Reduce Development Effort and Speed Up Your Digital Transformation with the HCL UnO AI Pilot

The HCLSoftware Universal Orchestrator (UnO) AI Pilot is a generative AI-powered assistant that simplifies and accelerates the creation of IT automation workflows.

In everyday terms, think of the AI Pilot as a knowledge base of templates and suggestions for your DevOps teams and IT operators. Instead of manually writing complex scripts or piecing together automation steps, a user can describe their desired outcome in plain English, and the UnO AI Pilot generates the corresponding automation workflow.

Here’s a Breakdown of Its Key Aspects:

Core Concept 1: From IT Runbook to Natural Language to Automation

The fundamental goal is to translate human intent into machine-executable actions.

Over the years, many organisations have produced IT Runbooks that define how to create, run, monitor, and crucially, how to react and what to do (or not) in the event of a process failure.

Additionally, when creating workflows before AI Pilot, an engineer or operations staff would need to know the specific syntax, commands, and logic to connect different tools (e.g., Ansible, Terraform, Jenkins, ServiceNow). They would then go through the labour and time-intensive process of manually building the workflow in their automation platform.

Core Concept 2: It’s All in the Prompt

This really is crucial and may need a few attempts. Existing Runbooks are typically bullet-point PDFs or Microsoft Word documents.

We want to create a summary paragraph of all the Runbook steps. You can do this a) manually (but why bother), or b) using your favourite corporate-approved tool such as Google Gemini or ChatGPT.

A prompt such as this is a good place to start:

“Take these runbook steps and create a combined paragraph rather than bullet points.”

and then copy/paste the Runbook into the prompt.

It’s always worth checking the output before you go to the next step, making it as natural as possible – a slight tweak can have quite a significant impact on the workflow that is created. Be clear and demanding in the paragraph – you won’t upset the UnO AI Pilot!

Core Concept 3: Hours Reduced to Seconds

Now that you have created and reviewed your prompt paragraph, you can open the UnO desktop and the Designer. On the canvas, you can simply paste the prompt into the AI Pilot pop-up:

“Create a workflow that checks the disk space on all my production web servers. If any of the servers are above 90% full, create a high-priority ticket in Jira and send a message to the #ops_status channel in Slack and the ops_status space in Google Chat.”

Within seconds, the UnO AI Pilot parses the request and generates the complete, multi-step workflow template, ready for review. Choose the most appropriate option (there will be 3) and you’re good to go!

Key Features and Capabilities

1. Generative AI Engine: UnO uses a Large Language Model (LLM) trained on a vast dataset of IT automation documentation, best practices, existing workflow patterns, and information about the various plugins HCL Universal Orchestrator supports.

2. Interactive Creation and Refinement: It's not just a one-time generation. Users can interact with the AI to modify the workflow. For example, after the initial workflow has been created, a user could add:

“Okay, if none of the servers are over 90% full, send a notification to the #ops_status channel in Slack and the ops_status space in Google Chat saying that no servers have hit the 90% limit, then terminate the workflow.”

3. Lowers the Skill Barrier: UnO "democratizes" automation. Team members who are not expert scripters or automation specialists can create powerful workflows in a secure, role-based environment, freeing senior engineers to focus on more complex tasks.

4. Accelerates Development: UnO drastically reduces the time it takes to create, test, and deploy new automation. What might have taken hours of research and coding can be drafted in minutes.

5. Reduces Errors: By relying on a model trained on best practices, UnO helps avoid common syntax errors, logical flaws, and inefficient process design that can occur during manual creation.

How UnO Fits in the HCL Ecosystem

HCL Universal Orchestrator is the core engine. It's a powerful Agentic AI orchestration platform designed to orchestrate complex, event-driven workflows across hybrid environments—from mainframes to cloud-native applications. It has a library of plugins to integrate with hundreds of common IT tools.

The integrated AI Pilot acts as the new intelligent "front-end" or "user experience layer" for this engine. It makes the power of UnO accessible through a simple, conversational interface.

Summary

In essence, the HCLSoftware UnO AI Pilot is a generative AI application that addresses a critical business problem: the complexity and time-consuming nature of IT automation. It shifts IT professionals' focus from how to build automation to what automation needs to be built.