IBM watsonx Orchestrate

Tools are implemented and called by agents to invoke external APIs and services, a tool node places a tool inside an agentic workflow, and the ADK documentation carries a tools section covering tool definition, connections to external systems with their own credential and OAuth token handling, an OpenAPI plugin, and MCP-based workflows.

Sourceibm.com/products/watsonx-orchestrate/developersread 2026-09-17

Agentic workflows are assembled from documented node types, including an agent node that hands a step to another agent, branch, parallel, foreach and decision nodes, a script node, a timer node that sets a delay between actions, and a user activity node, and IBM describes building with the Agent Development Kit for pro-code control, Langflow for visual design and Flow Builder for rapid orchestration, with branching logic and long-running flows named on the same page.

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Agents use knowledge bases to search and return grounded content. Knowledge bases are defined in YAML or JSON and imported through the ADK CLI, in two forms: built-in, backed by a Milvus instance and populated with documents the customer imports, or external, pointing at the customer's own Milvus or Elasticsearch instance.

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Agentic workflows carry a user activity node, an interactive step where the workflow waits for a person to provide or receive information, either one field at a time in conversation or through a form that collects several fields at once, with node owners, input and output schemas, and fields that select approvers from a user list. IBM describes the same capability on the product side as workflows that pause for human validation, capture context and resume automatically with audit-ready traceability, so the approval point sits at the node layer, IBM watsonx Orchestrate ADK documentation, User activity node page, and the developers product page, 2026-09-17

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Security and access control is named as a feature from the entry plan, and the Premium plan adds data isolation, a dedicated data space, end-to-end protection and a HIPAA-ready option. Against the published questions of which identity providers and provisioning standards are supported, and whether access control reaches users, teams, tools, knowledge sources and model usage, none of that is documented on the pages read, and no certification or audit report scoped to the product was found on IBM's own estate, so the attestation half of the bar is unmet and this sits at Partial on scope rather than on doubt.

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Traces visualize the complete path a request takes through an agent, with each observation recording a distinct unit of work, and they are reachable four ways: the orchestrate observability traces CLI command, the ADK Python library, the product interface and the API.

Sourcedeveloper.watson-orchestrate.ibm.com/traces/overview.mdread 2026-09-17

The Agentic SDK ships memory APIs that persist user information and retrieve it during later agent execution, against documented /memories and /memories/search endpoints: add_messages writes, search, list and retrieve read, and delete and delete_all remove, with memories typed (for example preference), tagged with metadata, scoped by agent and run, and carrying a sensitivity classification.

Sourcedeveloper.watson-orchestrate.ibm.com/sdk/memory.mdread 2026-09-17

IBM states the product runs as a fully managed service on IBM Cloud or on AWS, or in the customer's own on-premises environment, and the ADK documentation carries separate pages for on-premises compatibility and for an air-gapped environment.

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An agents and tools catalog is a named feature of every plan, with ready-to-use domain agents added at the Standard plan, and the product API exposes catalog management operations for listing the applications and skills available from it. Partner-built agents are sold beside it as separately metered add-ons, each a complete agent a buyer adopts on its own, among them a web research agent, a sales intelligence agent, a messaging agent and a document question-answering agent, IBM watsonx Orchestrate pricing page and ADK API documentation, catalog management operations, 2026-09-17

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Agentic workflows and agents can be scheduled to run automatically at specific times or intervals once schedulable is set on the workflow or agent, with the platform handling cron patterns, timezones and execution limits and the schedule running without manual intervention, and separately each channel a buyer configures (web chat, Twilio WhatsApp, Twilio SMS, Slack, Genesys Bot Connector, Facebook Messenger, Microsoft Teams) provides its own event URL to receive messages, IBM watsonx Orchestrate ADK documentation, Scheduling overview and Channels overview pages, 2026-09-17

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Models from multiple providers are imported as virtual models and assigned to an individual agent, and model policies coordinate several of them with a load-balance, fallback or single strategy, weights per target, and retry on named HTTP status codes; a policy is assigned to an agent the same way a single model is.

IBM describes the same surface on the product side as an AI Gateway for integrating multi-provider models with configurable routing policies. Model policies are published as public preview, while per-agent model assignment is not, IBM watsonx Orchestrate ADK documentation, Configuring model policies page, and the developers product page, 2026-09-17

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The platform publishes its own developer documentation site carrying an Agent Development Kit with a Python SDK and an orchestrate command line (agents import, evaluations, observability traces, models policy), a machine-readable documentation index, and a published OpenAPI specification for the server API alongside per-operation reference pages for agents, flows, connections, catalog management, evaluation and monitoring.

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The ADK ships an evaluation framework that assesses agent behavior by simulating user interactions and comparing the resulting trajectories step by step against reference data the customer generates, records or writes by hand, logging every deviation from the expected path and returning a metrics summary saved as CSV. The documented pre-deployment cycle is develop, evaluate, analyze, improve, with an analyze command for reading results and a rubric; evaluations run against the local Developer Edition and against draft environments of SaaS and on-premises instances, IBM watsonx Orchestrate ADK documentation, Evaluation overview and Evaluating pages, 2026-09-17

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No browser, desktop or remote computer control appears in the platform's own documentation: agents act through tools that call APIs and services, connections to enterprise systems, MCP and the channels a buyer configures, so the question of what happens when an interface changes does not arise for the platform itself.

Sourceibm.com/products/watsonx-orchestrate/pricingread 2026-09-17