IBM and Microsoft launch Imagine Enterprise, with forward deployed engineers from both companies

IBM and Microsoft announced Imagine Enterprise on November 10, 2026, a joint platform for building, running and governing AI agents inside industry-specific processes. IBM Consulting contributes more than 6,000 prebuilt AI agents and assets built on IBM Consulting Advantage, while Microsoft supplies Foundry, Copilot Studio, GitHub Copilot, Fabric, Entra, Purview, Defender and Azure.

The announcement says qualifying engagements get forward deployed engineering support from both IBM Consulting and Microsoft to help customers move agents from experimentation to production. The first industry frameworks cover financial services, insurance and retail. SEI is named as exploring the technology, not as a live production customer, and no pricing was given.

For FDEs, this is a sign that the big vendors now treat embedded engineers as part of the product itself. Two of the largest employers of FDEs are now staffing joint customer deployments, which points to more FDE work in regulated industries where governance and integration are the hard parts.