IBM is making major updates to IBM Bob, its agentic software development platform, including new multi-agent capabilities, built-in AI cost and use analytics, and pre-built, specialized workflows for modernizing enterprise systems.
According to the company, IBM Bob is architected to bring AI capabilities wherever software engineering work happens. Rather than limiting AI to a single development interface for isolated tasks, Bob provides a unified foundation for teams to coordinate across the software development lifecycle.
Many enterprise engineers are manually choosing models, trying to balancing cost versus performance, and still ending up with inconsistent outcomes and unpredictable spend. Bob can now optimize across the execution system, not just model selection. Bob matches models to tasks, coordinates AI execution across agents, and provides organizations with visibility into productivity, quality, performance, and cost through the newly launched Bobalytics, to help enterprises optimize AI at scale, the company said.
"Bob is the platform enterprise customers have been asking for," said Neel Sundaresan, GM, automation and AI, IBM. "The bar for enterprise AI is no longer a better coding assistant. It's an end-to-end agentic development partner that works inside any system development teams already use, with the governance, security, and cost controls enterprises require. We built Bob to solve the problems enterprises actually have, and the updates we're announcing today are the foundation for everything that comes next."
Engineering teams also encounter unique challenges as they move beyond code generation and apply AI to larger, more complex work such as updating legacy applications or modernizing IBM Z, IBM i, and Java environments.
AI output can vary depending on how the work is done, which can create significant issues for these types of high-stakes, multi-phase projects. Structured, repeatable workflows help reduce that variability so teams can deliver reliable, auditable results at enterprise scale.
IBM Bob now has pre-built workflows available that teams can customize and extend for their own environments to ensure outcomes are consistent and auditable, regardless of who runs it. IBM Bob Premium Packages for IBM Z, IBM i, and Java Modernization, are each opinionated workflows built on decades of IBM’s domain experience that optimize AI for enterprise teams that need to do large-scale modernization.
The latest version of IBM Bob is available for download at bob.ibm.com/download.
For more information about this news, visit www.ibm.com.