Kyndryl, the world’s largest IT infrastructure services provider, has unveiled new artificial intelligence (AI) and generative AI-based consulting and managed delivery services to assist organizations in leveraging their mainframe applications and data assets as part of their hybrid cloud transformations. This move underscores Kyndryl’s commitment to advancing AI adoption by equipping over 5,000 mainframe professionals with new AI skills.
This educational initiative builds on the company’s extensive certifications in mainframe and cloud technologies, positioning its professionals to accelerate the development and deployment of AI-enabled solutions in hybrid cloud environments.
Despite its 60-year history, the mainframe remains a vital IT foundation for numerous organizations globally. According to Kyndryl’s research, 90% of organizations still consider the mainframe essential to their business operations, with 95% integrating it within a hybrid cloud environment. However, the adoption of AI and generative AI technologies often poses a challenge due to a lack of necessary skills and expertise.
To address this, Kyndryl is leveraging AI and generative AI tools, along with insights from its AI-infused Kyndryl Bridge open integration platform. These expanded AI capabilities are supported by Kyndryl Consult and complement the company’s existing AI and data advisory services, which include assessments, innovation workshops, and proofs of concept. Additionally, Kyndryl continues to collaborate with hyperscalers and other partners to help customers achieve their AI objectives, thereby driving critical business outcomes.
Petra Goude, Global Practice Leader for Core Enterprise & zCloud at Kyndryl, highlighted the company’s strategic approach: “Kyndryl is taking a bold next step to enable and accelerate our customers’ mainframe modernization journey by unlocking their applications and data through the deployment of AI and generative AI. Our innovative approach will help customers reduce IT transformation efforts and costs, enhance agility and resiliency, mitigate skills challenges, and drive better outcomes by optimizing their mainframe estates to thrive in hybrid environments.”
Mary Johnston Turner, IDC Research Vice President for the Future of Digital Infrastructure, emphasized the importance of integrating mainframe data into enterprise AI initiatives. “The success of AI depends heavily on an organization’s ability to fully leverage all enterprise information assets regardless of data format or application platform. Mission-critical information created and managed by mainframes needs to be fully integrated into enterprise generative AI and other data-intensive use cases to fully enable data-driven decision making and digital innovation,” she explained. “Kyndryl’s commitment to mainframe modernization for generative AI and other AI use cases targets this set of important enterprise infrastructure requirements.”
Kyndryl’s comprehensive services are designed to optimize mainframe workloads using AI and generative AI across various scenarios. For moving workloads to the cloud, Kyndryl offers generative AI-produced and enhanced application documentation, automated conversion of mainframe application code to modern languages, and AI-based insights into business logic and data relationships.
This enables customers to quickly address new business opportunities and integrate mainframe applications with cloud environments securely. Additionally, AI-infused, dynamic workload placement helps improve asset financial usage.
In modernizing workloads on the mainframe, Kyndryl provides guidance on application code modernization to avoid production issues and integrates real-time AI solutions into mainframe applications for enhanced business insights.
The company also ensures quantum-safe data encryption to meet security and regulatory compliance requirements. For optimizing application developer agility, Kyndryl implements DevSecOps tools and processes, offering AI-based recommendations for real-time programming insights and faster time-to-market. These tools also enable data scientists to build new AI models and integrate these tools with existing DevSecOps processes.
Through these expanded AI services and skills, Kyndryl is poised to lead mainframe modernization efforts, empowering organizations to harness the potential of AI and generative AI in their hybrid cloud environments.
