Enterprises have agents. Most can't run them at scale. IBM's Suzanne Livingston explains what changes when you have hundreds — not two.

Full Show Notes

Scaling agentic AI is not the same problem as building it. At IBM Think 2026 in Boston, I sat down with Suzanne Livingston, VP of Product for IBM watsonx Orchestrate, to talk about where enterprise organizations actually are on this journey — and what it takes to move from a pilot to a production environment running hundreds of agents across dozens of departments.

Suzanne walks through the full watsonx portfolio, then goes deep on the challenge she hears from customers constantly: the agent worked in the demo, but now it needs to run reliably at scale, with proper governance, observable across the estate, and permissioned correctly for every user and every system it touches. That is a fundamentally different problem than building the agent in the first place. The new Orchestrate Agent Control Plane is IBM's answer to it.

This episode is for enterprise technology leaders who have moved past "should we do agents" and are now asking "how do we run them well." If your organization is somewhere between first pilot and full production deployment, this conversation is the one to listen to this week.

What We Cover

Why the jump from generative to agentic AI changes the operating model, not just the technology
What agent orchestration means in practice when you have 40 sub-agents reporting to one master agent
What the Orchestrate Agent Control Plane does and why cross-estate visibility matters more than per-agent optimization
How enterprises are treating AI agents like digital employees — with identities, goals, managers, and performance reviews
Why governance isn't optional in an agentic environment and what "governance light" looks like for organizations just getting started.

Guest Bio

Suzanne Livingston is Vice President of Product Management for IBM watsonx Orchestrate, IBM's enterprise AI orchestration platform. She leads the product team responsible for agent building, orchestration, evaluation, and the recently announced Orchestrate Agent Control Plane. Suzanne presented at IBM Think 2026 in Boston.

IBM Think profile: https://www.ibm.com/think/author/suzanne-livingston

Resources Mentioned

IBM watsonx Orchestrate 30-day free trial: https://www.ibm.com/products/watsonx-orchestrate
IBM Think 2026 content: https://www.ibm.com/think
Lopez Research blog: https://www.lopezresearch.com/research/

📢 STAY CONNECTED

Subscribe to the AI with Maribel Lopez audio podcast: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1947446
Subscribe to my LinkedIn newsletter — AI Decoded with Maribel Lopez: https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/ai-decoded-with-maribel-lopez-7312533413582827520/
Lopez Research blog: https://www.lopezresearch.com/research/
Follow me on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/maribellopez/
Follow me on X: https://x.com/MaribelLopez

🔍 ABOUT MARIBEL LOPEZ

Maribel Lopez is founder and principal analyst at Lopez Research, a technology research and strategy firm focused on enterprise AI. She advises CIOs, CDOs, CMOs, IT leaders and technology vendors on AI adoption, agentic systems, AI governance, and AI-driven customer experience. Her insights have been featured in mainstream TV and print media such as Bloomberg, CGTN, Marketwatch, Reuters, Wall Street Journal, and Yahoo Finance. She's also a contributor to Forbes.com, and her research is used by organizations navigating the gap between AI capability and enterprise deployment reality.

SEO Keywords I

Moving Beyond Building AI Agents With IBM's Suzanne Livingston

The AI with Maribel Lopez (AI with ML)

Moving Beyond Building AI Agents With IBM's Suzanne Livingston