Rackspace Technology Inc. is betting that customers will use a new generative artificial intelligence system to fast-track repetitive tasks and quickly analyze private data, part of its effort to keep up in the race to incentivize generative AI.
Srini Koushik, president of technology and sustainability, said businesses have been struggling to figure out how best to use generative AI. He said that building large language models and interfaces customers can use in everyday work environments can be challenging, as is understanding which structured or unstructured data is usable.
“We believe (ICE) will make AI accessible to all stakeholders and businesses,” he said in a statement. “ICE is easy to deploy and use, and ICE can help businesses of all sizes get the most out of their data.”
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The remarks come as Rackspace continues to invest millions of dollars in generative AI to launch new products and train most of its workforce on the basics of the technology this year. Rackspace is promoting its new AI product after reporting back-to-back declines in quarterly revenue year over year.
Rackspace did not respond to questions Wednesday.
Recently, Koushik said that Rackspace moved many of its internal systems to the Google Cloud Platform three years ago and has since been testing products to learn how to build its own AI systems, select and fine-tune the large language model, and secure the privacy of its data.
In June, the company announced its Foundry for Generative AI by Rackspace, or FAIR, an initiative aimed at using AI chatbots to help customers build their own apps and cloud platforms.
The following month, it launched a technology literacy program, called FAIR Learn, which offers voluntary courses on AI to Rackspace employees seeking to better understand how to use the technology. The company assembled training from the social media platform LinkedIn, tech education company DeepLearningAI, and cloud service titans such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google.
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Rackspace used FAIR to develop the Rackspace Intelligent Technology Assistant, or RITA, which is an intelligent chatbot that the company uses to perform tasks such as answering texts requesting information technology services, enhancing self-service capabilities for inquiries, requesting new hardware or software, resetting passwords, and answering questions on IT and security policies.
“Rackspace IT doesn’t have anyone answering the phones anymore,” Koushik told the Google Cloud Customer Community in July. “All the level-one support is done through automation, and then the second-level support goes to our engineers.”
Rackspace also used FAIR to build its ICE system. Koushik has compared the ICE system to Google Cloud Search, which enables businesses to search and find internal documents in their own computer networks.
In its announcement, Rackspace said that ICE can respond to questions from customers about business details. It can use sales and finance systems data “to identify promising leads and data from proposals, brochures, data sheets, white papers, knowledge bases, and document repositories to generate personalized presentations and proposals,” the company said.
Nirmal Ranganathan, the chief architect of FAIR, said in a statement that ICE is “a game-changer for businesses to harness their collective data,” helping them be “more productive and efficient, and ultimately deliver better customer outcomes.”
While speaking with Google Cloud’s educational community two months ago, Koushik recalled a meeting in which Rackspace’s chief legal officer asked whether his team could use the technology to search its contracts.
Ranganathan said the legal chief told him that he wanted the company’s lawyers “to focus on being lawyers and not spend the majority of their time looking for information that is relevant to what they are working on.”
“Within any enterprise,” Ranganathan said, “so many of these areas are underinvested over the years, and they’ve grown up as silos: HR, finance, legal, and marketing. We can see Rackspace ICE solving these problems in all of these domains.”
After posting a string of net losses and slumping stock prices, Rackspace rolled out its new operating structure that separated its private and public cloud business units.
