IBM News & Events

Starbucks (SBUX) is developing in-house tools with the help of AI that could replace some software applications it now buys from companies such as Microsoft (MSFT) and IBM (IBM), Bloomberg's Daniela Sirtori and Brody Ford report. The coffee chain is building alternatives to a Microsoft system that tracks inventory and an IBM tool that manages maintenance, according to an internal presentation reviewed by Bloomberg News. Some of the Starbucks-developed software could roll out by the end of next year, pending the results of testing, the authors add.

IBM announced updates to IBM Bob, its agentic software development platform, including new multi-agent capabilities, built-in AI cost and use analytics, and pre-built, specialized workflows for modernizing enterprise systems. The company said, "Now that organizations are using AI to write massive amounts of code, their software development challenges have moved to other parts of the process with 85% of DevSecOps professionals surveyed agreeing that AI has shifted the bottleneck from writing code to reviewing and validating it. IBM Bob is architected to bring AI capabilities wherever software engineering work happens. Rather than limiting AI to a single development interface for isolated tasks, Bob provides a unified foundation for teams to coordinate across the software development lifecycle.Many enterprise engineers are manually choosing models, trying to balancing cost versus performance, and still ending up with inconsistent outcomes and unpredictable spend. Bob can now optimize across the execution system, not just model selection. Bob matches models to tasks, coordinates AI execution across agents, and provides organizations with visibility into productivity, quality, performance, and cost through the newly launched Bobalytics, to help enterprises optimize AI at scale. Built-in usage visibility and cost optimization: Users can now access Bobalytics, a new feature that helps them monitor consumption, allocate resources and maintain oversight so they can scale AI according to their internal mandates. Parallel, model-native tool calling: Bob now allows models to request several tools in one turn and run them together. Subagents manage context at scale: Every exploratory step an AI takes, whether it's file reads, searches, or function traces, can bloat the context window and drive up cost. Now Bob subagents handle complex work in an isolated context, to deliver fast responses while helping manage cost."

IBM and Red Hat announced the commercial launch of Lightwell, delivering automated vulnerability remediation at scale through two offerings: Lightwell Network and Lightwell Clearinghouse Premier. Available now, Lightwell Network gives enterprises access to a launch catalog of 6,500+ remediated, digitally signed, and certified application-layer dependencies across major ecosystems, including Java and Python. Lightwell Clearinghouse Premier enters a limited-availability phase, serving as a trusted intermediary for secured patch embargoes and vertical threat coordination. Lightwell leverages the high-throughput capability of a generative AI-powered remediation engine that is already live and operating at scale.