IBM employed 286,800 workers as of 31 December 2025, down 2% from 293,400 the previous year, according to its latest annual report. The workforce includes 264,300 IBM employees, 8,700 at less-than-wholly-owned subsidiaries and 13,800 temporary and part-time workers. The technology company, led by CEO Arvind Krishna, has cut thousands of jobs in recent years whilst pivoting towards higher-growth areas including cloud and artificial intelligence. The restructuring follows IBM's 2019 acquisition of Red Hat, which transformed the company into a major hybrid cloud infrastructure player. IBM announced further workforce reductions in November 2025, with thousands of cuts planned by year-end. Despite the restructuring, IBM shares climbed 40% in 2025. The company maintains offices in over 170 countries.

CrowdStrike and IBM have expanded their strategic collaboration to advance autonomous security operations centre transformation. The partnership integrates CrowdStrike's Charlotte AI with IBM's Autonomous Threat Operations Machine (ATOM) for machine-speed threat investigation and containment. The collaboration also extends CrowdStrike's Falcon platform into IBM Consulting's managed Threat Detection and Response services and X-Force Cyber Range experiences, offering cyber crisis simulations. The integration addresses accelerating threats, as average eCrime breakout time has dropped to 29 minutes, with the fastest observed in 27 seconds. Together, ATOM and Charlotte AI analyse detections across endpoint, identity and cloud environments, applying enterprise context to coordinate containment decisions. This streamlines investigation and response to reduce manual handoffs and help teams act before threats spread.

ElevenLabs and IBM have announced a collaboration to integrate ElevenLabs' text-to-speech and speech-to-text technology into IBM watsonx Orchestrate, an agentic AI platform. The integration aims to enable enterprises to deploy AI agents with natural-sounding voice capabilities across 70 languages. The partnership addresses the growing demand for voice-enabled AI interactions in customer and employee-facing workflows. ElevenLabs provides access to over 10,000 voices and enterprise-grade security features, including PCI compliance and Zero Retention Mode for HIPAA-compliant data handling. The integration is designed to serve sectors including government, banking, insurance, healthcare and utilities. IBM watsonx Orchestrate enables clients to build and deploy AI agents whilst connecting to existing systems and automation tools. The companies plan to continue their collaboration to advance voice-first AI experiences for enterprise applications.