IBM Upgrades watsonx Orchestrate with Cross-Platform Agent Discovery

IBM has announced three significant updates to its watsonx Orchestrate platform. The AI Gateway now allows users to discover and import agents built on third-party platforms, such as Amazon Bedrock, Azure AI Foundry, and Google Vertex AI.

The new capabilities include cross-platform agent discovery, custom evaluation, and the AgentOps agent going generally available (GA) on August 31st. The AI Gateway can scan connected platforms and discover agents running on them, allowing users to import those agents and manage them from a single control plane.

Trace Inspector shows the full execution path of an agent run, enabling users to follow each step and identify where behavior diverged from what was expected. Custom LLM-as-a-Judge allows users to define their own evaluation criteria at build time, ensuring that evaluations reflect specific business needs.

The AgentOps agent is now GA and handles the full improvement cycle through natural language conversation. It observes performance, creates test cases, evaluates, analyzes root causes, and optimizes using GEPA and ACE.