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Over the last 100 years, IBM has seen many different tech trends rise and fall. What tends to win out are technologies where there is choice.
At VB Transform 2025 today, Armand Ruiz, VP of AI Platform at IBM detailed how Big Blue is thinking about generative AI and how its enterprise users are actually deploying the technology. A key theme that Ruiz emphasized is that at this point, it’s not about choosing a single large language model (LLM) provider or technology. Increasingly, enterprise customers are systematically rejecting single-vendor AI strategies in favor of multi-model approaches that match specific LLMs to targeted use cases.
IBM has its own open-source AI models with the Granite family, but it is not positioning that technology as the only choice, or even the right choice for all workloads. This enterprise behavior is driving IBM to position itself not as a foundation model competitor, but as what Ruiz referred to as a control tower for AI workloads.
“When I sit in front of a customer, they’re using everything they have access to, everything,” Ruiz explained. “For coding, they love Anthropic and for some other use cases like for reasoning, they like o3 and then for LLM customization, with their own data and fine tuning, they like either our Granite series or Mistral with their small models, or even Llama…it’s just matching the LLM to the right use case. And then we help them as well to make recommendations.”
The Multi-LLM gateway strategy
IBM’s response to this market reality is a newly released model gateway that provides enterprises with a single API to switch between different LLMs while maintaining observability and governance across all deployments.
The technical architecture allows customers to run open-source models on their own inference stack for sensitive use cases while simultaneously accessing public APIs like AWS Bedrock or Google Cloud’s Gemini for less critical applications.
“That gateway is providing our customers a single layer with a single API to switch from one LLM to another LLM and add observability and governance all throughout,” Ruiz said.
The approach directly contradicts the common vendor strategy of locking customers into proprietary ecosystems. IBM is not alone in taking a multi-vendor approach to model selection. Multiple tools have emerged in recent months for model routing, which aim to direct workloads to the appropriate model.
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