Are you overlooking the most powerful force in AI transformation?

Article 24-Jun-2025 Read time: 1 min

Artificial intelligence is reshaping every industry. But unlocking its full potential is rarely simple. As organizations push to modernize, innovate and stay competitive, they face a web of challenges: outdated infrastructure, siloed data, regulatory complexity, cybersecurity risks and a rapidly evolving technology landscape. These obstacles can stall progress and obscure the path forward.

In this environment, collaboration is no longer optional — it’s essential. For Kyndryl, strategic alliances bring the expertise, scale and agility needed to navigate complexity and accelerate outcomes. By working together, organizations can move forward with greater clarity and confidence. These partnerships enable smarter decision-making, faster innovation and more resilient operations, ultimately unlocking the full potential of AI with lasting impact.

Here, Giovanni Carraro, Senior Vice President of Global Strategic Alliances at Kyndryl, reveals how partnerships are shaping the future of AI transformation.

Why are alliances essential in delivering AI solutions today?

The reality is that no single company has everything it takes to deliver comprehensive AI solutions. Enterprise IT is incredibly complex, especially when mission-critical systems are involved. That’s why we’ve built a carefully curated ecosystem of partners. These alliances allow us to deliver integrated solutions that help our customers achieve their goals and solve core business problems. A great example is our recent collaboration with Databricks, which now works alongside our hyperscaler partners to help customers implement, run and manage AI at scale.

What do customers gain from these strategic alliances?

They gain access to specialized expertise across domains like data science, cloud infrastructure, security and compliance. Our partnerships with AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft and other leading providers help customers benefit from the latest innovations and best practices. These alliances also help customers modernize legacy systems with minimal disruption. Many enterprises still rely on decades-old infrastructure, and our hybrid cloud solutions help bridge the gap between on-premises and cloud environments while maintaining business continuity. Most importantly, alliances help accelerate time to value. We enable faster deployment and scaling of AI workloads by integrating tools like Azure Arc, AWS hybrid management or Google Cloud’s Gemini AI model.

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The future of AI isn’t about isolated solutions — it’s about ecosystems. Alliances are evolving from simple partnerships into multilateral networks where value is created across cloud providers, hardware and software vendors, integrators and customers.

Giovanni Carraro

Senior Vice President of Global Strategic Alliances

What are the biggest challenges organizations face when adopting AI?

Every organization is talking about AI and exploring how to move forward, but legacy systems often slow them down. That’s where Kyndryl comes in. We have decades of experience with our customers’ data and legacy systems (or mission-critical workloads). In partnership with our alliances, we bring together all the puzzle pieces to help customers overcome these barriers by providing the tools, such as insights into the data required to train models and the expertise needed to modernize and innovate simultaneously. We’re also fueling joint innovation through collaborative AI labs and hubs, working together to create new AI-powered solutions for customers.

How do alliances help unlock the full potential of AI?

The future of AI isn’t about isolated solutions — it’s about ecosystems. Alliances are evolving from simple partnerships into multilateral networks where value is created across cloud providers, hardware and software vendors, integrators and customers. These ecosystems foster knowledge sharing, which is critical for AI innovation. They also ensure a consistent customer experience across infrastructure, applications and support. And because AI is evolving rapidly, alliances allow us to adapt and scale as customer needs change.

How is this approach making an impact?

Our expanded alliance with Microsoft is a great example. By integrating Kyndryl Distributed Cloud services with Azure’s hybrid tools, we’re helping customers manage complex IT environments, accelerate cloud migration and unlock new AI-driven business models. This approach has already led to a 25% annual revenue increase from hyperscaler partnerships, and we expect even more growth as generative AI adoption accelerates.

Another example of driving innovation with and through our alliances is how we are tapping into AWS Transform’s agentic AI capabilities to enable and accelerate the integration of mainframe applications and data with the AWS Cloud.

And our partners are recognizing us for our collaboration, momentum and impact on customers. For instance, HPE named Kyndryl Systems Integrator Momentum Partner of the Year 2025, Broadcom appointed us VMware Cloud Service Provider (VCSP) Americas Partner of the Year and Google Cloud designated us Global Partner of the Year Award for Infrastructure Modernization.

Tell us about the long-term vision for alliances at Kyndryl?

No company can undertake the journey to AI-powered transformation alone. It is a collective effort, and alliances are the engine that drives it. At Kyndryl, we’re committed to deepening and prioritizing our alliance ecosystem because we know that together, we can help customers unlock AI’s full promise and build a smarter, more agile future.