KONE elevates its automation and AI strategies with Microsoft Power Platform

KONE is a global leader in the elevator and escalator industry. With 70,000 employees and over 600,000 customers, the company moves more than two billion people every day.

As part of its corporate strategy, KONE strives to be “the easiest to work for and the easiest to work with”. This same, people-driven objective is also a key part of the company’s efforts to accelerate its digital transformation—and that’s where Power Platform comes in. “Power Platform makes it easy for our employees to build their own solutions and become more self-reliant,” says Ashish Agrawal, SVP, Chief Information Officer at KONE.

Before Power Platform, KONE was using multiple technologies for automation, app development, data management, and other development. “We wanted one low code platform that could securely handle a wide range of development scenarios. That’s why we selected Power Platform. It gives us the versatility and control we need,” says Agrawal.

With Power Platform, employees at KONE are developing low-code solutions to automate a wide range of routine tasks. They are also working with colleagues to build advanced, enterprise-grade applications, including AI-driven solutions.

A global citizen developer community takes shape

KONE originally launched its Power Platform program with a structured onboarding process for new makers, including controlled environments to protect data and ensure quality. The team is also leading training, community events, and hackathons, paving a clear pathway to becoming a recognized citizen developer.

What happened next exceeded even the development team’s expectations.

Within a year, KONE had over 3,000 active Power Platform makers. Today, the company counts over 32,000 apps that deliver value across multiple business units and regions. “There was tremendous pent-up demand for applications,” says Matthew Redford, IT Director, Corporate Function Solutions at KONE. “People at KONE are eager to solve business problems with their own ideas. Power Platform is helping them bring those ideas to life.”

Redford attributes much of the growth in Power Platform development to an engineering culture at KONE that is naturally innovative and willing to try new technologies. He also acknowledges a strong and dynamic maker community where people are constantly sharing low code ideas and solutions.

To support the community and accelerate development, the team created a centralized application catalog of Power Platform solutions from makers. Similar to an internal app store, the catalog enables other makers at KONE to re-use and extend these solutions for their own projects. Makers can also post updates to the catalog about time and costs saved with their applications. In this way, the catalog is also proving to be a valuable source of business metrics, helping convey the true value of Power Platform to leadership at KONE.

From idea to impact: Citizen-built solutions making a difference

Since adopting Power Platform, KONE has migrated multiple applications from two other platforms, including over 90 automation solutions. The goal was to simplify the development landscape and avoid reliance on multiple, specialized tools requiring advanced developers. A single, unified platform now enables both IT and citizen developers to build, evolve, and run applications and automations in a consistent environment with shared governance, security, and lifecycle management while also reducing maintenance costs.

One of the first high-impact solutions built with Power Automate was a contract management solution. Developed by a legal director and performance manager, the solution provides greater visibility into bottlenecks and cycle times. Documents are processed faster and overall accuracy has improved. With its proven success, other regions are quickly adopting the application.

Similar scenarios have played out in other divisions. To better manage tracking of materials in a factory warehouse, for example, a security guard with no software background used Power Apps and Power Automate to digitize what was previously a completely paper-based processes. The app is saving employees several hours a day and is now used by a team of over 50 people. “It’s a powerful example of what happens when people closest to the problem have the tools to solve it,” says Redford.

Power Platform as an AI driver at KONE

As makers gain more experience with tools like Power Apps and Power Automate, they have also started developing more advanced, AI-focused solutions with tools in Power Platform such as AI Builder and Copilot Studio.

While KONE is also using other AI development tools, the company sees strong advantages to Power Platform. Working with one, consistent platform is one benefit. Deep integration with the company’s broader Microsoft ecosystem is another. “An important part of our AI strategy is integrating with applications that our employees use every day such as SharePoint, Teams and Outlook. Power Platform makes this integration really easy,” says Lulu Zhang, Director, Head of Technology & Services at KONE.

One notable example is a solution that automates a multi-stage contract process. The AI-driven system automatically extracts text, including handwritten text, from documents in SharePoint and validates this data against existing SAP records. Deviations are flagged via a Power Apps interface where users can edit and approve the content. Once the data is approved, the system seamlessly updates or creates contracts in SAP—enhancing accuracy, speed, and compliance in the service contract cycle.

The system was developed using pre-built AI models in AI Builder for text extraction and document processing—no advanced AI training required.

This AI-driven workflow now processes over 54,000 contracts per year, reducing handling time from 30 minutes to under 10 minutes per contract. There are plans to extend the solution across different contract types and scale it globally. “Our intelligent service contact system on Power Platform is one of the clearest demonstrations yet of how Power Platform can unlock enterprise-scale efficiency at KONE,” says Zhang.

Accelerating development with AI-driven agents

Along with AI-powered solutions that support the business, KONE has created an AI agent that directly supports makers and guides their development process.

Built using Copilot Studio, the agent ties directly into the company’s vast technical support library on SharePoint. Makers can get fast answers to specific questions using natural language. But the agent is more than just a more efficient way to query support materials. It can provide specific guidance on how to build a solution. A maker simply enters a description of their app using natural language and the agent will generate a set of prompts that can be pasted into Power Automate or Power Apps to kick start development.

The agent can also recognize the need for custom connectors and other advanced requirements and alerts users that IT support is required. In this way, the agent also helps maintain governance while also accelerating development. And with integration into the central Power Platform solutions library, the agent can even point out related solutions already in production and avoid duplication.

Early feedback has been extremely positive. This has encouraged the team to add even more capabilities to the agent. To drive this work, KONE is leveraging Azure AI Foundry which is also being used to enhance agent accuracy, grounding, and retrieval quality.

Scaling the benefits of Power Platform enterprise-wide

As KONE moves to the next chapter with Power Platform, the company is focused on deepening AI integration and expanding automation. The integration of AI and automation is particularly exciting. As Zhang says, “Power Platform is enabling us to integrate highly effective AI models into our automation solutions and that is helping us streamline increasingly complex processes—efficiently and at scale.”

KONE is also focused on scaling these and other innovative Power Platform solutions globally to deliver even more value. The goal is to scale at least 50 applications over the next year. “With Power Platform, we’re building an efficient pipeline from idea to enterprise-wide solution,” says Zhang. “Some of our best ideas start with citizen developers and grow in partnership with advanced makers.”

For KONE, the company’s success with Power Platform all comes back to collaboration and its ability to help drive that company objective—to be “the easiest to work for and the easiest to work with”.

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