ARMONK, New York, and REDMOND, Washington, November 10, 2026 — IBM and Microsoft have announced a new enterprise artificial intelligence platform designed to help companies build, deploy and manage AI agents for industry-specific business processes.
Called Imagine Enterprise, the platform combines IBM Consulting’s experience and catalogue of more than 6,000 pre-built AI agents and related assets with Microsoft’s AI, data, cloud and security technologies. The companies say it is intended to help organisations connect AI systems to their own information, software and everyday workflows rather than relying only on general-purpose chatbots.
The initial industry frameworks are aimed at financial services, insurance and retail. IBM and Microsoft said the system includes tools for governance, observability, identity and compliance, areas that are especially important for companies operating in regulated industries.
Both companies are also offering forward-deployed engineering support for qualifying engagements. The model is intended to help customers move from experimentation to production by adapting existing agents and integrating them with established enterprise systems.
Financial technology and asset-management provider SEI is exploring the platform with IBM Consulting and Microsoft as part of its broader enterprise transformation. The companies presented the work as an example of how agentic AI could support internal operations and customer-facing services, but the announcement does not establish that the platform has already delivered measured gains at scale.
The launch reflects a growing shift in enterprise AI competition from conversational assistants toward systems that can carry out multi-step tasks. The commercial test will be whether businesses can deploy these agents safely, reliably and at a cost that justifies the additional computing and governance requirements.