Glossary
AI on IBM i Glossary
watsonx, IBM Bob, the IBM i MCP Server, RPG modernization, and AI terminology, defined in plain English for an IBM i audience.
B
- Bob Premium Package for i ... The IBM i-specific add-on to IBM Bob, generally available June 24, 2026. It gives Bob about 40 skills and workflows and about 30 tools that work directly against QSYS, the IFS, CL, SQL and Db2 for i on a live system.
- Build with Bob ... An option added to watsonx Orchestrate's Create an agent dialog in the August 2026 release, listed by IBM as a preview, that launches IBM Bob into a workspace wired to your Orchestrate tenant to generate agents, tools and workflows from natural language.
F
- Foundation Model ... A large, general-purpose AI model trained on broad data and then adapted, through prompting, tuning, or fine-tuning, to specific tasks such as RPG code generation.
- Free-Format RPG ... A modern RPG coding style that drops the rigid column-based syntax of traditional fixed-format RPG in favor of freer, more readable statement syntax.
I
- IBM Bob (Project Bob) ... IBM's generally available AI coding agent for IBM i, built as a fork of Visual Studio Code and tuned for RPG, CL, DDS, and SQL. Reached GA on March 24, 2026; Bob 2.0 and the IBM i-specific Bob Premium Package for i shipped June 24, 2026.
- IBM i ... IBM's operating system for Power servers running traditional AS/400-lineage business applications, with Db2 for i built directly into the OS.
- IBM i MCP Server ... An open-source, IBM-published server implementing the Model Context Protocol (MCP), letting AI agents and LLMs query Db2 for i data and take defined actions on IBM i using natural language. In beta since October 2025.
R
- Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) ... Retrieval-Augmented Generation hands a language model passages pulled from your own data, so it answers from your content. On IBM i, retrieval is the hard half.
- RPG ... Report Program Generator, the primary business application programming language on IBM i and its AS/400 predecessors, still running the majority of production logic in most IBM i shops.
W
- watsonx ... IBM's platform for AI and data, spanning watsonx.ai (foundation models and generative AI), watsonx.data (data store), and watsonx.governance (AI governance), with watsonx Assistant and watsonx Orchestrate built on top.
- watsonx Assistant ... IBM's general-purpose conversational AI platform for building customer-facing and employee-facing chatbots and virtual assistants; not IBM i-specific.
- watsonx Code Assistant for i ... IBM's November 2025 preview announcement of an AI code assistant purpose-built for RPG on IBM i. The preview track was superseded by IBM Bob, which reached general availability in March 2026.
- watsonx Orchestrate ... IBM's AI agent and automation platform for orchestrating multi-step business workflows across enterprise applications. Since August 2026 it can launch IBM Bob from its Create an agent dialog through a Build with Bob preview, but it still ships no IBM i or Db2 for i connector.
- watsonx.ai ... The studio component of watsonx for building, tuning, and deploying foundation models and generative AI applications, including retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) against enterprise data.