IBM Cognos Analytics: Agents, AWS and a Few Pleasant Surprises

Ahead of IBM TechXchange 2026 in Atlanta, the Cognos Analytics product team ran a webinar on where the platform is headed. Most of it is centered on agents, with a good chunk on running Cognos as a managed service on AWS. Here are the parts that stood out to us.

Asking questions in plain English

The Query Agent, a preview in 12.1.3, is now generally available in 12.2.0. You type a question and get back a data table, a chart, and up to four short observations about what the numbers show. It also offers two or three follow-up questions, which helps when you aren't sure what to ask next.

The part we liked most is the Reasoning section. You can expand it and see how the agent arrived at its answer. For anyone who has had to defend a number in a finance meeting, that matters more than the chart. You can start it from the home screen, an open report, a dashboard, or a data module, and it picks up the data context from wherever you are.

The agents also stay inside the existing Cognos security model. People only see what their permissions already allow, which is the right default.

Faster report building

The Authoring agent lets you describe a report in plain language and have Cognos build a first draft against governed data. A new Dashboard agent (preview) does the same for dashboards, but checks with you before it creates anything. We'd still expect to tidy up whatever comes out. Getting to a reasonable starting point in minutes instead of an afternoon is still a real change.

There's also an Admin agent in preview. It answers questions like who belongs to which group, what's running right now, dispatcher status, and disk usage across nodes. Our team spends plenty of time in the administration screens, so this one caught our attention.

On the MCP side, the server now ships inside the Premium Kit instead of running on the client machine. AI clients such as Claude or watsonx Orchestrate connect through your normal Cognos URL, and the tool count is up to 104.

Cognos as a Service on AWS

The other big topic was Cognos Analytics as a Service, run by IBM on AWS. IBM handles upgrades, maintenance, and capacity. It's available in US East today, with more regions targeted for 2027. Standard and Premium plans are available now, and Essentials and Enterprise are listed for Q1 2027.

IBM was fairly candid about the problem this solves: a lot of on-prem Cognos shops fall behind on versions because upgrades need planning, testing, and downtime nobody wants to schedule. If your company is already committed to AWS, this takes much of that off your plate.

Smaller items worth a look

• Built-in source control for GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, and Azure DevOps, right from the content menus
• Dashboard export to PowerPoint and to Markdown
• Reference lines on charts
• A new expression editor with syntax highlighting
• 84 new REST API endpoints

Looking ahead

Taken together, 12.2.0 and the managed service give Cognos teams more ways to get answers into people's hands, whether they're asking a quick question, putting together a report, or keeping the environment healthy. Existing customers have plenty to try right away, and the AWS option gives a clear path for anyone ready to step back from running the platform themselves.