IBM Sterling

Agents call AI tools rather than starting Order Management System APIs or services directly, each tool is a single defined capability such as searching for orders, canceling an order or validating a coupon, carrying a name, description, input schema and permissions, tools also define how the system connects to external services, and from the 5 June 2026 release administrators create, modify and delete tools from the Order Hub interface.

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Two router agents, the Orderhub Router Agent and the Callcenter Router Agent, direct each prompt to the agent that handles it, some agents depend on other agents to complete a task so a user needs access to every agent in the chain for it to succeed, and each agent acts through AI tools that are implemented as services in the Sterling Order Management service definition framework.

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The Search-Action Agent answers by analyzing documentation and logs and summarizing them into actionable guidance, the Diagnostics Agent gives access to application, agent, integration and MQ logs, and the agents retrieve relevant information from systems, databases and APIs to answer the request in front of them. No customer source set that can be indexed, refreshed and permissioned is documented, nor a citation surface showing which documents influenced an output, and the agents that do the document analysis sit on the Self Service set, whose own page restricts it to nonproduction environments.

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Every AI tool carries permissions that control whether it completes read-only or write-enabled actions, which bounds what an agent is able to do, and the Self Service agents add user-controlled write operations and the ability to stop a response mid-execution. No approval step or consent checkpoint on an action the agent proposes is documented for the generally available Order Hub and Call Center agents, and the write and stop controls sit on the Self Service set, whose own page still restricts it to nonproduction environments.

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Sterling Order Management System is hosted in a secured data center and is ISO-27001, ISO-27017 and ISO-27018 certified, operated with and encryption, and access control reaches the agents themselves: each agent is associated with user groups, permissions are granted or revoked agent by agent under Applications, IBM Sterling Agentic AI, AI Agent in the resource hierarchy, users are identified by IBMid, and access is evaluated every time an agent runs, with unauthorized requests blocked.

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A tracing toggle in AI chat shows the agent's detailed steps and captures them for diagnosis, added in the 5 June 2026 release, transparency features let administrators understand how an agent reached a conclusion before acting on it, and the governance framework applies audit logging to every action and data request, including requests from externally developed agents connected over MCP.

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The documented mechanism is context within a conversation: the agents understand the conversation context and retrieve the information needed to answer the current request.

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Six named data center locations carry the Sterling Order Management System cloud services, Dallas and Washington in the US, Frankfurt and Amsterdam in the EU and Sydney01 and Sydney02 in ANZ, and the subscription includes a named environment set of production, disaster recovery with two stated RTO and RPO options, preproduction, quality assurance and development; the AI agents are documented for cloud environments, with on-premises support for them stated as future rather than shipped.

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Twelve agents are enumerated in the product's own resource hierarchy under Applications, IBM Sterling Agentic AI, AI Agent, including Search Orders, Cancel Order, Coupon, Appease Customer, Inventory Supervisor, Inventory Lookup, Inventory Supply Lookup and four inventory segment agents, each granted or revoked per user group so a buyer adopts them one at a time, and the Agentic Toolkit Add-on reached general availability on 9 March 2026 with the Order Appeasement agent following on 6 April 2026; a further eight Self Service agents are listed on a page that still carries a private preview note.

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Agents are reached through the AI chat interface in Order Hub and IBM Sterling Call Center, where enabling them turns on chat-based natural-language interaction and a router agent directs each user prompt, and the embedded agents can also be surfaced in another omnichannel interface such as an ecommerce channel or a CRM application. No schedule, webhook or system event that starts an agent without a person asking is documented, so the entry point is conversational.

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Every agent across Order Hub, IBM Sterling Call Center and Self Service is documented as watsonx-powered, and no customer or administrator-facing model selection, routing choice or bring-your-own-model surface appears on any AI agent page. The MCP server's note about using proprietary or industry-specific AI models describes the customer's own external agents connecting into OMS, not model choice for the OMS agents, so a single provider is documented.

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The AI Agent developer toolkit gives customers the capability to define and deploy their own agents and tools, and the MCP server exposes OMS data objects, workflows, APIs and execution services so externally developed agents can read real-time order, inventory, promising and fulfillment data and initiate governed transactions, with the server endpoint, access scopes and OMS roles and policies set when MCP integration is enabled; the MCP capability is delivered in the Agentic Toolkit Add-on, Essentials Edition.

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The subscription includes a named environment ladder, development for module and developer integration testing, quality assurance for integration, scalability and user acceptance testing, and preproduction for final validation before deployment to production, and AI tools are implemented as services in the service definition framework that is deployed through it, with in-product feedback submission on agent responses. No testing of the agents with fixtures, mocks or datasets before production is documented, nor any scoring of output quality over time beyond runtime tracking.

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The agents act through AI tools that call Order Management System services and connect to external systems through defined integrations, which is tool calling rather than operating an interface; no browser, desktop or remote computer control is documented.

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