News

IBM Giving Orgs a Governance Lifeline in Agentic AI Era

• By Chris Paoli
• June 18, 2025

Nearly overnight, organizations are facing brand-new challenges caused by self-directed AI systems (a.k.a. agentic AI). Big Blue is extending them some help.

This week, IBM debuted a new software suite designed to help enterprises tackle the growing oversight problems related to AI agents. The solution combines governance and security functions to give IT teams greater control over autonomous AI technologies, which can act independently of human prompts.

Specifically, the platform merges IBM's watsonx.governance and Guardium AI Security tools into a single framework for managing AI agents. The offering gives organizations a toolbox to apply governance policies, perform automated red teaming, and detect unapproved "shadow agents," all while addressing compliance across 12 international regulatory standards.

Additionally, a new integration between IBM and AllTrue.ai will help IT teams identify AI agents running in unsanctioned environments, including across multicloud deployments and developer repositories.

"One of the biggest challenges for security teams is translating incidents and compliance violations into quantifiable business risk," said Jennifer Glenn, research director for the IDC Security and Trust Group, whom IBM quoted in its announcement. "The rapid adoption of AI and agentic AI amplifies this issue. Unifying AI governance with AI security gives organizations the necessary context to find and prioritize risks, as well as the information to clearly communicate the consequences of not addressing them."

Some features are available immediately, including the compliance accelerators and basic policy management. Additional capabilities, such as agent audit trails, third-party tool integration, and automated risk scoring, will roll out later this year, with a major release slated for June 27.

IBM Consulting is also offering deployment services to help IT organizations integrate the platform with their existing security operations and compliance programs. Per the company's announcement:

To help clients scale AI responsibly, IBM Consulting Cybersecurity Services is introducing a new set of services that brings together data security platforms, like IBM Guardium AI Security, with deep AI technology and domain consulting. The new services will support organizations through their AI transformation journey: from discovering AI deployments and potential vulnerabilities, to implementing secure-by-design practices across AI layers, to governance guidance for a constantly evolving regulatory landscape. The new services build on IBM Consulting's experience helping hundreds of clients worldwide on AI strategy and governance, including Nationwide Building Society and e&.

For enterprise IT teams responsible for AI deployment governance, the new IBM offering provides a centralized architecture for policy enforcement, agent monitoring and compliance management. Its emphasis on interoperability and lifecycle tracking is aimed at helping IT organizations regain visibility and control as generative AI systems become more autonomous and harder to trace.