IBM touts agentic AI orchestration, cryptographic risk controls

At its TechXchange 2025 conference this week, IBM took the wraps off a number of software packages that have been updated to help enterprises more efficiently operate their growing AI infrastructures.

Enterprise software additions include tools for IBM’s watsonX Orchestrate platform, which helps customers build, deploy, and manage AI agents and workflows to automate business operations. In addition, IBM introduced agentic AI capabilities for the mainframe with a new release of watsonx Assistant for Z. IBM also announced a centralized encryption key management tool called Guardium Cryptography Manager to help customers secure AI data and more. 

IBM watsonx Orchestrate

IBM watsonx Orchestrate offers more than 500 tools and customizable, domain-specific agents from IBM and third-party contributors. Among the additions to watsonx Orchestrate are AgentOps capabilities that offer real-time monitoring and policy-based controls for observability and governance to ensure agents behave reliably and securely.

Other new features for Orchestrate include:

• Agentic workflows that let developers build standardized, reusable AI flows that ensure multiple agents and tools work together. 
• Support for the low-code, open-source Langflow software developers’ package that lets customers build agents and flows with a drag-and-drop visual builder.
• An agent governance and observability feature that lets customers develop and see their agent enterprise environment. From here they can monitor usage, success rates and latencies, all from a unified dashboard, IBM stated. Orchestrate will also support production monitoring of AI agents to ensure that predefined guardrails and policies are enforced automatically, preventing issues like prompt injection attacks and unauthorized data access.
• New pre-built agents for finance and supply chain as well as additional customer service agents. 
• An expansion of the IBM watsonx Orchestrate portfolio that adds Groq support to IBM watsonx Orchestrate. Groq offers AI-specific ASICs for rapidly building AI inference models.

“AI agents are designed to act autonomously. But when accuracy, compliance and repeatability are critical, autonomy needs structure. That’s where agentic workflows in watsonx Orchestrate come in. And with the integration of Langflow, users can design, visualize and manage complex flows [and develop] workflows that are predictable, auditable and reusable—giving organizations confidence that critical processes will run correctly every time,” wrote Suzanne Livingston, vice president, product management with IBM Watson Orchestrate, in a blog post. 

IBM watsonx Assistant for Z 

For the mainframe community, IBM announced watsonx Assistant for Z version 3, which includes prebuilt agents designed to help mainframe customers more efficiently use these agents to solve problems, automate repetitive tasks and resolve issues more quickly, according to Tina Tarquinio, vice president, product management for IBM Z and LinuxONE. The agents are powered by IBM Z-specific Retrieval-Augmented Generation (ZRAG) with curated content that accelerates on-boarding and knowledge transfer, Tarquinio said. 

“These agents can do complex workflows. They can handle more than one task at a time, we can stack the tasks,” Tarquinio said. “In the critical environments that mainframes run in, context, awareness and memory are key. This means that when we are talking to the agents and working through the assistance, they can really understand the train of questions that we’ve been asking, and they can continue to provide answers quickly. For customers who are using these agents to build up new skills and to drive productivity, this is absolutely key,” Tarquinio said.

IBM Spyre Accelerator

In other mainframe news, Big Blue announced the general availability of its new Spyre Accelerator – purpose-built hardware designed to bring generative AI capabilities on-premises for IBM z17 and IBM LinuxONE 5. The 32-core Spyre runs on a PCIe card, and additional cards can be added depending on requirements. The Spyre accelerator is an enterprise-grade accelerator designed for AI inferencing tasks with high efficiency and scalability, particularly for complex models and generative AI,

The IBM z17’s Telum II processor, integrated AI accelerator, and Spyre accelerator are designed to work in unison to support real-time, high-speed AI inferencing and model execution directly on the platform, minimize latency, and eliminate the need to move sensitive data. The idea is to embed AI into mission-critical workloads and support new high-performance applications such as advanced fraud detection, supply chain optimization, and automated decision-making with high performance and security, according to IBM.

IBM Guardium Cryptography Manager

IBM also enhanced its Guardium Cryptography Manager software to help customers secure sensitive enterprise data. 

“Data security is reaching a critical inflection point. Sensitive information is sprawling across hybrid environments, expanding the attack surface and complicating encryption and governance,” wrote Vishal Kamat, vice president of data security for IBM, in a blog post. “At the same time, it is anticipated that quantum computing will introduce significant risks: encryption algorithms – relied upon by the majority of organizations – will be broken, exposing today’s encrypted data.”

A report from the IBM Institute for Business Value reveals a troubling gap: Only 30% of organizations have completed a cryptographic inventory, leaving most uninformed about both current vulnerabilities and emerging quantum risks, Kamat added. That’s where Cryptography Manager can help.

IBM Guardium Cryptography Manager 2.0 introduces native remediation capabilities, expanded discovery integrations, and enhanced risk assessment features. These additions empower organizations to move beyond visibility and policy enforcement to active remediation of cryptographic risks, Kamat stated. New features include:

• Enterprise risk score: Helps provide a cumulative view of the organization’s cryptographic risk posture across the enterprise, enabling prioritization and executive-level visibility.
• Extended discovery integration brings UI-driven API integrations with vulnerability scanners such as Nessus and Qualys, improving asset coverage and posture visibility.
• Enhanced policy management adds ready-to-use policies aligned with asset management and cryptographic hygiene, to help improve policy enforcement and audit readiness.
• New policy-driven automation to trigger remediation workflows for high-risk violations.
• Detects automation and detection of encryption gaps and initiates remediation requests to protect sensitive data by using each database’s native encryption capabilities.
• Supports native encryption and key lifecycle management for Oracle, IBM Db2, MySQL, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, IBM Informix, IBM DataStax and Scylla.

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