New Orleans was electric last week — and not just because Jazz Fest was in full swing across town. More than 1,300 IBM i professionals filled the New Orleans Marriott for POWERUp 2026, and the energy in that building matched everything the city had going on outside it. There was a feeling in the air that something significant is underway. Not arriving — already here.
The conversations happening on the expo floor, in the hallways, and in packed session rooms had a quality you don't always find at technical conferences: genuine excitement. The kind that reminds you why you chose this platform in the first place.
The Hype Is Back — and It's Earned
When IBM introduced the AS/400 in 1988, the reaction from the IT world was something close to wonder. Here was a platform designed from the ground up for integration, resilience, and application longevity — a machine that seemed almost improbably ahead of its time. The community that formed around it became one of the most loyal, knowledgeable, and mission-driven in enterprise technology.
That energy is back. And this time, it's not nostalgia driving it — it's the moment the platform has been building toward.
IBM i is ready. Steve Will said it directly: IBM i will be fully agentic within the next couple of years.
IBM i Chief Architect and CTO Steve Will's session — "IBM i in 2026: Collaborative Strategy in the Era of AI" — captured what the community has been feeling for months. IBM has already shipped an IBM i MCP server and set a target of 500 tools in 2026. The platform's architecture — its integration model, its stability, its data layer — turns out to be extraordinarily well-suited for exactly this moment. The foundation is not being planned. It's being poured right now.
IBM Bob was front and center throughout the week. The AI-powered development assistant — which reached general availability in March — was the subject of multiple packed sessions led by IBM i Architect Tim Rowe, from the signature "IBM Bob: Your IBM i AI Development Partner" on opening day to a deep dive and community success stories by week's end. IBM also announced the Premium Package for i at POWERUp, bringing direct IBM i source connectivity and broader SDLC capabilities to the platform. For developers who have been watching the AI coding assistant space from a distance, Bob made the case in New Orleans that the wait is over.
The platform that was purpose-built for mission-critical work in 1988 may be the most capable foundation for AI-native enterprise operations by the end of this decade. That's not a talking point. That's an architectural reality.
A Community Built for This Moment
COMMON is, at its core, the premier education hub for the IBM i platform. It is where practitioners learn, where careers are built, and where the next generation of IBM i professionals is being shaped in real time.
That next generation was visible at POWERUp in a way that made the conference feel genuinely different. The demographic energy has shifted — Gen X and Millennial professionals are stepping forward as the new center of gravity in the community. COMMON's active partnerships with colleges and universities are producing results: students showed up in New Orleans, early-career developers engaged with sessions and practitioners, and new voices were part of conversations that define the platform's future.
COMMON is not just a U.S. organization. COMMON Europe serves as an umbrella for national user groups across the UK, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Iberia, and beyond. COMMON Latin América hosts Spanish-language events that draw practitioners from across the Western Hemisphere. COMMON Japan has built a growing presence in a market known for its deep IBM i installed base. And COMMON India — energetic, young, and hungry — held its first in-person conference in early 2025 to extraordinary response. The global IBM i community is growing, diversifying, and leaning into the platform's future with remarkable clarity of purpose.
The Partners Who Fuel the Platform
POWERUp 2026 had more business partners on the expo floor than any prior year — and their presence told its own story.
These companies — modernization specialists, security vendors, DevOps toolmakers, AI integration firms — are the innovation layer that most IBM i shops don't have internally. They take IBM's roadmap and turn it into deployable capability. They are the reason an IBM i shop with twelve developers can compete with organizations ten times its size. The POWERUp Expo is the largest gathering of IBM i solution providers in the world, and this year's edition made clear that the partner community is fully invested in where this platform is headed.
When a new IBM i developer in Hyderabad or São Paulo discovers what the platform can do, they're often discovering it through tools, training, and frameworks that business partners built. That ecosystem is a strategic asset for the entire community — and it was on full display in New Orleans.
POWERUp 2026 in Full
A note on how this conference felt beyond the sessions and the expo: COMMON has built something worth belonging to.
Pups & Cups — where attendees spent time with dogs from a local shelter — was the kind of moment a technical conference rarely creates. No agenda, no pitch, just practitioners and dogs and a city that has always known how to make strangers feel welcome. A pickleball court on the expo floor kept the energy moving between sessions. And all of it happened against the backdrop of Jazz Fest — the sounds of New Orleans filling the streets outside a building full of people genuinely excited about what comes next.
Hillery Hunter, CTO and General Manager of IBM Infrastructure, delivered the keynote. IBM Infrastructure covers IBM Z, Power, Storage, and IBM Cloud — and her presence on the POWERUp stage signals how IBM thinks about this platform in 2026: as active, strategic infrastructure, invested with resources and executive attention, with a clear road ahead.
The Technology Has Arrived — and the Human Question Remains
My session at POWERUp this year was titled "The Technology Has Arrived. Is Your Organization Ready?" You can read the full context and the signal data behind it here.
The AI capabilities that IBM i shops have been hearing about for two years are no longer on the horizon. They are here. But every significant technology transition carries the same challenge alongside the technical one — the human element. The practitioner figuring out where they fit. The organization figuring out how to move. We've navigated this before, and the IBM i community has always navigated it well.
What's different this time is the rate of change. AI capabilities are compounding faster than any previous technology wave, which means the window for thoughtful, calibrated response is compressed. The Signal Stack — 182 signals across 14 categories — exists precisely to give this community the intelligence it needs to move with intention. The data is clear: organizations that are engaging now are building advantages that will be very difficult to close later.
IBM i practitioners are well-positioned. The platform is ready. The question is whether the people and organizations running it are moving at the pace the moment requires.
182 signals · 14 categories · tracking the AI era for IBM i organizations. signal4i.ai
Atlanta Is Next — and the Stakes Are Higher
IBM TechXchange 2026 takes place October 26–29 in Atlanta. For the first time, COMMON will co-locate with TechXchange — placing the IBM i practitioner community inside the same gathering as the broader IBM developer and technologist ecosystem.
That convergence matters. IBM i is increasingly visible to the enterprise AI world as something it can't ignore: stable infrastructure, decades of production data, and an architecture that supports agentic workloads without the rebuild costs that greenfield platforms require. Atlanta will be a significant moment for the community's positioning.
Between now and Atlanta, Signal4i will be publishing a series following one IBM i organization — Meridian Financial Group, a fictional company built from real patterns — through the decisions that will define the next decade. If you've read the Meridian case study, you know the approach: composite scenarios drawn from real IBM i environments, real tradeoffs, real consequences. The series begins soon. This is the work that leads to Atlanta.
An Opportunity to Give Back
I joined the COMMON Board of Directors effective May 1, 2026 — and I want to say plainly what that means to me.
It's an opportunity to give back to a community that has given me an extraordinary career. Thirty-plus years on this platform — from developer to founder of a software company built on IBM i, to enterprise CTO — shaped how I think about technology, about organizational resilience, and about what it means to build things that last. COMMON is the institution that has sustained this community through every wave of change, and being part of its leadership at this particular moment in the platform's history is something I'm genuinely honored by.
My focus on the board is AI — specifically, how this community positions itself, educates its practitioners, and advocates for the platform's role in the enterprise AI era. The Signal Stack and the Meridian series are in service of exactly that mission: making sure IBM i professionals and organizations have the intelligence and the frameworks to lead this moment rather than react to it.
COMMON has built something remarkable over 65 years. I intend to invest in it — and in the developers, architects, and operators who make it worth belonging to, from New Orleans to New Delhi and everywhere in between.
The platform is ready. The community is ready. Let's go.