IBM Power Autonomous Operations
IBM's AI agent for running the Power systems underneath IBM i. Announced July 15, 2026, general availability September 23, 2026. It monitors the infrastructure, diagnoses what it finds, and resolves capacity constraints after a person approves the fix.
IBM Power Autonomous Operations is an AI agent for the Power infrastructure that IBM i runs on, not for IBM i itself. IBM announced it on July 15, 2026 alongside the Bob Premium Package for i and new entry Power 11 hardware, and set general availability for September 23, 2026. Where IBM Bob writes and modernizes code, this one watches the machine. Hillery Hunter, General Manager for IBM Power, framed the goal as making Power increasingly self-operating.
What IBM has said it does
Monitor and ingest
Continuously watches Power system behavior and takes in alerts, replacing the hours an administrator otherwise spends reading dashboards.
Diagnose and recommend
Runs AI-driven diagnostic analysis on the condition and produces a recommended remedial action. IBM's announcement specifies human-in-the-loop approval before remediation.
Resolve capacity constraints
The one published use case. In IBM's internal test across eleven Power systems, a capacity-related condition was resolved in 3.33 minutes against 52.59 minutes for the manual workflow, which is where the up to 15x figure comes from.
What matters for an IBM i shop
Most IBM i shops run a handful of partitions on one or two Power servers, and the person who understands the HMC, the LPAR weights and the memory pools is usually the same person who understands the RPG. That overlap is the bottleneck this product aims at. The chat-style interface is the point: IBM is positioning it so routine infrastructure work stops requiring a dedicated Power specialist.
Read the 15x figure the way it was produced. One issue type, capacity constraints, in one IBM-run environment of eleven systems, against a manual process IBM has not fully described. It is a measured number rather than a vague percentage, and it is not a benchmark of the whole product. IBM has published nothing comparable for other fault classes.
What IBM has not published yet
Open questions as of September 2, 2026
| Question | Status |
|---|---|
| Integration points (HMC, PowerVC, PowerVM, Cloud Management Console) | Not named in the announcement or the launch coverage |
| Which partition operating systems it acts on (IBM i, AIX, Linux) | Positioned at the Power layer; IBM i is not named in connection with this product |
| Licensing, packaging, and price | Not published |
| Approval roles, delegation, and audit trail | Not published beyond the statement that remediation requires human-in-the-loop approval |
| Minimum Power generation, firmware, or HMC level | Not published |
| On premises, IBM Cloud, or both | Not published |
Compiled from IBM's July 15, 2026 announcement and launch coverage. These rows should be answered by the general availability materials on September 23, 2026.
For the full pre-GA breakdown, how this differs from Bob and from watsonx Orchestrate, and the question list to take into your first call with IBM, see IBM Power Autonomous Operations, explained before GA. The hardware half of the same July 15 announcement is covered on our sibling sites at ai.as400system.com and Power 11.
Treat this listing as a pre-GA profile. It gets updated on or after September 23, 2026, once IBM publishes product documentation and ordering details. Until then, do not budget for it and do not assume IBM i-specific behavior beyond what IBM has stated. Listing last revised September 2, 2026.
Related
IBM Bob (Project Bob)
IBM's generally available AI coding agent for IBM i. Bob 2.0 and the Bob Premium Package for i shipped June 24, 2026, adding a Db2 for i Database Mode, about 30 IBM i tools, and direct work on source where it lives. Reported pricing from $20 to $240 per month.
IBM i MCP Server
An open-source, IBM-published Model Context Protocol server that lets AI agents and LLMs query Db2 for i data, inspect system objects, and take defined actions on IBM i using natural language.
IBM watsonx Orchestrate
IBM's AI agent and workflow platform, and the first watsonx product with an official link to IBM's IBM i coding agent. The August 2026 release added a Build with Bob preview that launches IBM Bob to generate agents and tools from natural language. Still no IBM i or Db2 for i connector in the box.
IBM watsonx.ai
IBM's studio for building, tuning, and deploying foundation models and generative AI applications, and the underlying AI layer other watsonx products are built on.
Frequently Asked
What is IBM Power Autonomous Operations?
IBM Power Autonomous Operations is an AI agent for the Power infrastructure underneath IBM i, not for IBM i application code. It continuously monitors Power systems, ingests alerts, runs AI-driven diagnostic analysis, and produces a recommended remedial action that a person approves before it is applied. You drive it with chat-style prompts rather than command syntax. IBM announced it on July 15, 2026 and set general availability for September 23, 2026. The one use case IBM has measured is capacity constraints: 3.33 minutes to detect and resolve a capacity-related condition across eleven Power systems, against 52.59 minutes by hand, which is where the up to 15x claim comes from. It is a different product from IBM Bob, which works on code, and IBM has not yet published licensing, integration points such as the HMC or PowerVC, or IBM i-specific behavior.