Q&A: How agentic modernization accelerates AI readiness

Today’s announcement addresses two big challenges in enterprise tech. First, the need to make modernization projects more predictable, less costly and less risky. And second, the need to scale that solution to meet the demand of thousands of enterprises across the globe.

That first challenge is addressed by Kyndryl’s Agentic Modernization services-as-software. This approach codifies decades of mission-critical engineering expertise into pre-built agentic workflows that are orchestrated and scaled like cloud software. Those workflows handle predictable, repeatable heavy lifting, while Kyndryl’s experts focus on each customer’s unique environment and challenges.

The second challenge — how to scale those solutions — is addressed through Kyndryl Bridge, our AI-powered open-integration business platform. Kyndryl Bridge provides the technology foundation for deploying, orchestrating and governing agentic workflows and AI agents across hybrid IT environments.

This isn’t just another vision for how AI can “one day” deliver value. This model has already proven out across real customer engagements in highly regulated industries globally. These agentic workflows support a range of modernization initiatives — infrastructure, application, business transformation — across distributed and mainframe workloads, public and private cloud, edge, software development and IT operations.

The result: greater speed, scale and consistency, with a fraction of the resources traditionally required. This lets us modernize what we operate, and operate what we modernize, all at scale.

In short, Kyndryl’s Agentic Modernization approach gives business leaders confidence that their projects will be predictable, with shorter timelines and minimal disruption to their businesses.

The approach accelerates modernization timelines, since Kyndryl’s Agentic Modernization workflows can be scaled like cloud software. At the same time, we are eliminating tech debt and moving customers to a technology foundation essential for AI readiness.

We can also reduce modernization costs by optimizing model usage and avoiding “experimental” token wastage. We do this by using proven, pre-built AI workflows, and by reducing unnecessary human effort that can be better utilized through these workflows. People remain important, but for higher-value work.

A standard approach also means lower risks, with improved predictability and reliability. It’s part of our continuous modernization approach: agent-generated, expert-supervised, with old and new systems coexisting side by side until proven successful, built into every step.

There’s also portability and no vendor or stack lock-in. Customers can align model, platform, and infrastructure choices to business needs, cost, and enterprise standards, without being locked into a single cloud, model or technology stack.

Kyndryl operates and modernizes some of the world’s most complex and mission-critical technology environments, including highly regulated industries where reliability and resilience are essential. Through Kyndryl Bridge, we have built a deep understanding not only of how technology systems are structured and how they run. This means we know what it takes to modernize and operate them without business disruptions.

To scale our impact, we’ve taken all that engineering and operational expertise and codified it into agentic workflows. Those workflows automate repeatable modernization tasks while maintaining human oversight and governance where it matters most. This allows us to apply proven modernization practices more consistently, at greater scale, and with greater predictability than traditional approaches that depend primarily on scarce specialist resources.

One thing is risk. Large-scale transformation programs can be difficult to predict, difficult to scale and difficult to execute without disrupting the systems the business depends on every day.

Think about the last time you upgraded your phone. The new camera and features are exciting, but what really makes people anxious is the transition: that stretch of time when you’re between devices, hoping the transfer doesn’t drop something important, or that you miss an important call while your new device gets its upgrade.

Now scale that up. A Fortune 500 company modernizing a mission-critical system faces the same fear, just with far higher stakes. The worry isn’t a slow photo transfer: it’s an outage affecting your business at the worst possible moment. These disruptions happen quite a bit. It’s one reason organizations simply put off modernization projects. Having a standard approach to modernization with committed outcomes goes a long way to building confidence among IT and business leaders. That’s what we sought to do: create a replicable blueprint for modernization that scales.

Beyond risk, modernization programs are often constrained by the availability of highly specialized talent — by definition, that’s hard to scale. Here, AI becomes a workforce multiplier. By codifying proven modernization expertise into repeatable AI workflows, Kyndryl can apply that expertise more consistently and at a much greater scale.

No. To the contrary, Kyndryl Agentic Modernization is open by design. Its pre-defined workflows and services-as-software model follow an open-standards architecture and support multiple foundation models, technology stacks and infrastructure environments, giving customers flexibility, portability and control without lock-in.

Our “build-once, run-anywhere" approach enables customers to execute agentic workflows seamlessly in any environment without technology-stack lock-in, supporting a variety of frontier models driven by use case, customer preference, workload needs, cost, performance, governance requirements and regional availability.