e& and IBM have announced a strategic collaboration to develop an enterprise-grade agentic artificial intelligence foundation at e&, starting with policy, risk and compliance functions. The initiative was announced at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos.

The collaboration marks a move by e& away from traditional natural language processing-based chatbots toward governed, action-oriented AI integrated into core enterprise systems. As part of the initiative, the companies introduced an agentic AI solution built on IBM watsonx Orchestrate, which includes more than 500 tools and customizable, domain-specific agents developed by IBM and its partners.

Integrated with IBM OpenPages and the broader watsonx portfolio, the solution is designed to help employees and auditors access, interpret and act on legal, regulatory and compliance information, while providing traceable responses aligned with enterprise governance requirements.

A joint proof of concept delivered within eight weeks by IBM, Gulf Business Machines (GBM) and e& demonstrated the deployment of agentic AI at enterprise scale under real-world conditions.

IBM’s Client Engineering team led the design and system integration, while GBM supported delivery through project coordination and its familiarity with e&’s OpenPages and watsonx Assistant environment.

According to e&, the solution enables reasoning and task execution within defined governance, risk and compliance controls, with the aim of streamlining compliance processes, reducing response times and enabling continuous self-service access across the organization.

Hatem Dowidar, Group Chief Executive Officer of e&, said the collaboration supports the scaling of trusted, governed agentic AI by embedding intelligence into risk and compliance workflows.

The initiative aligns with watsonx.governance, which is already in use at e&, and integrates agentic AI into the OpenPages platform. The project marks one of the region’s early enterprise-grade implementations of agentic AI. IBM said the project also demonstrates the flexibility of its AI model gateway, enabling large language models to operate across hybrid environments under enterprise governance controls.

Ana Paula Assis, Senior Vice President and Chair for Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Asia Pacific at IBM, said the proof of concept shows how agentic AI can be designed and validated for enterprise-scale use, with governance and accountability built in.