The question business leaders are asking has shifted from βShould we invest in AI?β to βHow do we scale AI from experiment to core business process β reliably, responsibly, and at speed?β
In my previous article, I explored how is supercharging delivery across our Asia Pacific (APAC) partner ecosystem. Now, ΒιΆΉΤ΄΄ partners are at the frontier of agentic AI β AI that doesnβt simply advise, but acts. According to the report, 72% of organisations in APAC agree that accelerating AI adoption has increased partner involvement and blurred accountability between internal teams and partners. The shift from tools to agents is central to how organisations are transforming how work gets done, and changing the way partners operate.
The Agentic Shift β From Recommendation to Action
While an AI copilot responds to questions and surfaces insights, an AI agent goes further. Given an intent, it can orchestrate tasks, make sequential decisions, and adapt to changing conditions; all with a human in the loop.
Unveiled at Sapphire earlier this year, ΒιΆΉΤ΄΄ is building agentic capability across and , with more than 200 agents and over 50 assistants available this year. They are built on Joule Studio, the platform where partners and customers can build and manage the full lifecycle of their own agents.
Across APAC, this development has accelerated ΒιΆΉΤ΄΄ partnersβ move from experimentation to execution. In Korea, ASPN has built ΒιΆΉΤ΄΄i, an agentic AI platform running natively on , , and Joule Studio. ΒιΆΉΤ΄΄i enables business users to query ΒιΆΉΤ΄΄ data in natural language and execute transactions β creating sales orders, purchase orders, and financial documents with human approval before anything is posted.
β is building for the autonomous era rather than for simple Q&A. ΒιΆΉΤ΄΄i already goes beyond answering questions to executing transactions and creating documents in ΒιΆΉΤ΄΄, and we are steadily making its AI agents more capable. These AI agents break a request into steps, apply the customerβs own rules before calling the LLM, and learn from approved outcomes β all while requiring a person to confirm before anything is posted to ΒιΆΉΤ΄΄.β
DoIn Nam, Committee Member, Platform Solution & Service Division, Business AI Team, ASPN Co., Ltd.
In Japan and Southeast Asia, ABeam Consulting and ABeam Systems have deployed agents across a range of industries, integrating them with customer data to maximise transformation outcomes. ABeamβs Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) Agent and Equipment Maintenance Agent are both planned for the , bringing APAC partner innovation closer to our customers.
β views AI agents not merely as tools for short-term operational efficiency, but as the foundation for achieving digital transformation, and we focus on maximising the value of results by integrating our customerβs data with AI agents. Our strength lies in our ability to deploy agents across a wide range of industries and business functions, from financial services and logistics to food and railway, and to take the lead in bringing these to market quickly, in close collaboration with ΒιΆΉΤ΄΄.β
Arata Nishii, Senior Expert, ABeam Consulting Ltd.
Partner-Driven Momentum
APAC is ΒιΆΉΤ΄΄βs fastest-growing partner-led territory globally and the region with the highest number of certified partner consultants. This is an incredibly diverse region with mature enterprise landscapes in Japan and Australia, high-velocity growth in India and China, and AI Centres of Excellence in Korea and Singapore. Scaling AI therefore requires partners who deeply understand local regulatory and data realities.
Thatβs why ΒιΆΉΤ΄΄ has committed a β¬100 million partner-led AI adoption fund to support the deployment of ΒιΆΉΤ΄΄-built AI assistants, agents, and partner-built innovation on the . By the end of 2026, ΒιΆΉΤ΄΄ expects 400 AI agents in the , with partners driving significant contributions. Today, ΒιΆΉΤ΄΄ has received over 680 partner agent submissions.
Accenture ANZ ΒιΆΉΤ΄΄ practice, for example, has already delivered into production and is deploying agentic solutions across Procure-to-Pay, service entry sheets, and treasury. The company is using its Human Led AI methodology anchored in maximising standard ΒιΆΉΤ΄΄ functionality to reduce customisation and technical debt.
βA³¦°ω΄Η²υ²υ globally, we have built more than 60 agents on the platform, a number that continues to grow as we deliver demonstrable outcomes with our customers. The ΒιΆΉΤ΄΄ Business AI Platform gives us the secure, compliant foundation to access ΒιΆΉΤ΄΄ data and infuse AI as close as possible to the business process β while our approach ensures we maximise standard ΒιΆΉΤ΄΄ functionality and protect our customersβ long-term architecture.β
Dr. Nicholas Nicoloudis, Reinvent Digital Core Leader, Reinvention with ΒιΆΉΤ΄΄, Accenture
IBMβs Value Generation partnership with ΒιΆΉΤ΄΄ also demonstrates the depth of commitment our partners are making to the agentic AI opportunity. The company focuses on helping enterprises move from AI experimentation to production impact, while protecting the investments these customers have already made.
βThrough our Value Generation partnership with ΒιΆΉΤ΄΄, has built a comprehensive portfolio of generative and agentic AI solutions that embed directly into the ΒιΆΉΤ΄΄ environments our clients already rely on. From intelligent procurement and vendor reconciliation to warranty processing and sustainability, these solutions are delivering measurable outcomes at scale spanning more than 23 line of business use cases and over 30 custom solutions for industries including CPG, retail, manufacturing, defence, utilities, life sciences, and electronics.β
Sharath Burla, Senior Partner β ΒιΆΉΤ΄΄, Asia Pacific & China, IBM Consulting
For cbs, the agentic AI opportunity is taking shape across industries, such as manufacturing. The company is developing ΒιΆΉΤ΄΄-integrated AI agents to manage material master data change requests through , process supplier emails using relevant ΒιΆΉΤ΄΄ data, and manage purchasing outline agreements. Through natural language interactions, these agents are designed to reduce manual effort and errors, and improve response times.
βA³Ω , we believe the real value of agentic AI lies in making everyday business processes simpler, faster, and more intuitive. We see AI agents becoming essential digital assistants for our customers, providing a foundation to progressively introduce new AI-driven use cases across business functions. This opens new opportunities for us to help customers accelerate ΒιΆΉΤ΄΄ Business AI adoption and realise greater value from their ΒιΆΉΤ΄΄ investments.β
Jack Wong, Consulting Director, cbs Asia Pacific
No Data Strategy, No AI Strategy
Every AI agent rests on a dependency rarely featured in a demo or prototype; it requires clean, connected, and business-ready data. An AI strategy cannot exist without a sound data strategy and addresses this directly. It enables organisations to access structured, contextualised ΒιΆΉΤ΄΄ data and integrate it with non-ΒιΆΉΤ΄΄ data and partner platforms, without months of extraction and transformation cycles.
ΒιΆΉΤ΄΄ BDC runs natively on AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform, and the spans Snowflake, Collibra, Confluent, Databricks, DataRobot, and more.
The Value of AI data reveals 73% of organisations in APAC prioritise vendors that integrate with their existing technology stack. This confirms the importance of ΒιΆΉΤ΄΄βs approach to providing a semantic data layer that allows AI to operate across the full business, not isolated pockets of it.
ΒιΆΉΤ΄΄ GROW Fast β Enterprise-Grade AI at Startup Speed
The business value of AI is not exclusive to large enterprises. Midsize companies that are scaling fast in footprint and complexity often face enterprise-level challenges at startup speed. tackles that issue, offering a pre-scoped, partner-delivered model that establishes AI-ready cloud foundations in weeks, not months; while maintaining enterprise-grade governance and security.
ΒιΆΉΤ΄΄ GROW Fast helps fast-growth companies move from scattered AI experimentation to a coherent and integrated AI strategy built on a . And partners are offering the structured and proven path by combining ΒιΆΉΤ΄΄βs platform with their own delivery IP and rapid-deployment frameworks.
Deloitte, for example, has launched Jumpstart AI β a Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE)-led model for ΒιΆΉΤ΄΄ Business AI use-case discovery and rapid build, complemented by DevAria, Deloitteβs AI-powered development assistant for ΒιΆΉΤ΄΄, which compresses development time by up to 2 times.
βAI is moving rapidly from experimentation to execution. At , we are seeing this firsthand, both in how we use Joule internally to improve our own efficiency and in how we help clients turn ΒιΆΉΤ΄΄ Business AI into tangible business outcomes. With the ΒιΆΉΤ΄΄ Business AI Platform, organisations now have the tools and frameworks to build, run, and govern AI agents across ΒιΆΉΤ΄΄ and non-ΒιΆΉΤ΄΄ applications. What makes this particularly interesting is that there is no one-size-fits-all agentic AI use case. The real value comes from identifying and building use cases relevant to each clientβs business. Across procurement, finance, sales, data, governance, and beyond, we are moving from identifying the right opportunity to a working solution in weeks.β
Vipin Shetty, Asia Pacific ΒιΆΉΤ΄΄ CTO, Deloitte
The Autonomous Enterprise Era
ΒιΆΉΤ΄΄βs ambition is clear: to become the number one Business AI company, powering the .
Our customers have moved past the question of whether to adopt AI to how quickly they can deploy it with confidence. That confidence comes from ΒιΆΉΤ΄΄ partners who understand each customerβs unique environment and change capacity.
Increasingly, partners are not just implementing ΒιΆΉΤ΄΄βs AI but are also ΒιΆΉΤ΄΄βs force-multiplier bringing the Autonomous Enterprise to life. While ΒιΆΉΤ΄΄ partners have always been the engine of this ecosystem, today, they are also its architects, and the autonomous enterprise they are building together with ΒιΆΉΤ΄΄ will define the competitive landscape for the rest of this decade.
Peter Moore is the Regional Head of Partner Ecosystem Success at ΒιΆΉΤ΄΄ Asia Pacific.