Kyndryl Unveils GenAI-Powered Services Orchestration

‘A lot of customers use things like Microsoft Power Platform for IT optimization, but we're actually moving beyond that to really streamline business processes with a focus on employee experience and tying it back to them being able to do their jobs more effectively. And that allows us to infuse things like GenAI into some of those processes to help streamline the business processes the employees are doing,’ says Kyndryl Distinguished Engineer Dennis Perpetua.

Global IT infrastructure services provider Kyndryl this week unveiled the work it has done to develop a generative AI-powered orchestration technology aimed at helping it improve how it provides services to its customers as well as help customers provide their own services.

That technology, Kyndryl Workflow Orchestration services, is a way to put no-code and low-code platforms to use for customers to extract more business value than IT value, said Dennis Perpetua, distinguished engineer and global digital workplace services chief technology officer and experience officer for the New York-based solution provider.

“So typically, what we see is a lot of customers use things like Microsoft Power Platform for IT optimization, but we're actually moving beyond that to really streamline business processes with a focus on employee experience and tying it back to them being able to do their jobs more effectively,” Perpetua told CRN. “And that allows us to infuse things like GenAI into some of those processes to help streamline the business processes the employees are doing.”

Kyndryl Workflow Orchestration services is an initiative that already has a track record within Kyndryl, Perpetua said.

“We started to do this ourselves,” he said. “We started to use it to optimize our own internal processes. And then we started to use it to modernize ourselves when we became an independent company [after being part of IBM]. So lots of legacy Lotus Notes and databases all got moved over to new modern platforms. We were able to say, ‘Hey, listen, we have this experience doing this for ourselves, both in optimization and then modernization. And then we can do this for customers. And that's really what we've been focused on the last couple of months.”

Before starting with GenAI, Kyndryl has had general AI infused in its processes starting with things like IBM Watson and Microsoft LUIS cognitive services, Perpetua said.

“With general AI, we already had the plumbing in place to be able to actually introduce OpenAI from Azure,” he said. “So we're able to now infuse that into the things that we're doing.”

Kyndryl and its customers are already using Kyndryl Workflow Orchestration services for several use cases, Perpetua said. For instance, the company can quickly provision handheld devices that a contractor may just need for one day, provisioning all the required applications in three minutes just by scanning a barcode or QR code, he said.

In another example, Kyndryl created an application for a construction company to allow a supervisor use their mobile phone to do crane inspections. In another case, the technology is helping businesses with their employee onboarding, he said.

“Generative AI has simplified something that was fairly arduous with traditional AI, extracting entities or information, and now actually pulls that information out into form,” he said. So prior to generative AI, you could say, ‘A new employee is onboarding next week. His name is Dennis Perpetua. He lives in Upstate New York, and he needs a red badge.’ Traditionally, that would have been really difficult. With generative AI, that entity extraction is really easy. It does it really well. It allows us to actually have a much more natural interface to execute the tasks.”

Kyndryl has also used Kyndryl Workflow Orchestration services to help a medical supply company automate it onboarding process, which Perpetua said has yielded several hundreds of thousands of dollars in savings.

The other more important piece is it allows businesses to actually use it as part of their decision making, Perpetua said.

“It allows us to actually pull data in the process flow and do some decision making with it,” he said. “We hook into customers’ knowledge sources so that we're actually also able to use generative AI against that as well for a variety of use cases.”

Unlike robotic process automation, GenAI allows the development of modern applications that can dynamically process information, Perpetua said.

“If you look at the use case of a crane inspector, generative AI can dynamically say that this task failed,” he said. “Maybe the bolts were rusty, or the bolts were sheared. It could actually use generative AI to query the knowledge base articles and say, ‘Alright, this is what you do about it.’ These are things that can be constantly updated with the latest and greatest information.”

Going forward, Kyndryl is looking to scale its Kyndryl Workflow Orchestration services, Perpetua said.

“One of the things that we've done is to take all of the work that we've done so far leading up to this both for ourselves and for customers, and turn those into a library of reusable assets,” he said. “We've created within the last couple of months a library of 50 reusable assets. Some of those have generative AI embedded in them, some are more traditional task-oriented automations. But the idea here is that we can then start to compose these into future use cases. My goal is, I'd like to have an ‘encyclopedia bookshelf’ of all of the modules so that we could go in very rapidly with customers and create new workflows for them that provide value very quickly.”