IBM Rolls Out New Power Systems and AI Tools to Automate Enterprise IT Operations

IBM has introduced IBM Power Autonomous Operations, an AI agent designed to continuously monitor Power systems and resolve issues on its own, alongside the recently launched IBM Bob Premium Package for i, which uses agentic AI to speed up application development on IBM i. The company also unveiled the Power S1112, a compact, entry-level server built to run AI inference locally.

The push reflects a broader shift for IBM's Power platform, which has traditionally handled mission-critical enterprise workloads and is now being adapted to support AI as part of that same critical infrastructure. IBM cites its own research suggesting enterprises expect to be running an average of 1,661 AI agents by 2027, a scale of automated decision-making that manual governance can't realistically keep up with, and frames these new tools as a way to embed autonomous management directly into the Power platform.

Power Autonomous Operations lets teams manage systems through simple chat-style prompts and is said to resolve capacity constraint issues up to 15 times faster than manual intervention. IBM Bob Premium Package for i, meanwhile, is aimed at making IBM i development, historically reliant on specialized RPG skills, more accessible to a broader range of engineers, with early adopter Heartland Co-Op reporting 60% faster onboarding for developers new to the platform.