By Michael Ramos —

IBM Tech 2025 - My Thoughts

I just got back from Tech 2025, IBM's premier recognition, education, and development program for top technical IBMers. This year's event was in San Diego and I had a great time. The program is a mix of fun events and educational sessions, and in this post I'll cover some of my takeaways from the technical sessions.

Six IBM Tech attendees posing near event signage

Leadership Behaviors

Dinesh Nirmal kicked off the event with an opening session focused on key behaviors of a technology leader. I found this session insightful, especially as I compare with the behaviors described in The Geek Way, which is constantly being referenced by our senior leadership.

Here are the six key behaviors Dinesh highlighted:

  • Stay Curious
  • Move Toward the Unknown
  • Collaborate at Speed
  • Simplify Relentlessly
  • Lead With Data
  • Persist With Purpose
Dinesh presenting in front of a slide showing the six leadership behaviors

Of these, Lead With Data stands out especially. There's strong overlap with the science norm discussed in The Geek Way here. Dinesh points out that we should be gathering data in order to make better decisions, but we can go further too. It's not just what the data says, but it's what we do with it.

"AI Assistants" Are the Past - How Are "Agents" Shaping the Future?

A slide showing the evolution of assistance, from traditional to single agent to multi-agent

This session was the one I found to be the most exciting. The talk focused on new capabilities recently added to watsonx Orchestrate, particularly the agentic AI features. These agents are powered by the think-act-observe loop and have the ability to interact with other systems, making them much more dynamic than a chat bot. In addition, the team has released the Agent Developer Kit (ADK) that can be used for building and deploying tools and agents to Orchestrate. There's great potential now for a CI/CD pipeline to build, test and deploy agents to Orchestrate with the ADK.

Many of the other sessions were also focused around AI and ways to improve our workflows. I'm looking forward to experimenting with the ADK and seeing where agent-based workflows could add value for my team.