Acing AI automation

Welcome back to the Circuit Breaker, where you can find the best recaps on the latest innovations in AI, quantum computing, semiconductors, and more, from across IBM Research and beyond.

Stay tuned for new features and content in the coming weeks as we look to bring you newsletters that will give you an even deeper understanding of what's next in computing.

Week of July 7 -11

• AI agents for greater automation

• Serving more insights with watsonx at Wimbledon 2025

• TSPulse: AI-powered solutions for better asset control

AI agents are coming to IBM Maximo

IBM researchers are adding AI agents to the Maximo Application Suite to help enterprises manage their industrial equipment more effectively. The goal is to move from fixed maintenance schedules for machinery to a dynamic, condition-based system that saves money.

🤖 What’s new. A new LLM-powered interface called Maximo Assistant. Users can now query Maximo’s databases through a chat window, and an IBM Granite-powered agent will fetch the information. Users no longer have to call APIs or know how to code in SQL to interact with Maximo's relational databases.

“Now operators, reliability engineers, and technicians can interact with the AI directly,” said Anuradha Bhamidipaty, a distinguished engineer at IBM Research co-leading the project. “It’s a huge transformation in how clients not only monitor and maintain their systems but plan their investments to replace them.”

→ What’s on its way. In July, the SaaS platform will add an optimizer to help users calculate, based on budgeting constraints and the condition and performance of their assets, when they should ideally be replaced.

By the end of the year, a second agent, Maximo’s Condition Insights agent, will be added to gather statistics and operational data for each asset a company tracks. The agent will estimate the asset’s current condition and projected replacement date as part of a broader shift from corrective maintenance to servicing only when needed.

🏦 Why shift to condition-based maintenance? It can reduce unnecessary labor, help enterprises meet their sustainability goals by keeping machines at peak performance, and extend the useful life of expensive, multi-year investments. It can also avert costly failures.

“The typical chiller lasts about 40 years,” said Roman Vaculin, a principal research scientist at IBM Research co-leading the project. “If the AI agent senses that efficiency is declining or the machine is consuming too much power, that could signal a failure mode. Technicians and engineers can act on these insights before it turns into something serious.”

Learn more about Maximo’s upcoming features

Strawberries, cream, and a smattering of AI — Wimbledon is back with new AI-powered experiences

This year’s Wimbledon tennis championships are upon us once again 🎾

After a fantastic first week at the All England Lawn Tennis Club that saw some major upsets and some amazing points, we’re poised to head to a finale this weekend that will surely excite tennis fans around the world. And with the updated Wimbledon apps and website enhanced with new AI capabilities, it’s easier than ever for fans to feel like they’re on Murray Mound or at Centre Court.

🎾 New experiences. Making its debut at this year’s tournament is Match Chat, an interactive AI assistant that can answer your questions during live singles matches. It’s built using watsonx Orchestrate and a collection of AI agents and LLMs, including IBM Granite, first incubated here in IBM Research. The assistant was trained on Wimbledon’s editorial style and the language of tennis and can answer queries in real time, such as “Who has converted more break points in the match?” or “Who is performing better in the match?”. The assistant is also available to tennis fans in IBM Slamtracker for replays of select high profile match-ups.

📈 Enhanced projections. The Likelihood to Win tool inside Wimbledon’s app and website has also been upgraded, offering fans a projected win percentage that can change throughout each game. Using Red Hat OpenShift, the tool creates an AI-powered analysis of player statistics, expert opinion, and match momentum to guide its projections as the aces and backhand winners fly by.

🏆 The 2025 championships runs through July 13. 

Learn more about how IBM has supported Wimbledon for 35 years running.

Managing assets more efficiently with AI

IBM’s new time-series foundation model, TSPulse, can go beyond standard forecasting tasks to detect anomalies, fill in missing values, classify data, and search recurring patterns. It’s tiny enough to run on a laptop and could help change how we manage physical assets and IT operations. Listen to Jay(ant) Kalagnanam , Director of AI applications at IBM Research, explain how:

➡️For more on the model collection and its use cases, check it out here.

Serving you a new fan experience with IBM's AI powered assistant, Match Chat 

Extending the Qiskit SDK’s C API support

𝙍𝙚𝙨𝙚𝙖𝙧𝙘𝙝 𝙍𝙤𝙪𝙣𝙙𝙪𝙥:

Highlighting new publications from IBM researchers that we liked the sound of:

• A Complete Security Proof of SQIsign

• R2D2: Remembering, Replaying and Dynamic Decision Making with a Reflective Agentic Memory

• Learnable Channel Converter for Multi-Spectral Image to RGB Visualization using a Vision-Text Model

• EpMAN: Episodic Memory AttentioN for Generalizing to Longer Contexts

If you liked this, please consider following IBM Research on LinkedIn. And if you want to to go even deeper, subscribe to our monthly newsletter, Future Forward for more on the latest news on breakthroughs in AI, quantum computing and hybrid cloud.