IBM and Microsoft announced a new joint platform on Tuesday, November 10, 2026, designed to help large organisations build, run and govern artificial intelligence agents for industry-specific work. The platform, called Imagine Enterprise, combines IBM Consulting expertise and a library of more than 6,000 prebuilt AI agents and assets with Microsoft AI, cloud and security technologies, along with forward-deployed engineering support from both companies for qualifying engagements.
The announcement, issued jointly from Armonk, New York, and Redmond, Washington, is aimed especially at regulated industries, where companies want the productivity of autonomous agents but also need controls, observability and compliance support before they can deploy those agents at scale. Imagine Enterprise is designed to connect agents to an organisation's own data and daily processes, rather than requiring the organisation to replace the systems it already depends on or spend months assembling the pieces itself.
IBM Consulting brings the agent library, built on IBM Consulting Advantage, its AI-powered delivery platform, together with its Process Studio, Context Studio and Advantage Core tools for designing, deploying and governing tailored agents. Microsoft provides the underlying foundation, including Microsoft Foundry, GitHub Copilot and Microsoft Copilot Studio for coordinating agents and enterprise systems, and Microsoft Fabric, Microsoft 365 infrastructure, Microsoft Entra, Microsoft Purview, Microsoft Defender and Microsoft Azure for data, identity, governance, security and cloud services.
The companies frame the offer around three advantages. Customers start with prebuilt agents and deep industry expertise from day one, instead of starting from scratch. The platform is designed to fit an existing technology environment and scale over time, with security, identity and governance built in. It also puts the knowledge of the business behind both people and agents, so that enterprise data and context can be put to work across the organisation.
The first industry-specific frameworks cover financial services, insurance and retail. The companies describe those frameworks as a repeatable blueprint for additional industries in the future, including manufacturing, energy, the public sector and mobility. Financial technology and asset management firm SEI is cited as an early example, exploring agentic technologies with IBM Consulting and Microsoft as part of its enterprise transformation. As of September 30, 2026, SEI manages, advises or administers approximately 2 trillion dollars in assets.
"AI is evolving quickly, and our focus at SEI is on applying it with intention in ways that strengthen trust, enhance human decision-making and create meaningful value across our business," said Sneha Shah, Chief AI Strategist and Head of SEI Next. Mohamad Ali, Senior Vice President and Head of IBM Consulting, said clients no longer want AI that simply helps people do the same work a little faster, and described the goal as building an agentic business. Rodrigo Kede Lima, President of Microsoft Frontier Company, said enterprise AI will be won by organisations that can turn their data, industry expertise and AI into action.
Imagine Enterprise is available to clients that engage IBM Consulting to deploy and operate the platform on their behalf, or to co-innovate on enterprise-scale implementations, and self-management options are also available. The launch underlines how the enterprise AI contest has shifted from individual chatbots toward governed fleets of agents, sold with consulting, engineering support and compliance controls attached.