At IBM Think 2025, IBM doubled down on a bold agentic AI strategy to unify digital labor across hybrid enterprises. IBM’s approach stands out by focusing on open standards, semantic control planes and an architecture that invites a diverse ecosystem of agents. The scale and complexity of enterprise ecosystems demand AI agents that are not just intelligent, but also interoperable. IBM’s announcements at Think 2025 centered around this very idea, championing openness as the foundation of digital labor. With watsonx Orchestrate positioned as the orchestrator of the agentic enterprise, IBM introduced a platform capable of managing, coordinating, and integrating agents built with any framework. “Over the next three years, one billion agents will be built on the basis of generative AI,” Rob Thomas, senior vice president, software and chief commercial officer at IBM, said during IBM Think. “They will need to work with each other seamlessly.” The semantic control plane at the heart of watsonx Orchestrate enables AI agents to interpret goals, decompose them into executable tasks and route those tasks to the right digital workers. This allows agents to operate collaboratively across hybrid environments —on-prem, cloud and software-as-a-service — without being trapped in vendor-specific ecosystems. “We help our clients integrate,” Arvind Krishna, chief executive officer of IBM, said during IBM Think. “We want to meet them where they are.” Through its new Agent Connect partner program, IBM is opening the doors for SaaS vendors, integrators, and developers to contribute agents to the watsonx ecosystem, according to Hebner. These agents can be built using any stack and plugged directly into IBM’s orchestration framework, where they benefit from observability, governance and semantic interoperability. Platforms from competitors such as Microsoft Corp. and SAS Institute are actively integrating causal AI, advanced reasoning and knowledge graph capabilities to help AI agents make better decisions, not just automate workflows. With multi-agent collaboration, pre-built domain-specific agents, and connectors for over 80 enterprise apps, IBM is building a semantic operating system for AI agents, enabling businesses to plug and play digital labor as easily as integrating software components.