Jim Laredo

Jim A. Laredo is an IBM Distinguished Engineer in the AI Assistants for Business Automation Group at IBM Research, Yorktown Heights, New York. He leads efforts to infuse AI into automation and integration, enabling business users to streamline their work using AI Agents, in collaboration with IBM watsonx Orchestrate. Jim’s work includes advancing conversational API composition through Large Language Models (LLMs) and generative sequencing of API flows, creating tools that empower builders and enhance automation.

Jim collaborates with IBM’s Integration Business Unit to drive natural language-driven integration flow generation, data mapping, and the cloud enablement of services for faster feedback and adoption. Other initiatives also include randomly biased API test generation and automating the creation of Open API specifications using generative AI technologies.

Jim’s contributions extend to Software Engineering, particularly in applying AI to Security Vulnerability detection applying signal awareness into source code modeling and reducing false positives in static analysis.

Jim has over three decades of experience in distributed systems, cloud computing, and Software as a Service (SaaS). His extensive customer-facing experience includes delivering business process management (BPM) and enterprise integration solutions for clients across industries such as Financial Services, Telecommunications, Insurance, and Manufacturing. He also was an architect in the first working SaaS platform in IBM and Invoice 2 Cash Service, the largest (at the time) SaaS application following a Service Oriented Architecture.

He is well-known for his pioneering work in the API economy, delivering enterprise grade API Management for IBM, API Consumption and ecosystem development stemming from his leadership in the 2013 IBM Global Technology Outlook, which introduced the concept of the API Economy to the enterprise. His work also includes approaches to coexistence between REST and GraphQL, as a new API model and the co-design of a novel approach for GraphQL API Management to provide rate management through query analysis. He co-authored a Best Paper at FSE 2020 on this topic.

Drawing on skills from his early work at Transarc, a startup acquired by IBM, Jim has applied his expertise in transaction processing to transactional semantics in microservices architectures. Earlier in his career, Jim also played a key role at Vitria Technology leading their Professional Services in the East Coast. He holds 40 patents and has over 40 publications. Jim earned his undergraduate degree in Computer Science from Universidad Simón Bolívar in Caracas, Venezuela, and a Master of Science in Computer Science from the University of Toronto in Canada.