How IBM and AWS are Accelerating Agentic AI for Enterprises

As enterprise teams enter a new era of digital transformation powered by agentic AI, a major challenge remains: transitioning going from pilot to production.

IBM and AWS highlight that many companies are struggling to operationalise AI in a manner that aligns with the unique needs of the business while driving tangible business value.

Breaking down barriers to AI operationalisation

AWS and IBM are releasing new tools which can help its users to overcome these barriers, while advancing their agentic AI tools – through enabling them to design, deploy and manage AI agents with enhanced speed, scalability and governance.

These improvements will help to streamline approvals, supplier management and contract workflows for procurement teams

In a co-authored blog post, John Epperly, Global Managing Director, AWS Partnership at IBM, and Mahmoud Elmashni, Managing Partner, Strategic Partnerships at IBM Consulting, outline how a combination of AWS and IBM's AI technology and consulting expertise can provide clients with enhanced flexibility – "no matter their size, sector or location".

They add: "Together, we're helping clients across government, utilities, financial services and automotive harness agentic AI where it will deliver the greatest impact for their business."

Rather than simply making IBM technology available on the AWS platform, the duo are working on every layer of the AI stack to deliver hybrid cloud, AI, data and automation solutions that fit seamlessly into existing environments, helping clients maximise their investments and enhance productivity.

AI integration across the enterprise stack

Agentic AI integration

The partnership integrates IBM watsonx Orchestrate with Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, enabling enterprises to deploy AI agents that maintain conversational context across multiple interactions. The combined platform provides access to Amazon Bedrock's language models alongside AgentCore's Memory and Observability modules, allowing organisations to build, test, deploy and manage AI agents that can improve both employee productivity and customer experiences.

AI-powered development environment

IBM has introduced Bob, a new AI-first integrated development environment designed for enterprise software development and modernisation. The platform features advanced task generation capabilities and includes built-in security through integration with either IBM Guardium AI Security or Palo Alto Networks Prisma AIRS. Bob orchestrates across multiple large language models, including Anthropic's Claude via Amazon Bedrock.

Enterprise AI management gateway

ContextForge, an IBM-built Model Context Protocol gateway and registry, runs on AWS infrastructure utilising Lambda, API Gateway, S3 and DynamoDB services. The platform is designed to help enterprises build, deploy, monitor, secure and validate AI agents while bridging rapid development with enterprise governance requirements. ContextForge enables organisations to discover, integrate and manage curated AI resources across their operations.

Application modernisation framework

A new agentic framework powered by IBM Consulting Advantage combines IBM assets and agentic automation with AWS native tools to help clients migrate and modernise applications. The framework aims to accelerate transformation timelines, reduce implementation risks and improve cost-effectiveness for evolving enterprise applications.

Federal market expansion

IBM secured FedRAMP authorisation for 11 software solutions deployed on AWS GovCloud, expanding secure access to IBM technologies for federal agencies. The authorisation represents a strategic investment in meeting federal hosting standards, allowing government organisations to adopt compliant AI and enterprise tools.

John and Mahmoud continue: "We're also strengthening our partnership with AWS to help clients modernise with confidence – bringing together services and offerings across AI, hybrid cloud and advanced security.

"Our recent expansion into markets like the Middle East, Japan and India gives more enterprises access to this expertise and innovation through the AWS Marketplace, one of our primary channels for software delivery, now featuring 15 new IBM Consulting Agentic AI solutions."

The duo are also helping to accelerate users' SAP transformation efforts, having signed a strategic collaboration agreement that enables them to rapidly advance SAP S/4HANA modernisation on AWS and develop agentic AI solutions that aim to enhance decision-making and automate core SAP processes – streamlining workflows and boosting productivity.

Dr. Gregory Moody, Lee Professor of Information Systems and Director of Cybersecurity Programs at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, adds: "As companies expand their digital footprint through the use of the cloud, digital tools and AI, working with IBM has allowed us to bring innovative technologies, like hands-on cybersecurity training, to equip our students with the skills and expertise needed to impact the way organisations do business in an ever-connected world."