As organizations expand their use of AI agents, visibility and control become just as important as building the agents themselves. This month's updates help organizations do exactly that, making it easier to monitor metrics, optimize agents, connect them to more information, and accelerate the path from idea to production.
Introducing Agentic Control Plane Dashboards
Managing a growing ecosystem of AI agents just got easier. With Agentic Control Plane Dashboards, teams gain a centralized, real-time view of everything happening across their agents in watsonx Orchestrate. Monitor message success rates, deployment health, evaluation coverage, and quality metrics from a single dashboard, enabling faster decisions and more confident operations.
Whether you're an AI operations lead keeping tabs on production agents or a developer iterating on new builds, the dashboards surface the right information at the right level of detail — with immediate drill-down for anything that needs attention.
As AI agent deployments scale, visibility becomes a critical control surface. The Agentic Control Plane Dashboards close the gap between deploying agents and understanding how they perform — giving teams the confidence to move fast without sacrificing trust or governance.
To access the dashboards, add /dashboard to the end of your watsonx Orchestrate URL in your browser. Let’s explore this new experience with this Getting started with Control Plane.
Turn agent improvements into an ongoing process with AgentOps
Available now on IBM Cloud and AWS
Launching an agent is only the beginning. The real challenge is understanding how well it's performing and making continuous improvements over time.
With the general availability of AgentOps, you can now evaluate, optimize, and improve agents through a single conversational experience. Instead of juggling separate tools and workflows, teams can review agent performance, identify opportunities for improvement, and apply optimizations from one place.
Whether you're refining prompts, improving guidance, or measuring quality, AgentOps helps teams spend less time diagnosing issues and more time delivering better experiences to users.
Know the details by accessing the AgentOps documentation.
Give agents access to knowledge across your organization
Knowledge doesn't live in one place, and now your agents don't have to either.
You can now connect multiple knowledge sources to a single agent, allowing agents to draw from several repositories, document collections, or content domains at the same time.
This makes it easier to create agents that provide more complete answers without requiring separate agents for separate knowledge areas. As organizations grow and information becomes increasingly distributed, agents can stay connected to the content users need most.
Learn more in Add another knowledge source.
Move from building to deployment with a clearer agent experience
Creating successful agents requires more than configuration. It involves building, testing, and deploying in a structured way. To better support that journey, the agent builder now features a streamlined three-tab experience:
- Build to configure your agent and its capabilities
- Evaluate to test performance and review results
- Deploy to publish and manage channels
The new layout follows the natural lifecycle of agent development, making it easier to stay focused on the task at hand and helping new and experienced builders navigate the process more efficiently.
For more information, see Navigating the agent configuration page.
Accelerate agent creation with IBM Bob
Preview on AWS and IBM Cloud
Getting started is often the hardest part of building an agent. That's why you can now launch IBM Bob directly from watsonx Orchestrate when creating a new agent.
With the new Build with Bob option, you can use natural language to create agents, generate workflows, build tools, and update existing assets. IBM Bob automatically connects to your watsonx Orchestrate environment, helping you move from concept to execution faster.
Whether you're creating something new or enhancing an existing solution, IBM Bob can help reduce manual effort and speed up development.
See more in Building agents with IBM Bob.
Explore the latest watsonx Orchestrate capabilities through two new demos
Agentic Control Plane Dashboards: Provide real-time visibility into agent performance, helping teams manage agent operations at scale.
Testing and Evaluating Agents: Streamline the process of assessing agent behavior, measuring quality, and identifying opportunities for improvement before and after deployment.
Discover more in this release
To explore these features in more detail and discover everything included in this release, visit the What's New documentation. From agent management and observability enhancements to the latest development and evaluation capabilities, the documentation provides a complete overview of the updates available in watsonx Orchestrate and how they can help teams build, deploy, and scale AI agents more effectively.
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