Virtualplatform previews AI-powered workflow engine and vendor bridge

Australian telco software company Virtualplatform has previewed its AI-powered Workflow Engine and Vendor Bridge, offering managed service providers, ISPs and telcos a no-code platform to automate processes across customers, employees, internal systems and suppliers.

The visual, no-code workflow canvas lets operators embed AI models directly into business processes - rather than running them as standalone chatbots - to interpret information, classify requests, improve data quality, generate communications, recommend actions and trigger the next operational step.

Supporting the engine is Vendor Bridge, which normalises disparate vendor APIs behind a consistent interface.

The company said this makes suppliers interchangeable at the workflow layer: a process built for one NBN retail service provider can operate through another, despite differences in their underlying APIs, data structures and transaction sequences.

It also enables automatic vendor failover, redirecting a transaction or service process when a preferred supplier is unavailable.

Practical use cases cited by Virtualplatform include invoice-to-order migration - where AI extracts service details from an uploaded bill to prepare a ready-to-submit order - as well as ticket classification and triage, vendor error interpretation and plain-language service-health summaries for customers and Level 1 support teams.

The company said the underlying workflow capability is already deployed in the live operating environment of a Brisbane-based telecommunications aggregator, with the visual engine now previewed building on that production deployment.

Virtualplatform also said many providers still rely on spreadsheets, manual handoffs and hard-coded processes across the customer lifecycle, with each new supplier or product creating a fresh development project. The platform aims to turn those activities into reusable workflows spanning qualification, ordering, provisioning, communications, approvals, assurance and billing.

Stuart Wallis, CTO and co-founder of Virtualplatform, said AI becomes far more valuable when it is embedded directly into the business process.

"The intelligence has the context and access needed to produce an actionable outcome — not just another answer in another window," he said.

Wallis said Vendor Bridge addresses the recurring problem of supplier lock-in within telco operations.

"Integrate a supplier once, normalise its capabilities and then reuse them across workflows, brands and customers. Changing an upstream supplier no longer needs to mean rebuilding the business around it," he said.