Business Process Transformation Through Generative AI

Keith Townsend: All right, we’re back here on the show floor. I’m super excited. Dinesh, really great keynote. But I have to tell you that that 97% of all API calls going through either gateway or middleware, they eventually net up, what, 70% on the mainframe, et cetera? Really great stack. But your follow-on statement to that, that generative AI is going to disrupt every application in the world, you got to defend that a little bit to me. Give me some context.

Dinesh Nirmal: Yeah, great question. I mean, think about it. That’s why I started by saying generative AI will disrupt and reconstruct every process, every application in the enterprise. But unless you take advantage of the existing investment, because think about it, Keith, every enterprise, unless born in the last two years, they have existing infrastructure, existing enterprise landscape. They’re running billions of API calls through a gateway. How are you going to infuse AI into it, right? Look at mainframe. 70% of world transactions run through a mainframe. How do you infuse AI into it? So unless those things are taken into account, there’s no way new technology will come and disrupt the enterprises.

So that’s why I stated by saying, “You have to think about how do you take advantage of the existing investment.” The middleware is a key piece. I talked about applications and data. That’s only two things that matter to an enterprise. Application goes down, enterprise goes down, data gets corrupted, enterprise goes down. So it’s those two things. Connecting the lifeline is the middleware. API calls, messages, MQ, all that is what connects the two. So when that gets cut or generative AI introduced into it, what is the resiliency you’re dealing with? What is the risk you’re dealing with? So this is where a company like IBM can come because we have been living and breathing that for the last hundred years.

Keith Townsend: So IBM, experts in business process, business transformation, digital transformation. You’ve been helping clients with this throughout the past 20 plus years. I have to ask the question around people, process and technology. How do you help organizations mature to this level where they can take their processes, digitize them, and then inject the technology and the processes needed to get the advantages that you just spoke of?

Dinesh Nirmal: Right. So I think you put it well, people, process and technology. Think about the people. There is a cultural change that you have to do. So take my own example, right? I have thousands of developers. How do I convince these developers to bring in generative AI? I can give them the tools, doesn’t mean that they have to use it. Same thing at an enterprise. You can give them the tools, doesn’t mean that they are influencers of that tool or practitioners of that tool. How do we convince them to use it? So there’s a cultural aspect in the people side. On the process side, this is why process mining was invented, right? These process are very arduous and complex, multi-way joins. How do you take that process, split it into multiple API calls, make it enable for things like generative AI to take advantage of what process… because this process has been around for 30, 40 years. How do you really bring new technology in? And then finally is how do I bring the technology, right? Which is the generative AI, the process mining, all those things, the new technology you have to infuse. But the process is also very important because if you look at an application, a line of business, everything is called on the process perspective. So exactly what you said, is what the challenge is are in the enterprise.

Keith Townsend: Well, Dinesh, I really appreciate you stopping by, having this quick conversation. Join us for more coverage from the show floor of IBM TechXchange. These deep conversations around LLMs, up to the higher level business abstractions all happening at one event.