identified only as possible future additions. Joint Architecture and Governance IBM’s launch overview says the companies jointly invested in and co-developed the platform.

The platform pairs IBM’s industry and delivery expertise with Microsoft’s AI, data, cloud, identity and security technologies. It is designed to connect with an enterprise’s existing data, processes and systems, with the aim of letting organizations adapt pre-built capabilities without replacing their current technology environment or assembling each component themselves.

Clients can engage IBM Consulting to deploy and operate the platform, collaborate with IBM on enterprise-scale implementations, or choose self-management. Initial industry frameworks cover financial services, insurance and retail.

IBM Consulting Advantage’s Process Studio and Context Studio connect agents to an organization’s own data and processes, while Microsoft Foundry, GitHub Copilot and Copilot Studio help coordinate agents with enterprise systems. That product division places governance inside the deployment stack rather than leaving it to a separate oversight exercise.

For regulated industries, the platform contains controls, observability and AI-compliance support intended to govern agents connected to enterprise knowledge and daily work.