IBM Expands watsonx Capability With Voice AI: Can it Fuel User Growth?

International Business Machines Corporation IBM recently announced that it is collaborating with ElevenLabs, an AI research and product company, to integrate advanced voice AI (speech-to-text and text-to-speech) into IBM watsonx Orchestrate. The IBM watsonx Orchestrate is a platform that facilitates development, deployment, management and governance of AI agents. Per a report from Grand View Research, the AI agents market size was $7.63 billion in 2025. It is projected to reach $182.97 billion in 2033, with a compound annual growth rate of 49.6%.

Enterprises across industries are rushing to integrate agentic AI to automate workflows across their business, improve productivity and gain a competitive edge. Organizations are increasingly using agentic AI to interact with customers and employees. However, they faces issues with legacy voice systems used by agentic AI which often have poor multilingual support, robotic sounds, rigid call flows and long wait times. By integrating ElevenLabs' premium TTS technology, IBM aims to allow enterprise customers to develop intuitive, responsive and accessible voice-enabled agents that can communicate naturally and with greater clarity.

Development of intuitive communication capabilities can be a game-changer across multiple sectors where customer support and sales interaction are major aspects in operations. The collaboration is expected to boost IBM’s commercial prospects in several industries such as banks, insurance companies, healthcare providers and utilities. Moreover, multi-lingual support across 70 languages, support for regional accents and voices make the voice support inclusive. This will also boost the acceptability of IBM watsonx across several regions worldwide.

Other Tech Firms Focusing on Agentic AI Deployment

Microsoft Corporation MSFT is rapidly expanding into the AI agent market through initiatives such as the Agent Store in Microsoft 365 Copilot, which allows organizations to discover and deploy AI-native workplace assistants. Microsoft introduced Agent Lightning, enabling reinforcement learning in AI agents without code changes, allowing agents to improve through real-world feedback while preserving existing architectures. The Microsoft Azure Agent Service is also gaining solid market traction.

Alphabet Inc. GOOGL is also a major player in this space. The company offers a unified, open platform for creating and deploying AI and machine learning applications and models called Vertex AI. The platform offers access to over 200 models, including Google’s foundation models. It provides tools for governance, security, and compliance and supports AI inference workflows and generative AI workflows. Google Cloud is becoming a preferred choice for enterprises planning to deploy AI agents thanks to the Agent Development Kit and a low-code tool offering Agent Designer.

IBM’s Price Performance, Valuation and Estimates

IBM stock has declined 1.8% over the past year against the industry’s growth of 101.1%.

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Going by the price/earnings ratio, IBM’s shares currently trade at 19.19 forward earnings, above 10.31.

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The Zacks Consensus Estimate for IBM’s earnings for 2026 and 2027 has risen over the past 60 days.

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IBM currently carries a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold). You can see the complete list of today’s Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here.

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