At the 2026 World Economic Forum in Davos, global technology group e& and IBM officially unveiled a groundbreaking collaboration to deploy enterprise-grade Agentic AI systems. This strategic partnership marks a decisive evolution in corporate artificial intelligence, moving beyond the passive, informational capabilities of traditional Generative AI (GenAI) toward autonomous, action-oriented agents capable of complex reasoning and task execution.
The initiative, which focuses initially on transforming governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) workflows, represents one of the first large-scale deployments of agentic architectures in the telecommunications and technology sector. By integrating IBM’s watsonx Orchestrate with e&’s existing enterprise infrastructure, the partnership aims to set a new global benchmark for how organizations can safely automate mission-critical operations under strict regulatory oversight.
For the past few years, the enterprise AI landscape has been dominated by Large Language Models (LLMs) serving primarily as advanced chatbots—summarizing documents or drafting emails. The announcement at Davos signals the maturity of a new phase: Agentic AI.
Unlike standard GenAI, which awaits human prompts to generate text, the agents deployed by e& are designed to "reason, act, and orchestrate." They do not merely retrieve information; they understand the intent, interface with multiple backend systems to gather context, perform analysis, and execute workflows autonomously within defined guardrails.
Hatem Dowidar, Group Chief Executive Officer at e&, emphasized this strategic pivot during the announcement: "Our ambition is to move beyond isolated AI use cases toward enterprise-scale agentic AI that is trusted, governed, and deeply integrated into how the organization operates. By collaborating with IBM, we are embedding intelligence directly into our risk and compliance processes, enabling faster decisions and consistent policy interpretation."
The core of this deployment relies on IBM watsonx Orchestrate, a robust platform designed to manage and deploy AI agents. This system provides access to over 500 pre-built tools and customizable, domain-specific skills that allow agents to interact with disparate software environments.
For e&, the immediate application is deeply integrated with IBM OpenPages, a premier governance, risk, and compliance platform. This integration ensures that every action taken by the AI—whether it is interpreting a new regulatory policy or flagging a potential compliance risk—is traceable, audit-ready, and aligned with the company’s internal controls.
The scalability of this solution was validated through an intensive eight-week Proof of Concept (PoC) involving e&, IBM, and Gulf Business Machines (GBM). IBM’s Client Engineering team led the architectural design, while GBM provided critical on-ground delivery expertise, leveraging their deep familiarity with e&’s regulatory environment.
The PoC successfully demonstrated that agentic AI could operate under real-world enterprise conditions, handling complex queries that required retrieving data from multiple silos, cross-referencing it with legal standards, and producing actionable reports without human intervention.
Key Components of the Solution
The table below outlines the specific technical stack and capabilities deployed in this partnership:
| Component | Role in Architecture | Key Capability |
|---|---|---|
| IBM watsonx Orchestrate | Agent Management Layer | Connects agents to 500+ enterprise tools and APIs |
| IBM OpenPages | GRC Foundation | Provides regulatory frameworks and risk data repositories |
| Watsonx.governance | Oversight Engine | Ensures AI explainability, fairness, and audit trails |
| Custom Agentic Models | Reasoning Core | Executes multi-step logic beyond simple Q&A |
| Hybrid Cloud Gateway | Infrastructure | Allows models to run across on-prem and cloud environments |
Governance is often cited as the primary bottleneck for enterprise agility. By deploying agentic AI in this domain, e& addresses a critical operational challenge: the sheer volume of evolving regulations and internal policies.
The new system empowers employees and auditors with 24/7 self-service access to complex compliance information. Instead of manually searching through thousands of pages of legal documentation, an auditor can query the agentic system. The agent then:
This capability significantly reduces the time required for compliance checks and minimizes the risk of human error in policy interpretation. Ana Paula Assis, Chair for Europe, Middle East, Africa, and Asia Pacific at IBM, highlighted the importance of this governed approach: "As organizations move from experimenting with AI to embedding it into the fabric of how they operate, governance and accountability become just as important as intelligence."
The collaboration between e& and IBM at Davos serves as a bellwether for the broader tech industry in 2026. It highlights a dual focus: increasing the autonomy of AI systems while simultaneously tightening the control mechanisms that govern them.
For the Creati.ai community, this development underscores that the future of AI is not just about smarter models, but about integrated workflows. The ability of an AI to "do" rather than just "say" is the defining characteristic of the Agentic Era.
As enterprises globally look to replicate this success, the "e& model"—starting with high-stakes, rule-based environments like GRC before scaling to creative or customer-facing domains—offers a prudent and effective roadmap. This partnership demonstrates that with the right orchestration and governance tools, AI agents can be trusted with the keys to the enterprise.
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