Tech leaders and experts have been vocal about their predictions that AI agents will be the next big thing. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently said there could be more AI agents in the world than humans. Similarly, Google is also going big on agents with their senior developers dropping subtle hints on how AI assistants and agents will be a game-changer.
A tech player who is already going big on this is Kyndryl.
Spinning off from IBM in 2021, Kyndryl, the world’s largest IT infrastructure services provider serving various sectors including cloud, security, network, enterprise, and applications, has been heavily investing in AI too.
“We have a lot of customers and our customers are across all verticals. They are seeking ways to ingest AI into their environments and then elicit advantage out of it,” said Sreekrishnan Venkateswaran, CTO of Kyndryl India in an exclusive interaction with AIM. He also noted that the majority of companies are using GenAI in production, not just for prototyping.
Speaking about the future of AI applications, Venkateswaran brought emphasis on how agentic AI will bring a significant shift in how things work.
“We often use Agentic AI when mixed problem-solving approaches are required. For example, in customer engagement, the AI system directs each query to the most suitable agent based on its content. One agent might perform retrieval-augmented generation from an internal corpus, while another accesses real-time data through external APIs,” said Venkatesan.
The CTO explained that their collaborative workflow, where multiple agents tackle different aspects of a problem based on the query, is a prime example of Agentic AI. He emphasised that they leverage these Agentic AI patterns to effectively address several practical challenges faced by their customers.
Agentic AI is the Future
Venkateswaran explains Agentic AI as a concept that combines language models, custom code, data, and APIs to create intelligent workflows capable of solving business problems. He highlighted the significance of this development, noting AI and data to be particularly valuable in India due to its abundant data and skilled AI professionals. “We believe this area is going to grow and is an important aspect for us,” he stated.
Agentic AI represents a shift towards more autonomous decision-making systems. An “agent” in this context is a piece of code capable of perceiving its environment—through sight, sound, or text—and making decisions based on that input.
This capability can range from simple tasks, like generating creative code and sharing it via WhatsApp, to complex functions such as managing supply chains or enhancing customer engagement systems.
“An agent takes the initiative and makes decisions to solve problems autonomously,” said Venkateswaran.
Venkatesan’s illustrious career of over 28 years in technology, spending 25 years at IBM before moving to Kyndryl, stresses the importance of building broad technical skills and hands-on coding, cautioning against over-specialisation. As he puts it, “Leadership, yes, but you also need to bring in a C-level skill,” underscoring the need for both leadership and technical expertise.
He also teaches computer science at BITS Pilani, emphasising that foundational skills like maths and algorithms remain crucial despite the industry’s evolving landscape.
Speaking about the progress in AI systems Venkateswaran said that neural networks required large datasets to learn and perform complex tasks. However, with foundational models like GPT, which are pre-trained, this requirement has been significantly reduced.
“The human advantage in learning from smaller datasets is no longer valid,” the CTO observed.
Nuanced AI Support
Speaking about Kyndryl’s application across domains, Venkateswaran highlights how AI has helped transform customer engagement in industries such as retail, travel and transportation, and believes AI is helping with nuanced approaches.
“Customer engagement is much more than a Q&A with a chatbot.” He believes that to truly replicate or enhance live interactions, genAI must be adept at “understanding the sentiment associated with the text or sarcasm” and responding appropriately in the detected language.
Similarly, Kyndryl has also found strong use-cases in education, healthcare, and finance which is one of Kyndryl’s biggest focuses. “All of them [customers] ask for ways to use this new tech to solve fraud detection, anomaly detection, suspicious transactions, and so on,” said Venkateswaran.
He also explains how adoption of generative AI in edutech surged post-COVID, with AI automating the evaluation of descriptive exam answers and creating tailored questions. In healthcare, AI is improving patient-provider connections by interpreting symptoms more effectively than traditional keyword searches.
“So any project where we have AI and data, it is usually a modern application project. And if you have Gen AI, it is like a modern application project, up on steroids. So it is not really, there is no real bifurcation between an AI app and a modern app,” said Venkateswaran.
Kyndryl has partnered with top players including Google Cloud for developing responsible generative AI solutions and accelerating adoption by customers. “We have partnerships based on what we need from each of those partners, and then it goes back to what we can offer them with customers,” said Venkateswaran.
Kydryl has been rapidly expanding its operations in India expanding its base in Bengaluru. The company opened its third office in Bengaluru in April. Last month, Kyndryl launched a security operations centre (SOC) in the city for providing comprehensive support and advanced protection for cyberthreats leveraging AI.
