Four insights you might have missed from theCUBE’s coverage of IBM Think

IBM Corp. is positioning itself to be a foundational player in enterprise AI.

The computing giant brings mainframe hardware, hybrid computing assets and a legacy of strong governance to the AI infrastructure conversation. Those strengths have put IBM near the center of enterprise AI discussions, according to theCUBE Research’s Dave Vellante.

“In our opinion, IBM has found a differentiated path in enterprise AI by productizing workflow-level outcomes across a stack that, while sometimes confusing, customers generally trust,” Vellante said in a recent analysis. “Client Zero proof, a workload-first hybrid design, durable platforms reimagined for agents and a pragmatic quantum roadmap create a credible basis for sustained advantage.”

In interviews at IBM Think 2026, Furrier and Vellante spoke with industry experts from IBM and BNP Paribas, among others, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed how organizations can effectively integrate AI agents into their workflows, the qualities needed for effective hybrid AI governance and examples of successful AI deployments in major global enterprises. (* Disclosure below.)

Here are four key insights you may have missed from IBM Think 2026:

Insight #1: Enterprise AI raises the stakes for trusted infrastructure.

IBM Z, the company’s mainframe platform, has enjoyed particularly strong growth as enterprises look for trusted infrastructure to support AI use cases. Ric Lewis (pictured), senior vice president of the Infrastructure Division at IBM, discussed that momentum during theCUBE’s IBM Think coverage. 

“It couldn’t be more fun right now,” he said. “The industry is as exciting as I’ve ever seen it in my entire career. Every boardroom is having a conversation around, ‘What are you doing on AI? What’s the plan? What’s the infrastructure that underlies that?’ The conversation has changed radically in just the last 18 months with agentic and how quickly that’s changing everything.” 

As AI initiatives move from experimentation to production, enterprises need to trust their systems. That’s an area where IBM has a distinct advantage, according to Lewis.

“Sovereignty is our home court,” he said. “We do 70% of the world’s financial transactions. The most important data that travels around the world is in our Z systems. Those are sovereign systems. They’re on-prem, they’re in environments, they’re in banks, they’re in financial institutions, they’re in insurance. Sovereign is our home court and we know this space extremely well.” 

Here’s the complete video interview with Ric Lewis:

Insight #2: Managing AI agents like employees improves performance and accountability.

As enterprise leaders consider how to govern an increasingly digital workforce, lessons can be drawn from how they are currently managing their human workers. It’s more than just a thought experiment – it was a specific directive that IBM CEO Arvind Krishna gave to Mohamad Ali, senior vice president and head of IBM Consulting.

“Arvind called me and we had a conversation about three years ago and he said, ‘I want you to come over and I want you to be a consulting business,’” he said in an interview with theCUBE. “‘What is digital labor? It’s a whole bunch of bits of software. I need you to come in and I need you to build this set of software and do it in a way that it could be managed. You could think of this as HR management … but now you have to HR manage human workers and digital workers.’” 

This model has come to life within IBM Consulting, which relies on a common management layer to deploy and govern more than 4,000 digital workers across 450 active projects. That includes agents from IBM watsonx, Anthropic and OpenAI. Importantly, this management layer gives leadership visibility into agent utilization, with the control to turn off any that are not providing value.

“If you build an agent that nobody’s using, eventually we’re going to decommission it,” Ali said. “We’re going to starve it. It’s not going to get tokens, it’s going to retire.” 

Like any human worker, AI agents can also be tested, graded and credentialed on core skills, such as cloud essentials or security. That helps ensure quality, and the results have included a 20% year-over-year increase in profits from 2024 to 2025 for IBM Consulting, Ali noted. 

“We took a $25 billion spend and we’ve actually [saved in productivity] four and a half billion of that spend,” he said. “That only happened because we decomposed our company into these 490 workflows, took 70 of them, re-engineered them and did it the hard way.” 

Here’s the complete video interview with Mohamad Ali:

Insight #3: The most successful AI strategies align governance with business transformation.

The speed and scale of AI innovation has created a noisy partner ecosystem that includes hyperscalers, cloud providers, software vendors and more. It’s enough to make any compliance officer nervous about the balance of risk exposure versus restrictiveness. IBM Consulting is uniquely positioned to help enterprises achieve a healthy balance, emphasized Jason Kelley, global head and managing partner for core business applications at IBM.

“The challenge is in front of us to make sure that our partners are orchestrated together [for] that given client, in that given industry, in that given sovereign network,” he explained in a conversation with theCUBE. “That’s where we come in — as conductors of that orchestration.” 

To that end, the IBM Sovereign Core platform announced at Think 2026 is designed to embed governance and compliance controls directly into infrastructure at runtime. That helps enterprises address key questions around exposure, control and business model alignment, explained Javier Olaizola, global managing partner for hybrid cloud and data at IBM Consulting.

“Sovereignty and exposure was coming in on slide 40 in a PowerPoint pitch,” he said. “Now it’s coming up front — ‘How much is my exposure?’ That is coming up with a new set of conversations that we are having with clients.” 

The businesses getting the most benefit from AI don’t just set a few agents to work on discrete use cases; they first think strategically about the business outcomes they want AI to help drive, Olaizola added.

“AI is now putting a lot of pressure on clients to reflect on what their actual value is, and they are reflecting on their business models from a first-principles perspective,” he said. “You start to see that winners in the market are the ones that are really realigning their whole operating model around AI and where they can really thrive.” 

Here’s the complete video interview with Jason Kelley and Javier Olaizola:

Insight #4: Federated governance helps enterprises scale AI without losing control.

Organizations have moved beyond thinking of AI governance as purely an issue of data sovereignty. There are bigger questions around operational sovereignty, including who runs the platform, where is the control plane, and who owns the keys, pointed out Sripriya Srinivasan, general manager for Core and ALM software products at IBM.

“It comes down to two things: control and independence,” she said. “It’s not like enterprises are trying to replicate being a technology vendor. They’re not trying to replicate being a chip and a hardware vendor. That’s not the point. They want operational resiliency. That is the fundamental reason why they want that control and independence is making sure their business is operational at all times.”

The IBM Sovereign Core platform is designed to help address these questions, giving enterprises a way to govern the spread of agents across different departments, according to Srinivasan.

“The proliferation of agents is real in enterprises. Everybody is starting to build agents,” she said. “How do you as a CIO, how do you as a CTO, make sure that there’s a level of standardization, there is a level of consistency, there is a level of governance, there’s a level of orchestration? All of these are internal fears — not necessarily coming just based on regulations.” 

Here’s the complete video interview with Sripriya Srinivasan:

Catch up on our complete video coverage of IBM Think 2026:

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the IBM Think event. Sponsors of theCUBE’s event coverage do not have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE