IBM & Others

IBM watsonx · various vendors

Vendor · enterprise2 patterns
In Plain English

This page shows every pattern that IBM & Others has published or written about — 2 in total. Each one includes a simple picture of how it works, a short explanation, an example of when to use it, and its trade-offs (the good parts and the not-so-good parts).

Reading patterns from one source at a time matters because it lets you see how a single company or team thinks about building AI agents, and compare their ideas side by side. If a pattern here also appears in the bigger Deep Catalogue, you will see a link so you can read the full, detailed version.

An open reference book with a pencil in the fold under warm lamp light

2E.01IBM LATS Agent

IBM LATS Goal Branch A expand Branch B best Branch C prune

IBM reference implementation of Language Agent Tree Search for planning.

Use caseComplex planning tasks where branching exploration pays off.
Trade-offsHigher quality on hard problems · Expensive.

See 1D.08

2E.02IBM Plan-and-Execute Agent

IBM PLAN-AND-EXECUTE Planner Executor Replanneronly on break Answer

IBM reference for ReWOO-style planning agent with LangGraph.

Use caseProduction Plan-and-Execute deployments.
Trade-offsStable pattern · Requires good planner prompting.

See 1C.03, 1D.06