IBM Think 2025 Highlights Generative AI and Agentic AI Advancements
IBM's annual Think conference in Boston focuses on generative AI and agentic AI tools, with new enterprise solutions unveiled to address ROI challenges.
IBM kicked off its annual Think conference in Boston this week, with generative AI and agentic AI dominating discussions. The event, expected to attract 5,000 attendees, showcased IBM's latest enterprise AI tools aimed at addressing the ROI challenges faced by businesses adopting AI.
Key Announcements
- watsonx Orchestrate: A tool enabling users to build enterprise AI agents in five minutes or less, featuring 150 pre-built agents.
- webMethods Hybrid Integration: A solution for intelligent, agent-driven automation in hybrid cloud environments.
- watsonx.data: An enhanced data tool offering 40% more accuracy than conventional RAG by unifying and governing data across silos.
- IBM LinuxONE 5: A new mainframe capable of processing 450 billion AI inferences daily, with advanced security and cost-saving features.
ROI and Adoption Insights
IBM CEO Arvind Krishna emphasized that while AI investments are doubling, only 25% of projects deliver expected ROI due to data silos and infrastructure fragmentation. IBM's watsonx platform aims to tackle these issues.
- 20,000 deployments of AI assistants, with 50% of POCs transitioning to production.
- 2025 is the year of AI agents, with simple task-based agents already in production and more complex use cases emerging.
Quotes
"The minute AI turned to automation, we saw the tipping point for value creation." — Rob Thomas, IBM Chief Commercial Officer
"Over 50% of organizations will embed AI agents in essential systems within a few years." — Ritika Gunnar, IBM GM for Data and AI
Links
This article first appeared on HPCwire.
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About the Author

David Chen
AI Startup Analyst
Senior analyst focusing on AI startup ecosystem with 11 years of venture capital and startup analysis experience. Former member of Sequoia Capital AI investment team, now independent analyst writing AI startup and investment analysis articles for Forbes, Harvard Business Review and other publications.