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IBM Automation Roadmap

Digital labor automates business, IT, and security tasks. Advancements in generative AI and code generation will transform automation across all levels, across industries.

Automation
Roadmap

Strategic milestones

All information being released represents IBM’s current intent, is subject to change or withdrawal, and represents only goals and objectives.

You can learn more about the progress of individual items by downloading the PDF in the top right corner.

2023

Automate strategic business processes and IT with digital labor.

Digital labor will be used in strategic business processes, with hundreds of skills and completing thousands of tasks a year. IT operation tools will be more advanced at incidence detection, triage and remediation, achieving 99.99% service level objectives.

2024

Bring together business insights and IT investments.

Business OKRs and IT spending converge with greater visibility, recommendations for optimization, and intelligent remediations, increasing efficiency and ROI. We will advance digital labor through greater use of generative AI for dynamically sequencing tasks.

2025

Enhance automation with governance, auditability, and trust.

Digital labor will see widespread use of a trusted automation platform accessible via multiple communication modalities. We will integrate business OKRs and IT operations and use conversational AI interfaces across all aspects of applications.

2027

Deliver automation that adapts to changing environments for proactive operations.

By 2027, automation will adapt to changing environments, provide more sophisticated predictions, proactively avoid incidents, improve service levels by 10x, and optimize across cost, performance, and carbon footprint.

2029

Merge business and IT to automate most of the mundane tasks.

We will build trusted automated systems that will perform most of the mundane digital work. Business and IT will cease to be separate disciplines and become synergistic in definition and operation.

2030+

Enable autonomous enterprises with trusted decision automation.

In 2030 and beyond, trusted decision-automation systems will operate most of the basic functions in an organization, with creative and strategic tasks done by humans. Automation will enforce the governance of sustainability goals.