Alphabet (Google) vs IBM

Alphabet (Google) — Foundation Models · Public · $4.2T mkt cap · 4 of 4 figures sourced  |  IBM — Application · Public · $216.6B mkt cap · 4 of 4 figures sourced

Relationship

IBM FY2024 10-K, Software segment (includes watsonx/Watson Assistant).

17 of 30 capabilitiesShared product typeSmaller scaleNamed in filingDraft and edit written contentServe a model in production

17 of 30 capabilities — Shares agent orchestration, agentic coding, code generation and 14 more.

Ludbee capability tags · from the product records

Shared product type — Both ship API service, agent platform, application and 2 more.

Ludbee product records

Smaller scale — IBM: $216.6B market cap, against Alphabet (Google)'s $4.2T market cap.

Ludbee scale figures · valuation, market cap or revenue estimate

Named in filing — “The principal competitors in this segment include: Alphabet (Google), Amazon, BMC, Broadcom, Informatica, Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce, SAP and Splunk.”

sec.gov · checked 2026-09-18

Draft and edit written content — Rivals on this job — Produce and revise written material — copy, documents, reports — with AI doing the drafting.

Ludbee needs vocabulary · the scope on the sourced edge

Serve a model in production — Rivals on this job — Run a trained model behind an API at scale — hosted endpoints, GPU capacity, routing, and the cost and latency trade that comes with them.

Ludbee needs vocabulary · the scope on the sourced edge

Aligned comparison

FieldAlphabet (Google)IBM
Market cap$4.2T$216.6B IBM has 19× smaller
Employees190,820264,300 IBM has 39% more
Founded19981911 87 yrs earlier
StatusPublicPublic match
CategoryFoundation ModelsApplication
Stack layerAI agent, API service, Agent platform, Application, Developer tool, Hardware, Model API, PlatformAPI service, Agent platform, Application, Data service, Developer tool, Platform
HeadquartersMountain View, USAArmonk, USA

Capability overlap

Shared · 17

Agent orchestrationAgentic codingCode generationCode reviewCode searchCustomer supportData analysisDocument extractionEvaluation and observabilityModel inferenceModel trainingKnowledge retrievalSpeech to textText generationText to speechVoice agentWorkflow automation

Not verified for IBM · 13

Accelerator siliconAI compute hardwareAvatar videoGPU cloudImage generationMusic generationPresentation generationSummarizationTranslationVideo analyticsVideo editingVideo generationSearch answers

Recorded for Alphabet (Google). IBM’s product records say nothing either way — a missing record is not a missing capability.

Not verified for Alphabet (Google) · 4

Data securityGuardrails and safetyThreat detection and responseVector search

Recorded for IBM. Alphabet (Google)’s product records say nothing either way — a missing record is not a missing capability.

Products, side by side

Hand-checked pairing

Alphabet (Google)

Application

AI Mode in Google SearchApplication

A named tab in Google Search — "our most powerful AI search, with more advanced reasoning and multimodality" — that answers a query conversationally over web sources rather than with a link list.

DreambeansApplication

Standalone mobile app (iOS/Android) delivering personalized, AI-illustrated daily stories synthesized from a user's connected Google services (Gemini, Gmail, Calendar, Photos, YouTube, Search).

GeminiApplication

Google's assistant for chat, research, image generation and work across Google apps.

Gemini NotebookApplication

A source-grounded research tool that summarizes, answers questions from and generates audio overviews of documents a user uploads.

Google FlowApplication

AI filmmaking application for creating cinematic clips and scenes, built on Veo (video), Imagen (image) and Gemini (prompting) — the application layer above the Veo model already recorded in models.json.

Google Flow MusicApplication

Agentic music co-producer, formerly ProducerAI and graduated from Google Labs, that chats with you about ideas, generates and edits songs, learns your style, and offers free unlimited downloads.

Google VidsApplication

An AI-assisted video creation and editing application bundled with Google Workspace that generates video from text prompts, slides or screen recordings.

Literature InsightsApplication

A Google Labs science tool (built with Gemini Notebook) that runs a comprehensive literature search, structures results in a data table and produces reports, slide decks and infographics.

MixboardApplication

AI-powered concepting board for exploring, expanding and refining visual/creative ideas.

Play with PuttyApplication

Google Labs experiment; explicitly waitlisted at evaluation time.

API service

Agent SearchAPI service

Enterprise search and retrieval service on the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform (formerly Vertex AI Search) that indexes an organisation's websites, documents and structured data and serves search, answers and recommendations to applications and agents.

Cloud Speech-to-TextAPI service

A managed Google Cloud API that transcribes audio to text, supporting streaming and batch recognition across 85+ languages.

Cloud Text-to-SpeechAPI service

A managed Google Cloud API that synthesizes natural-sounding speech from text across 380+ voices and 75+ languages.

Cloud TranslationAPI service

A managed Google Cloud API that translates text and documents across more than 100 language pairs using neural machine translation, custom models or a translation-specialized LLM.

Cloud Vision APIAPI service

A managed Google Cloud API for image and document analysis, including object, face and landmark detection, OCR text extraction, and explicit-content tagging.

Document AIAPI service

A pay-per-page API for extracting, classifying and summarizing structured data and text from documents such as invoices, forms and IDs.

Google Cloud Natural Language APIAPI service

ML-based text understanding: sentiment analysis, entity recognition, syntax analysis and content classification.

Google Cloud Video Intelligence APIAPI service

Video AI service that analyzes video content for object/label/shot detection and other video-intelligence tasks.

Agent platform

Customer Experience Agent StudioAgent platform

Studio inside Gemini Enterprise for Customer Experience for building, testing and deploying customer-facing AI agents across voice and chat channels.

Gemini EnterpriseAgent platform

A seat-licensed enterprise application for discovering, building and running AI agents across an organization's business tools, formerly branded Agentspace.

Developer tool

Colab EnterpriseDeveloper tool

Enterprise-grade notebook environment (IAM-managed access, Google Cloud security/network, official support) explicitly distinguished on its own page from the free Colaboratory product.

Gemini Code AssistDeveloper tool

An AI coding assistant integrated into IDEs, GitHub pull requests and a CLI, sold in free, Standard and Enterprise tiers.

Google AI StudioDeveloper tool

A free web tool for prototyping prompts and testing Gemini models before moving to the Gemini API for production use.

Google AntigravityDeveloper tool

Agentic software-development platform managing autonomous coding agents across an IDE, a graphical command center and a terminal-first CLI surface.

Vertex AI WorkbenchDeveloper tool

Managed JupyterLab notebook instances on Google Cloud, prepackaged with deep-learning frameworks and integrated with BigQuery, Cloud Storage and scheduling, for developing and training models end to end.

Platform

BigQuery MLPlatform

Lets analysts create, train and run machine-learning and generative-AI models inside BigQuery with GoogleSQL — from trained regression and forecasting models to remote calls on Gemini and Cloud AI APIs — without moving the data out.

Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform (formerly Vertex AI)Platform

Google Cloud's platform for training, tuning, serving and evaluating models and agents.

Gemini Enterprise for Customer ExperiencePlatform

Google Cloud's customer-experience suite — Customer Experience Agent Studio, Agent Assist, Customer Experience Insights and Contact Center as a Service — for building AI agents and assisting human agents across contact-centre channels.

IBM

Application

IBM Guardium AI SecurityApplication

Protects enterprise data across AI agents, applications and endpoints against agentic-AI, regulatory and post-quantum risks.

IBM InstanaApplication

Full-stack application and infrastructure observability powered by agentic AI, including automatic discovery/mapping of GenAI workflows and AI-driven Smart Alerts to reduce alert fatigue.

IBM Robotic Process AutomationApplication

AI-driven robotic process automation for building intelligent bots that automate business processes, with AI-embedded resilience built into the RPA runtime.

IBM SPSS ModelerApplication

Visual data-science and machine-learning platform for building predictive models, with advanced algorithms, model deployment and open-source framework integration.

IBM Watson DiscoveryApplication

Document intelligence platform using OCR, NLP enrichments (entity/sentiment/emotion/category extraction) and LLM integration to automate information discovery from enterprise documents.

API service

IBM Watson Natural Language UnderstandingAPI service

Deep-learning text analytics service extracting entities, sentiment, emotion, concepts, semantic roles and custom classifications from unstructured text.

IBM Watson Speech to TextAPI service

A speech recognition API that converts audio into real-time or batch text for transcription, captioning and voice-analytics use cases.

IBM Watson Text to SpeechAPI service

A text-to-speech API that converts text into multilingual synthesized speech using neural voices.

Agent platform

IBM Watson AssistantAgent platform

A conversational AI platform for building customer-support chatbots and virtual assistants deployed across voice and digital channels.

IBM watsonx OrchestrateAgent platform

Platform for building and running AI agents that call enterprise applications on a user's behalf.

Developer tool

IBM BobDeveloper tool

An AI coding agent that automates planning, code generation, review and verification across the software development lifecycle, including IBM Z mainframe modernization workflows.

IBM watsonx Code Assistant for ZDeveloper tool

A generative AI assistant for IBM Z mainframe application discovery, code generation, refactoring and modernization.

Platform

IBM ConcertPlatform

An agentic AI IT-operations platform that unifies observability, optimization and automated remediation across applications, infrastructure and networks.

IBM watsonx.aiPlatform

Studio for building, tuning and deploying model-based applications on IBM and third-party foundation models.

IBM watsonx.governancePlatform

A governance platform providing real-time visibility, policy enforcement and accountability tracking for AI models and agents across the AI lifecycle.

No counterpart

Alphabet (Google) sells these in a stack layer with no product recorded for IBM yet — nothing on the other side to compare them against.

AI agent

Computational DiscoveryAI agent

An agentic research engine (built with AlphaEvolve and ERA) that generates and scores code variations against the user's optimisation metrics to discover models and algorithms.

Hypothesis GenerationAI agent

A multi-agent research tool (built with Co-Scientist) that simulates the scientific method to identify knowledge gaps and propose testable research plans.

JulesAI agent

An autonomous coding agent that clones a GitHub repository, plans and writes code changes in a cloud VM and opens a pull request for review.

Model API

Gemini APIModel API

A developer API, distinct from the consumer Gemini app, for integrating Gemini and Gemma models into applications and billed per token.

Hardware

Google Cloud TPUHardware

Google's custom AI accelerator chips, rented by the chip-hour on Google Cloud for training and serving machine learning models.

IBM sells these in a stack layer with no product recorded for Alphabet (Google) yet — nothing on the other side to compare them against.

Data service

IBM watsonx.dataData service

An open hybrid data lakehouse including a built-in Milvus vector database that unifies data access and automates governance for AI and analytics workloads.