IBM on October 27, 2026, announced new identity, credential, discovery, containment and evaluation capabilities for enterprise AI agents at TechXchange 2026 in Atlanta, including the general availability of IBM Agent Identity and HashiCorp Vault 2.2.

The company said the capabilities are built for developers, IT and security teams running agents across business systems with defined authority and accountability, combining agent discovery, verified identities, access controls and performance evaluation. “The winners in enterprise AI are changing how their business runs, not simply adding more AI to it,” Dinesh Nirmal, Senior Vice President of IBM Software, said in IBM’s announcement. Nirmal said agents taking on real work require an AI operating model that connects them to a company’s data, applications and infrastructure.

IBM’s announcement tied the rollout to governance gaps in current enterprise deployments. Gartner predicted in an April 28, 2026 press release that by 2028 an average global Fortune 500 enterprise will have over 150,000 agents in use, up from less than 15 in 2025, and that only 13% of organizations believe they have the right AI agent governance in place. IBM identified persistent credentials, unclear ownership and disconnected controls as the obstacles the new capabilities target.

Agent Identity and HashiCorp Vault

Agent Identity, detailed in an IBM announcement published October 26, 2026, registers agents in a central inventory and captures ownership, metadata, risk classifications, approved tool connections and lifecycle state. IBM said the system preserves on-behalf-of delegation across identity providers and token exchanges so an action can be traced to an originating person, approval state or upstream system, and it issues OAuth-based, short-lived, task-scoped tokens with consent-aware authorization for sensitive actions. Controls remain active while an agent runs, covering contextual authorization, policy enforcement, runtime risk evaluation and credential control. Structured audit trails connect human identity, delegated agent identity, credential issuance, policy decisions and downstream actions for compliance reporting and incident investigation.

Within the architecture, IBM Verify provides centralized identity, authorization, governance, token exchange and audit controls, while HashiCorp Vault brokers just-in-time, target-specific credentials for systems that cannot consume delegated tokens directly. Used with Vault, IBM said, Agent Identity establishes the authoritative record for each agent, covering its owner, lifecycle status and granted authority, and shares that context with Vault’s credential controls to enforce least-privilege access and enable real-time revocation when an agent attempts an unauthorized action.

IBM said Vault already secures non-human identities for organizations including ABN AMRO, Adobe, athenahealth, BBVA, BlackRock, Canva, Duke Energy, Expedia, London Stock Exchange, Starbucks, Swiss Federal Railways and Target. Vault 2.2 gives agents their own secured accounts, automatically renews their credentials and incorporates post-quantum encryption. According to HashiCorp’s account of the updates, the release adds vTPM support for Linux virtual machines, letting workloads authenticate with cryptographic proof tied to an enrolled virtual TPM rather than distributed bootstrap secrets, alongside PKI modernization, automated public certificate management and Vault on IBM Power.

Two related previews extend the Vault portfolio. Secure Hub, in public preview, provides centralized visibility, reporting and governance across distributed Vault environments, including operational health, secrets and certificates. Vault Arc, also in public preview, introduces a new resource and IAM model with scoped and ephemeral authorization and agent and non-human identity governance. HashiCorp Boundary 1.1 is available with a Model Context Protocol server in public preview, which lets administrators manage Boundary clusters in natural language and lets MCP-compatible agents reach SSH and RDP targets without custom client code; the release also adds app tokens with customized time-to-live and scope, and virtual-machine auto-discovery across multiple AWS accounts from a single plugin configuration.

Discovery, Containment and Evaluation in Watsonx Orchestrate

IBM’s watsonx Orchestrate announcement introduces an AI Gateway that acts as a single enforcement layer for discovering third-party agents, models and MCP servers across platforms such as Amazon Bedrock, Microsoft and Google, with customers able to interact with those agents through watsonx Orchestrate chat and channels. The discovery capability, in tech preview, connects to platforms such as Amazon Bedrock, Microsoft Foundry and Google Gemini to find agents built in third-party environments, and it extends to models and MCP servers.

The Orchestrate catalog is evolving into a governed catalog aligned to OWASP, CoSAI and the IBM AI Risk Atlas. For select agents including Ziemacs and Cognos Partners, it surfaces performance, reliability and latency metrics plus EU AI Act compliance information; for select MCP servers including Box, Visier and New Relic, it shows protocol conformance, tool schema integrity and default credential rejection.

A containment capability, also in tech preview, runs agents in isolated sandboxes and gives teams a kill switch to shut down any agent, while a Premium Runtime provides hardware-virtualized container isolation, zero lateral movement and hardware-bound resource containment. The evaluation tooling is generally available: teams can test the quality, accuracy and compliance of agents, models and MCP servers before deployment and monitor them in production, with built-in cost tracking of model and token use. New tools include Custom LLM-as-a-Judge evaluation, user simulation with deterministic evaluation, Trace Inspector and an AgentOps Agent that investigates failures and generates test cases. Orchestrate can also connect directly with Microsoft Entra and IBM Verify as identity providers for human and non-human agent identities.

NVIDIA Integration, Availability and Conference Program

IBM said Agent Identity and HashiCorp Vault integrate with NVIDIA OpenShell secure runtime software, the foundation of the NVIDIA OpenShell Architecture, pairing a protected runtime environment with verified identity and short-lived credentials for each agent. John Fanelli, NVIDIA’s vice president of enterprise software, said the work combines OpenShell’s policy-governed runtime with Agent Identity and Vault to support secure execution and tightly scoped access to business systems.

On availability, HashiCorp Vault 2.2, Agent Identity, the watsonx Orchestrate evaluation capabilities, IBM Concert and Terraform policy are generally available; Secure Hub, Terraform Developer Portal, Terraform remote MCP server and IBM Z Atlas are in public preview; and IBM Integration Intelligence Hub and the Orchestrate discover and contain capabilities are in tech preview.

Client speakers at the conference include athenahealth on automating certificate management with Vault’s PKI engine; Albert Einstein College of Medicine on applying IBM Verify and Vault to agent identity, just-in-time access, dynamic secrets and auditability; Optum on Vault Radar and Boundary; Seven-Eleven Japan on Vault Enterprise and Vault Radar; and Yum! Brands on building an identity security platform with IBM Verify. Shailesh M. Shenoy, Assistant Dean for Information Technology at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, said technologies such as IBM Verify and HashiCorp Vault can help organizations establish the identity, access and security controls needed to innovate with confidence.

IBM said this year’s TechXchange, which incorporates HashiConf, brings together nearly 6,500 attendees from 85 countries, with more than 1,000 sessions, 180 hands-on labs, 260 client-led sessions and more than 50 certification exams.