AI could rival the industrial revolution, say IBM and Trustmarque Ultima

At Fusion Live 2026, the companies discussed agentic AI, governance, and why organisations are finally moving beyond experimentation

At Fusion Live 2026, the newly rebranded Trustmarque Ultima (TMU) and long-time vendor IBM outlined how customers are moving from AI experimentation towards implementation, with growing interest in agentic AI, governance and measurable business outcomes.

The significance extends beyond a 20-year partnership.

The two organisations are betting that the next wave of AI spending will be driven not by standalone tools, but by partners capable of combining AI platforms, data, governance and industry expertise to solve business problems and deliver demonstrable value.

Speaking to CRN, Tom Walker, alliance director at Trustmarque Ultima, and Mark Osborn, AI and data ecosystem leader EMEA at IBM, shared the ways in which AI is evolving from a productivity technology into a transformational business platform, and why partners that help customers innovate safely could be among the biggest beneficiaries.

What makes the IBM and Trustmarque Ultima partnership important to both organisations?

Walker: “As a business, we work with about 1,300 different vendor partners every year, and that's a real mix based on the massive conglomerates, from the likes of Microsoft, all the way down to partners who sell very niche technologies.

“What we're constantly keeping our finger on is the pulse of the market and partners who can really support the objectives our customers are trying to achieve.

“With enterprise AI, everything that's going on in that space, and the huge value we believe we can unlock for customers, we need to have the right partner within that ecosystem, and IBM are clearly one of the market leaders in the space.”

Osborn: “From our side, we work with a lot of partners, and different kinds of partners, from resellers, service partners, and OEM partners.

“What TMU bring is not only expertise in selling, which is obviously really important that you look for that in a retail partner, but they have the delivery capability.

“They've got really deep skills across a whole range of different domains, from cost management through to AI, through to hardware and that makes them an incredibly powerful partner to be working with, and we're really excited how this relationship has developed over the last few years.”

What does the partnership enable for customers?

Walker: “Our business is unlocking technology's potential for our customers.

“The analogy I use is the vendors that we work with provide the engine in the car, but it's our job to put the car together, and then drive the car for our customers.

“Ultimately, our customers aren't interested in what the engine looks like.

“They're interested in getting from A to B, and we facilitate that.

“We are a much broader business [after the merger], with a much greater customer base, and with much deeper capabilities, and that gives us jointly a platform to help those customers unlock the value that they have within their data through technologies like AI.”

Osborn: “What we really appreciate about TMU is the ability for them to build solutions, and, if necessary, across vendors that meet the customers’ needs.

“TMU has a really good industry understanding, and they've got excellent relationships with a whole range of very specific customers in industries, and they know that really well, so they can execute in a way that we can't on our own.

“That's why we work with partners like TMU across the board, it's core to our strategy.”

What does co-developing a go-to-market strategy look like between TMU and IBM?

Osborn: “With our partners, we start with skills, that’s the foundation. We always support our partners with that, and then we work together.”

Walker: “It starts from understanding the problem that we’re trying to solve.

“As an industry, it’s very easy for us to develop solutions to problems that no one has.

“We start with asking ‘what is the customer pain point, what is the challenge here?’ then work backwards from there to see what a solution could look like.

“That solution will invariably involve an element of a product, but also a service wraparound, to actually deliver the outcome that the customer is looking for.

“But we always need to start with the problem we're solving rather than building the solution first.”

What customer challenges are driving the deepest collaboration between IBM and TMU?

Walker: “Budgets are a massive challenge for a lot of our customers, everyone’s trying to do more, but budgets aren’t necessarily increasing in line with that.

“We have a FinOps as a service offering and we use IBM technology in a lot of our optimisation plays.

“We go out to customers and look at their licensing spend underpinned with IBM technology, HashiCorp and Apptio, to identify savings for customers in terms of cloud and software utilisation.

“The point of that isn't necessarily to just drive that money through to a customer's bottom line, although fully support that if that's what they want to do.

“But actually, with the way technology is moving, what we want to support is reinvesting that in technology that's going to drive value in their business rather than keeping the lights on.”

Osborn: “The AI play is the other side of the coin.

“That’s where you can actually take some of that saved budget and do some innovating.”

As AI continues to evolve, how are partner programmes adapting?

Walker: “Programmes ultimately existed in the commercial side of things to encourage investment in certain technologies.

“I don't think they will change with AI in terms of the kind of classic model.

“It's how consumption works that will fundamentally change.

“The challenge with AI is tokenisation, which means your infrastructure costs can be phenomenally high, and therefore a SaaS subscription model no longer works from a vendor perspective.

“I think it will become a customer problem, because they're ultimately going to have to pay for this infrastructure, and therefore we have to work together to find a structure that is equitable, and that allows customers to pay for what they're consuming.

“The bit that's going to be really difficult is building a model where customers can clearly see their consumption because the challenge we are going to have, as we're already seeing, is customer spend go through the roof because they don't have visibility of their spend."

Osborn: “I don't think it's fundamentally going to change. I think licensing might change, and how you go to market may shift for different types of models.

“We're already seeing that with consumption-based licensing.

“We’re always working to create the most cost-effective solutions. So, products that help customers manage their costs, and also for our partners, we try and create a flexible programme.

“[Although] the conventional reseller model continues to be very successful.”

What are the biggest reasons that organisations are still struggling to move from piloting AI to successfully implementing the technology?

Osborn: “We're seeing a lot of organisations starting to actually transform their businesses where they are.

“I think at the beginning, a lot of organisations didn't understand what they could do with it. There was a lot of sandboxes, a lot of experiments. We’ve moved on from that.

“The next phase is where organisations were looking at AI purely as a cost-saving tool [now] need to take it and make it transformative and see how you how you make more money with AI rather than how you save money with AI.

“We’ve seen internally how we've been able to reduce costs but also grow our business significantly.

“We're taking a lot of our own internal experience, bringing it to our clients, and we're putting it into the products.

“We're leading by example, we call ourselves ‘client zero’, and by leading by example, you can really inspire customers, and I think that's how we help organisations make the most of it.”

Walker: “If you look at generative AI, there’s this conception that organisations aren’t adopting it, and I’d say that’s mixed, but actually, employees are [using it].

“In organisations who aren't using it officially as a productivity tool, we see examples where tools like ChatGPT are used, and employees are adopting these things in a shadow AI-esque way in order to get ahead.

“It may not be organisational AI adoption, but the AI is being adopted nonetheless, it's just at what layer it's being monitored and supervised.

“You've then got the agentic AI piece, and that's a piece that I think is currently under adopted, and part of that is I don't think customers necessarily know where it adds value and where to use it, and there seems to be a lot of confusion between AI and automation.

“You can look at something and say, ‘Well, we could automate that,’ that doesn't necessarily make it an AI use case, it makes it an automation use case.

“Really understanding where AI is the right tool and how to augment that with humans and processes and technology and all those other bits we work with is really key to all of this.

“AI is great at what it does, but it's finding the use cases where it is actually a value, and it isn’t everything.”

Where are customers actually investing in AI today that is adding value?

Walker: “Customers aren’t cutting IT budgets, but what customers are looking for is more value out of their IT investment.

“In order to do that, there’s a lot of mundane, manual, repeatable tasks that AI can take away from humans so we no longer have to do it.

“That means that we can then focus those people on adding direct value to customers rather than repeating those same old tasks.”

Osborn: “The best examples are where they’re able to actually make better use of their resources.

“If you’ve got a team providing customer support, you’ve got a limited number of humans.

“Rather than saying ‘I want to cut those humans’, the innovative companies have actually said, ‘actually, let's use AI so we can deal with more queries automatically, the humans can deal with more complex queries, and then we can actually grow our market.’

“That's where we've seen customers actually start to grow.”

Many organisations are excited by agentic AI, but equally concerned about governance. How is governance impacting the adoption of agentic AI?

Walker: “If you look at governance more broadly, it enables control, and control enables AI to be used in constructive ways.

“If you don’t have that control, you can’t be constructive, and then you end up in a potentially destructive or chaotic state.

“We want to enable our customers to deliver consistent services to their stakeholders.

“That does not work with technologies like AI unless you've got a governance framework in place.”

Osborn: “If organisations have got a governance framework in place, then they are free to innovate because they know that they can create new solutions that are fully compliant.

“If you don't have them in place, then they're frozen, and AI solutions aren’t deployed.

“That’s why we’ve got an agentic control plane, which is our WatsonX Orchestrate product, which TMU are leading with.

“That control plane provides several capabilities, and works across multiple platforms.

“One of our core principles is being hybrid. You can use the IBM agents control plane to manage AI solutions from multiple different vendors, multiple different clouds. Not just IBM, but not even IBM.

“You can just use it across the board, and then it brings together those into one solution, and that then frees up organisations to actually build safe solutions and innovate freely.

“It’s really important as a lot of organisations want to not be tied to one vendor, especially now sovereignty is a concern.

“Some organisations need to be able to deploy on premises as well as in multiple different clouds.

“We have solutions that run on premises. We have solutions that work in any cloud. We have our solution also will work with any vendor or hyperscaler, and that's where we differentiate ourselves.”

What prediction about AI do you think we’ll all look back on and realise was completely wrong?

Osborn: “That it’s going to kill jobs.

“Jobs will be disrupted by it, but it’s going to create more jobs longer term, they’re just going to be potentially different jobs."

Walker: “There’s something called Amara’s Law which says that people tend to overestimate the impact of technology in the short term and underestimate the impacts of technology in the long term.

“I remember being at an event two or three years ago, and AI was the phrase of the moment and that it was going to change the world.

“We're three years down the line now, and really, while AI has had an impact, and while we're all using it, our day-to-day lives are broadly extremely similar.

“I do think we're at the cusp of a wave that will rival the previous industrial revolutions, and the digital revolution.

“I think AI will have a similar-sized impact on the world, but similar to the previous ones, it is a huge opportunity for us to make the world a better place.

“If we look at the previous revolutions, industrial, digital, history shows that we have harnessed those technologies and used them to make to bring up standards of living, to reduce world hunger, to make the world fundamentally a better place, and I think AI has a huge opportunity to do that if we utilise it in the right ways.

“All I can say for almost certain is, the things that happen and evolve, and the jobs that are created, we will not even be able to imagine today. They'll be fundamentally different.”