IBM and Microsoft launch Imagine Enterprise drawing on more than 6,000 agents and assets

IBM and Microsoft announced Imagine Enterprise on 10 November 2026, pairing more than 6,000 prebuilt IBM Consulting AI agents and assets with Microsoft’s cloud and security technologies for industry-specific use, according to Microsoft’s announcement from Armonk, New York, and Redmond, Washington. The platform is designed to help enterprises build, operate and govern agents used in their existing processes, initially in financial services, insurance and retail.

IBM Consulting brings more than 6,000 agents and assets

The IBM contribution draws on IBM Consulting Advantage, its AI-powered delivery platform. Microsoft says customers can adapt the prebuilt agents and assets to their own processes rather than assemble every component themselves. IBM Consulting Advantage’s Process Studio, Context Studio and Advantage Core are intended to help customers design, deploy and govern those agents.

Imagine Enterprise is designed to connect agents to an organisation’s existing data, systems and daily work. Microsoft says the platform will provide controls, monitoring and AI-compliance support, with particular attention to regulated industries. Those are proposed capabilities of the platform, rather than results from a customer deployment.

Engineers from IBM Consulting and Microsoft will work directly with customers on qualifying engagements. The companies say that support is intended to help customers move beyond experiments and put agents into production. Their initial sector frameworks cover financial services, insurance and retail. Microsoft identifies manufacturing and energy as possible areas for expansion.

Microsoft supplies the data and security foundation

Microsoft Foundry, GitHub Copilot and Microsoft Copilot Studio are among the tools intended to coordinate agents and enterprise systems. Microsoft Fabric and Microsoft 365 provide parts of the data and workplace infrastructure, alongside Microsoft Entra for identity, Microsoft Purview for governance, Microsoft Defender for security and Microsoft Azure for cloud capacity. The arrangement puts IBM’s consulting assets on a foundation supplied by Microsoft products.

The companies are entering a market in which customers are still working out how to manage agents alongside employees. Only 4% of CIOs had implemented plans to adjust roles for a workforce combining people and agents, CIO Dive reported, citing Gartner. The publication also reported that Google and AWS, as well as IBM and Microsoft, have introduced engineering programmes intended to help enterprises scale AI deployments.

Microsoft, IBM and ServiceNow were placed in the Leaders category of Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for AI Agent Management Platforms, CX Today reported on 2 November. The category covers tools for managing agents across an organisation, including access controls, oversight and cost tracking. CX Today also described Salesforce’s combination of subscriptions, credits and usage-based metering as a potential procurement challenge for large agent deployments.

SEI explores agentic technology with IBM

SEI, a provider of financial technology, operations and asset management services, is exploring emerging and agentic technologies with IBM Consulting and Microsoft’s support. Microsoft says SEI is also using other technologies from both companies in work aimed at changing its operations and its experience for employees and clients. The announcement presents SEI’s work as an exploration, rather than a completed deployment of Imagine Enterprise.

Sneha Shah, SEI’s Chief AI Strategist and Head of SEI Next, said the work is examining how emerging capabilities could support critical processes and be scaled over time. SEI’s stated goals include improving employee and client experiences and supporting sustainable growth.