COMMON Dances To A Fresh New Tune In New Orleans
May 4, 2026 Alex Woodie
This wasn’t the first COMMON conference held in New Orleans, but it may have been the best, considering where the IBM i platform is at this particular time and what happened down on the bayou last week.
For starters, the four-day event attracted about 1,300 attendees, which is a solid increase from the 1,200 that attended last year’s conference in Anaheim, California. But here’s the kicker: About one-third of the COMMON POWERUp 2026 attendees were attending the conference for the first time. In other words, around 400 folks decided that IBM i education and community were important enough for them to travel across the country and spend four days in the heat and humidity of southern Louisiana.
The band for Opening Session set the tone for the entire conference.
Of course, New Orleans is a fun town. Bourbon Street and the French Quarter are just steps outside of the Marriott Hotel where IBM i types held up for a week. For the “work hard, play harder” types, there’s hardly a better place in the country to be. But that doesn’t take away from the fact that the IBM i community is in the midst of a youth movement, and that was quite evident last week at POWERUp 2026.
Some of the attendees weren’t even drinking age. The COMMON Education Foundation brought 38 students from nine colleges to attend the conference, which is beginning to get a healthy youthful glow after many years of gray. The New to i (N2i) group, which was spearheaded by Marina Schwenk and her colleagues a few years ago, continues to grow its rolls and attract people to the platform, including younger folks as well as “people of age.” In addition to “young pups” attending POWERUp sessions, the conference brought in some literal puppies to cuddle with, as part of its “Pups & Cups” program.
You might think that the younger students were at POWERUp to learn from their IBM i elders, said Pete Massiello, who heads up the COMMON Education Foundation. But you might be mistaken.
“I think you’re here to learn from these students,” Massiello said during the POWERUp 2026 Opening Session on April 27. “I learned so much last night in 20 minutes talking to these young professionals that I was just amazed at what they knew. The velocity that they acquire information, what they do, what they talk about – they don’t just talk about AI. They breathe AI.”
Who doesn’t love cuddly puppies?
The winners of the iMPACT Challenge were honored at POWERUp 2026. Gavin Bowers of the Pennsylvania College of Technology and Kyle Schuller of the University of Pennsylvania were declared winners of the challenge, which required students to pull data off an IBM i and then use machine learning techniques to analyze the data in a retail environment. The event, which was hosted by the IBM Power Skills Academy, was designed to increase awareness and enthusiasm for using IBM i with different technologies. “Some of the students never even got on an IBM i before this competition,” Massiello said.
It was kind of hard to miss AI at the conference. As Massiello referenced, it seemed to be in the air. As we mentioned in our COMMON preview story two weeks ago, there were about 50 sessions on AI at POWERUp 2026. Some of these sessions were about Bob, the new coding co-pilot that IBM started selling back in March, but there were many more sessions on other AI topics.
Some of the most well-attended POWERUp sessions on AI were given by the young IBM engineers that are starting to make their mark on the platform. Folks like Adam Shedivy, Sanjula Ganapeola, Ashwin Srinivas, and Liam Allan led discussions on the latest innovation, ranging from the capabilities of IBM Bob to the possibilities of the new MCP server that is still technically in preview, although some IBM i shops apparently are using it in production.
COMMON reported about 1,300 attendees at the four-day event.
The huge potential for using AI technologies with IBM i was the focus of the opening session keynote, which was delivered by Hillery Hunter, the new IBM general manager for Power Systems. Hunter, who also is an IBM Fellow and the chief technology officer for the Infrastructure group, came up through IBM Research and has serious hardware chops, having worked on the “Summit” supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and its companion “Sierra” supercomputer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. (Summit was the fastest supercomputer in the world when it debuted back in the summer of 2018.) Hunter made a solid impression to the IBM i base in her very first COMMON conference, and it appears the affection was mutual.
“I’ve been in this role as general manager of IBM Power for about six months and don’t tell the other communities, but my IBM i meetings have been my favorite,” Hunter said. “The passion and enthusiasm for what happens on Power Systems is the motivation that drives each of us to engage with technology, develop better technology for you.”
The day-to-day realities of IBM i users are far removed from the world of supercomputers and training AI models with trillions of parameters. An IBM i shop is much more concerned about ensuring the month’s end payroll processing goes without a hitch than worrying about how to checkpoint a training session for the latest large language model. But Hunter sees a fruitful intersection of the quintessential business machine with the rapidly evolving capabilities of artificial intelligence.
Hillery Hunter, IBM GM of Power, IBM Fellow, CTO of Infrastructure.
“It may not be evident to you, but there’s an incredibly unique opportunity to move at the fastest pace in the industry,” Hunter said. “And I truly believe that with IBM i, there are very few other systems that are end-to-end integrated. And that’s what we’re going to talk about: What do you get and how quickly can you move in AI if you’re working on an end-to-end integrated system, not an environment where all the pieces may exist but you have to take your own decisions to build together a stack, but an environment where all the pieces are effectively predefined, pre-packaged, and ready to go?”
Hunter made some very salient points about how quickly IBM i shops will be able to adopt AI and get real business benefits from it, if they’re willing to make the move. She rightly pointed out that organizations running data lakes on open systems struggle with basic data management and data governance tasks. After deconstructing the database to gain scalability across distributed systems, the backers of the data lake concept realized they lost the ability to trust their data, so they had to create additional layers to support transactions on data.
But these assurances and controls are essentially baked into the IBM i platform, thanks to its integrated Db2 for i database. When you add up the platform’s other qualities – the security, the reliability, the decades of proven performance running the most demanding applications, not to mention the new matrix-math accelerators that IBM built into Power11 and the new Spyre accelerators that are just waiting to dig into some AI inference workloads – the equation looks quite promising from Hunter’s seat.
“All of these considerations – the data access and governance control, the data quality and the availability of underlying system – are the things that the CIO community is struggling with,” Hunter said. “And that’s why I made the bold assertion that the most AI ready foundation is in your hands. Because you have got that critical data. It’s well-governed, it’s well controlled. And so the question is, what are you going to do with it?”
As Massiello and others previously pointed out, the younger crowd is already moving ahead quickly with AI. Nobody is quite sure where it’s going to lead, but if the POWERUp 2026 conference in New Orleans last week is any indication, AI very well could be the movement that breathes some youthful vigor back into the machine and the community behind it.
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