IBM i AI Watch List, Fall 2026

Two dates are left on the 2026 calendar for AI on IBM i. IBM Power Autonomous Operations reaches general availability on September 23, and IBM TechXchange runs October 26 to 29 at the Georgia World Congress Center in Atlanta. Everything else below has already shipped.

This is one URL, updated in place as each date passes, not a new post every time IBM moves. Each dated item also gets its own short article in the library, so the detail has somewhere to live and this page stays something you can scan in a minute. Last updated September 2, 2026.

The 2026 list, in order

June 24: Bob 2.0 and the Bob Premium Package for i

Shipped. Bob 2.0 brought a 270,000-token context window, parallel tool calls, subagents and rollback, and the Premium Package for i is the layer that turns Bob into an IBM i product rather than a coding agent that has seen some RPG: roughly 40 skills and workflows and 30 IBM i tools that read and write QSYS and the IFS, run CL and SQL, launch a 5250 session and manage library lists. IBM's July announcement cites Heartland Co-Op estimating 60 percent faster application comprehension for developers new to the platform. Full write-up in IBM Bob explained, and the money side on the sibling IBM Bob pricing breakdown.

July 18: IBM i 7.6 TR2 and 7.5 TR8

Shipped, and the AI column is empty. The first Technology Refreshes of 2026 delivered real Db2 for i work ... SQL Error Logging Facility filtering, trigger pseudo columns, RFC 3986 URL encoding for SQL REST calls, FROM_SYSTEM_TIMESTAMP and TO_SYSTEM_TIMESTAMP, CREATE_DATA_JOURNAL_READER and 17 new IBM i services ... and not one item labeled AI. Why the absence is the most interesting entry on this list is the subject of what the summer 2026 Technology Refreshes did and did not do for AI.

July 24: IBM Power S1112

Shipped. The entry Power 11 server that runs inference locally on on-chip Matrix Math Acceleration, with IBM claiming twice the per-core performance of the S914 and up to 69 percent better energy efficiency; hardware coverage belongs to our Power 11 site.

August: Build with Bob and AgentOps in watsonx Orchestrate

Shipped, with a label worth reading carefully. The August watsonx Orchestrate release added a Build with Bob option to the Create an agent dialog, which opens a Bob workspace wired to your Orchestrate tenant and generates agents, tools and workflows from plain language. IBM lists that entry point as a preview on IBM Cloud and AWS. What went generally available in the same release is AgentOps, along with the removal of the one-knowledge-source-per-agent limit; the Orchestrate extension on Bob's side is GA. Details in Build with Bob, August 2026, and what it still takes to reach Db2 for i in Bob, watsonx Orchestrate and the IBM i MCP Server.

September 23: Power Autonomous Operations reaches GA

Upcoming. IBM's AI agent for the Power infrastructure under IBM i, driven with chat-style prompts, which watches for capacity constraints and resolves them with a human in the loop. IBM's own test across eleven systems averaged 3.33 minutes against 52.59 minutes by hand. Licensing, integration points and per-partition behavior are still unpublished, which is exactly what makes GA day worth watching. Background in IBM Power Autonomous Operations explained.

October 26 to 29: IBM TechXchange 2026, Atlanta

Upcoming. Project Bob was unveiled at TechXchange 2025, and IBM's 2026 event pages already describe Bob sessions covering IBM i development acceleration, so Atlanta is the most likely place for the next round of Bob, watsonx and Power announcements to land. What is realistic to expect, and what would count as actual news rather than a restatement, is in our TechXchange 2026 preview.

What we are watching next

Four questions decide how much of this becomes buildable in 2027, and not one of them has a date attached. That is the honest state of the list.

The vector question is the one that comes up most often in real projects. RAG on IBM i: where do the vectors live covers the design people are actually shipping while they wait for IBM to answer it.