IBM Bob Premium Package for i Gets June 24 GA: Here Are 5 Specialized Capabilities

IBM announces the general availability date for Bob's Premium Package for i, which tailors the AI-driven development tool for IBM i users

IBM Bob Premium Package for i Gets June 24 GA: Here Are 5 Specialized Capabilities

Steve Will and Tim Rowe of IBM i explain how the IBM Bob Premium Package for i infuses the AI-driven development environment with ‘the IBM i special sauce’

IBM i shops will have access to a specialized edition of IBM Bob, the new AI-driven integrated development environment, on June 24, according to announcements from IBM.

Bob,released as a platform-agnostic tool in March, is being positioned by IBM as an “AI software development lifecycle partner” that helps developers understand, modernize, refactor and generate code. The specialized version, IBM Bob Premium Package for i, extends those capabilities, infusing the development assistant with what IBM i CTO Steve Will has termed “the IBM i special sauce.”

An announcement blog from Brandon Pederson, IBM i and Power product manager, summed up the new Bob package’s capabilities: “The IBM Bob Premium Package for i is designed to help development teams modernize applications with greater speed, confidence, and consistency while preserving the business-critical logic that powers their organizations.” 

Here are five ways the IBM i team is aiming to fulfill that promise with the IBM Bob Premium Package for i. 

1) Native IBM i Connectivity

Standard Bob can’t reach directly into the native IBM i file system. The premium package alleviates this problem by automating that connection, Will says. 

“So if you want to work with the source code that’s in your source members on IBM i, Premium Package will be the glue that connects base Bob to that so that you don’t have to move your source code outside of that place where you’ve always developed it and then move it back,” he explains.

2) IBM i Developer Mode

Standard Bob hasseveral preconfigured modes that can be selected based on the task at hand—Code, Ask, Plan, Advanced and Orchestrator. “A mode is basically like a persona. It helps Bob understand, this is the activity that we’re going to be doing,” Tim Rowe, IBM i business architect, explained during his keynote at POWERUp 2026 in May. 

The IBM i team developed another mode for the premium edition: IBM i Developer Mode, a “persona” specially configured for IBM i development. That means a focus on native IBM i languages including RPG, CL, SQL/DB2 for i, COBOL and DDS. This way, Rowe explained, “the intricacies, the uniquenesses of our platform are taken into account.”

3) Optimized Skills and Agentic Workflows

A core component of the Premium Package is its collection of skills and workflows curated for IBM i. These provide Bob with the context, clarity and specialized guidance to complete tasks correctly, Rowe explained. 

“How do you do it? What’s the best way? What are the ‘gotchas’ that Bob needs to be aware of? And those are the things that we are building into these different use cases. We’ve got 40 or so different skills that we’ve created,” Rowe said.

These IBM i-tailored skills and workflows are specifically designed for use cases such as:

• Converting fixed-format RPG to free-format RPG
• Replacing record-level access with SQL 
• Generating RPG/CL/DDS code
• Creating technical documentation from source code
• Generating RPG unit tests to support modernization and code validation
• Refactoring monolithic programs into modular components 

4) Curated RAG Documentation

To bolster Bob’s ability to draw on knowledge that exists outside of the large language models (LLMs) powering it, the IBM i team created a “curated list of IBM i-centric documentation” to support retrieval augmented generation (RAG), Rowe said. This documentation dates all the way back to the 1980s and the days of IBM System/36, one of the predecessors to the AS/400 and IBM i. 

“There’s documentation out there from the System/36 days that still is relevant if I’m going to convert from 36 RPG to modern RPG, because, for example, Bob needs to know what the heck a cycle is,” Rowe said, referring to RPG’s built-in processing loop, whichfell out of use in the 1990s with the advent of modern RPG. “It’s not one of those things that you pedal to transport yourself. It’s something completely different that nobody understands.”

The Premium Edition’s curated documentation also includes information that was too new to be included in Bob’s training data, such as technical SQL details, Rowe noted.

5) Optimized Prompting

IBM Bob users are billed in Bobcoins, valued at $.50 USD apiece. Efficient use of those Bobcoins will require efficient prompting. With that in mind, the Premium Package features specialized prompts to help users get the most out of the tool. 

“Bob does a pretty decent job of explaining RPG, etc., but we have figured out how to create those prompts with specialized prompting so that you will get the most accuracy for the least amount of Bobcoin resource,” Will says. 

The specialized prompting was the result of the IBM i team’s own journey of discovery, and users of the IBM Bob Premium Package for i can expect to see more of those learnings make it into the tool. 

“We are learning ahead of people,” Will says, “so they’ll be able to take advantage of what we’ve learned, and then over time we will learn more, and that’ll be part of the Premium Package.” 

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