Power Autonomous Operations

IBM Power Autonomous Operations is an AI agent that runs the Power infrastructure rather than the applications on it. IBM announced it on July 15, 2026 and set general availability for September 23, 2026. The agent continuously monitors Power system behavior, ingests alerts, runs AI-driven diagnostic analysis, and produces recommended remedial actions with human-in-the-loop approval before anything is changed. It is driven through chat-style prompts, which is IBM's answer to the fact that most shops cannot keep a full-time Power specialist on staff. The single use case IBM has put a number against is capacity constraints: in an internal test across eleven Power systems, a capacity-related condition was detected and resolved in 3.33 minutes against 52.59 minutes for the manual workflow, the source of IBM's up to 15x claim. Read that as one fault class in one IBM-run environment, not as a general benchmark. Power Autonomous Operations sits at a different layer from IBM Bob, which writes and modernizes code, and it carries no watsonx branding. As of September 2, 2026 IBM has not published licensing, integration points such as the HMC or PowerVC, audit trail behavior, or whether the agent acts differently on IBM i, AIX and Linux partitions.