Johnson Controls rethinks IT for the cloud-native and AI era

“We’re focused right now on building our internal capabilities,” he says. “We’ve been a heavy externalized organization, and we made a decision that we needed more in-house talent to give us a solid understanding of our business processes, our data, and the analytics as we begin to drive forward. We’re looking at our overall set of investments across all technology stacks and making sure we’re getting a good ROI on that.”

Bringing transformation home

Johnson Controls now has roughly 4,500 IT pros internal and external, many based in India, working on the next transformation. The goal is to streamline, simplify, and align the company’s cloud-based workloads, data, and analytics to be far more efficient and “optimized like a technology organization,” Sankaran says, adding that cybersecurity is another key focus.

The CDIO established a centralized AI team that will build applications using Microsoft OpenAI Azure as its core platform, adding related tools for efficiency. The software engineering teams are now using tools such as Github Copilot for greater efficiencies and are working with Microsoft to teach all employees about using Copilot for document summarization, though it’s still early in the process.