Live from Think 2026: Shaping the next era of agentic AI

12:30 p.m. EDT | May 4, 2025At IBM’s annualThink conference, which kicked off today at Boston’s Thomas M. Menino Convention & Exhibition Center, it’s clear the ecosystem multiplier effect is real. As IBM Senior VP of Ecosystem, Strategic Partners & Initiatives Kareem Yusuf said in his keynote address to IBM partners on Monday, the focus is about the logical next steps: growth and ROI; or as he put it, “scaling this ecosystem in the most efficient and effective way to serve our clients and joint clients.” When a partner sells an IBM solution, deal value can grow manifold through services, upsell and cross-sell.Yusuf was joined onstage by IBM Chairman, President and CEO Arvind Krishna, as well as leaders from several IBM partner companies, all backlit by a larger-than-life 3D luminescent IBM “Think” marquee.

“Clients are counting on us as they transform to AI-first,” he said. “AI is moving quickly from just a source of cost and productivity gains to fundamentally changing business.”Furthermore, the urgency for companies to use AI to transform business is accelerating: “infrastructure capex [capital expenditures] is approaching USD 1 trillion” by 2026, Krishna said. To this end, IBM is gearing up to prepare its clients for the new reality. Many companies, he noted, “have been stuck in a 1940s org structure,” that is, fragmented. “Here is finance, here is legal, here is sales, here is back office. We designed workflows that can move smoothly between these siloes,” he said. Nothing wrong with that, he observed, except that if you try to shoehorn AI into one silo at a time, you’ll only see marginal improvements, but you still have friction.“The real advantage for AI adoption is that it allows you to think about the end to end, and then say, how much of this can I make touchless, and how can I rethink my process?” Krishna said. “Agents can cut across silos.”

Yusuf emphasized the importance of understanding “each of the diverse elements of [the IBM] ecosystem,” which he defined as sell partners, build partners and service partners.A new IBM offering focusing on sell partners’ preparedness and ability to engage with clients, he said, is the watsonx Workshop—an AI-enabled skill-building platform that allows for “coaching sessions, practice and even role play.” Another sell partner-centric innovation, he said, is Tier-One Support for theAWS Marketplace. Integrated directly into IBM toolchains, it allows sellers to link deals to the AWS Marketplace, thus meeting customers where they are, which will in turn “remove friction, drive volume, increase velocity and tap into committed spend.”Reyna Thompson, President, North America, TD SYNNEX, took to the stage to describe her company’s partnership with IBM. “One of the things that we heard from you is that renewals is really where there was the most friction,” she said. “So we pointed the API to the renewals effort and the team ... mapped the process end to end, and wherever we could point the API to fill a gap, we moved it to production, and everything else got automated.” The result? “85% of our renewals quotes are touchless. That’s a big deal.”IBM build partner Nexa CEO Zach Greenberger said that one of IBM’s big value-adds to his company, was bringing speed to market. “It’s one thing to collect the data,” he said, but IBM allowed his company to “take this incredible value data pipeline and actually build agents that we can deliver to customers.” He cited IBM’sAgent Catalog—a curated list of enterprise-grade applications from partners including Adobe, Box and Palo Alto. In particular, he cited the catalog’s “compliance, speed, legitimacy-in-market” and quick scaling as key benefits. He also laudedIBM Bob: “Everyone from engineers to product managers all the way to the finance team … is leveraging coding capabilities like Bob to help accelerate our business meaningfully.”Vedavyas Avula, Founder and CEO of IBM service partner Pragma Edge, said that the most important thing IBM brought to the table for his company was trust: “Once we built the trust and delivered the right solutions for the customer, we were able to transform the way we are doing joint account planning.” This was invaluable, he said, in partner matching and sales coordination for Pragma.Patrick Moorhead, Founder, CEO and Chief Analyst of Moor Insights & Strategy, related his experience with IBM in a fireside chat with Krishna. “First and foremost, IBM technology is hybrid, and not retrofit,” Moorhead said. “Second, IBM has a lot of depth and expertise in premier regulated industries.” And finally, “a lot of companies and a lot of programs have consulting, and a lot of them have software, but IBM connects the two.”