Hakkoda Labs took the road less traveled and built AI agents that disrupted their own business processes, effectively handing over their proprietary data migration IP — the company’s secret sauce — to any developer.
The project itself was launched as a skunkworks challenge to build an AI business analyst. The data consultancy, which was acquired by IBM in April, formalized the effort in mid-2023, hiring AI engineers to help pilot the project. Dubbed a “support engineer” model, the project used OpenAI’s large language models (LLMs) to perform data migration tasks, such as source target mapping; extract, transform, load (ETL); and extract, load, and transform (ELT) — the essential work of data scientists and data engineers.
Many enterprises are using AI for automation but Hakkoda’s “sophisticated and specialized” AI agents for developer-oriented use cases such as ETL and schema matching are far less common that other generative AI applications such as document summarization and content creation, according to one of the company’s founders.
