IBM and ElevenLabs on March 25 announced a collaboration to bring ElevenLabs’ text-to-speech and speech-to-text technology into IBM watsonx Orchestrate, IBM’s agentic AI orchestration platform. The companies said the integration is intended to give enterprise clients richer voice interactions while addressing security and scalability requirements for business use.
According to the announcement, the integration is meant to move IBM’s agent experience beyond text-based interaction and toward voice-first workflows. IBM said watsonx Orchestrate is a unified platform for building, deploying, managing and governing AI agents, and that the ElevenLabs addition gives clients access to premium speech capabilities inside that environment.
“AI agents are becoming central to everyday work, and voice is where AI either earns trust or loses it,” said Mati Staniszewski, Co-founder at ElevenLabs. “Together with IBM, we’re helping organisations replace robotic interactions with AI agents that people actually want to talk to, built with the security and compliance controls that enterprises require.”
A central part of the offering is language coverage, IBM and ElevenLabs said AI phone agents using the integration can converse in 70 languages and use multiple regional accents and voices. The companies also said ElevenLabs’ voice library includes more than 10,000 voices.
The announcement also emphasises enterprise controls, IBM and ElevenLabs said the integration includes PCI compliance for payment processing, Zero Retention Mode designed to support HIPAA-compliant data handling, and data residency options. The companies framed these features as important for deployments that require consistency, reliability and high-volume concurrent interactions.
Both companies pointed to customer-facing and internal use cases, The announcement cites government services, banks, insurance companies, healthcare providers and utilities as examples of sectors that could use the integration for customer support, sales, employee experience and internal operations.
IBM said the collaboration reflects its open ecosystem approach, while ElevenLabs said the aim is to replace robotic-sounding interactions with more natural conversational experiences. The companies also said they intend to continue the collaboration, though they noted that statements about future direction and intent are subject to change.
“We’re bringing a voice to AI Agents in the enterprise. As clients increasingly deploy agentic AI that interacts with their customers and employees, they want these experiences to feel intuitive, responsive and accessible,” said Nick Holda, Vice President, AI Technology Partnerships at IBM. “IBM’s open ecosystem approach offers clients the flexibility to choose the models and tools that fit their business, and our integration of ElevenLabs into watsonx Orchestrate is a powerful example of that – enabling enterprises to deploy AI agents that sound natural, scale globally, and address security, reliability and governance.”
