Jon Stojan
Image credit: Kindo
Kindo, a pioneering AI company founded in 2022, has raised $28 million in funding. Now, they’re changing the way enterprise approaches AI security and implementation, starting with their free AI Hackathons.
In less than 2 years, AI has wedged itself into every corner of the modern organization. With that comes Shadow AI, where employees are using this new technology without any security controls around company data, customer data, even employee data. This leaves Security and IT departments open to considerable risk and possibly litigation.
At the core of Kindo’s recent client expansion are its free AI Hackathons, designed to bridge the gap between AI buzzwords and practical deployments in an enterprise. These hands-on events create a friendly competition, with coworkers voting for the team that built the best AI Agent.
Kindo claims their Hackathons have yielded results for publicly-traded companies on the Forbes 2024 Cloud 100 and Inc. 1000 lists.
“Everyone is talking about AI right now, so it makes sense our Hackathons are in demand. But, these aren’t just educational – some have been transformative,” said Ron Williams, Founder & CEO of Kindo. “In one afternoon, we’ve seen companies go back to work with a handful of fully functional, hyper-focused, no-code Agents ready for implementation internally. And a team energized to create more.”
Kindo’s AI orchestration platform helps enterprise clients bring AI into their organizations, securely and seamlessly. Clients can use any AI model (commercial, open source, private) and take advantage of a variety of hosting implementations (cloud, hybrid, on-premise, even air gapped).
Different models can be assigned to specific department(s), or released company-wide, and come with Kindo’s Automated Workflow Builder, which helps teams build no-code, task-specific Agents with natural language.
Image credit: Kindo
Client Security and IT teams benefit from full visibility into what their AI models create, when, by whom, and with what data, all the way down to the AI model and prompt used. They can even incorporate Kindo’s compliance, governance, and data loss prevention (DLP) controls, depending on the level of granularity required by corporate protocols and rules.
Kindo’s Hackathons follow a three-step process:
- Learn – Participants receive an accelerated course in Kindo’s no-code AI productivity platform.
- Build – Teams of 2 work on the use case they brought to the Hackathon, while the Kindo team helps with support questions and solutions.
- Implement – Companies leave with functional AI agents ready for deployment and expansion inside that department.
A recent Hackathon with a global, publicly-traded hotel chain produced this remarkable output with an Identity Access Management (IAM) Agent they built.
Problem: The IT team regularly adds/removes new employees to their IAM and each one requires input from the Security team, which is disruptive for them.
Solution: Their new Kindo Agent allows them to ask a chatbot what is needed and it provides the necessary configuration so Security doesn’t need to be involved, saving 5-6 hours every week.
“We’re not just teaching people how to use AI securely. We’re equipping companies with the tools they need to securely deploy, build, and implement AI in real-time,” explained Bryan Vann, Co-founder & Chief Technology Officer at Kindo. “It’s not unusual to create a couple of a-ha moments at each of our Hackathons. Sometimes more.”