Following on from Infrastructure-as-a-Service, Platform-as-a-Service and Software-as-a-Service, Emma Technologies aims to introduce a new term into the cloud lexicon: “Infrastructure-as-Prompt”. The concept, which the company plans to launch on 8 July, is based on an idea that is simple to articulate but more complex to implement: enabling users to manage their cloud infrastructure using natural language.

“You can deploy any application on any cloud in a matter of minutes, with a simple request made in natural language via our platform,” explains Dmitry Panenkov, founder and CEO of Emma Technologies. Users would no longer necessarily have to select, line by line, the required architecture, resources or providers. Instead, they would describe what they want to achieve: moving an application to a sovereign environment, creating a GPU cluster in Europe, launching a service from code on their computer, or optimising an existing infrastructure.

For Emma, the challenge is not just about making the interface more user-friendly. It is about creating a new layer of abstraction on top of a world that has become too complex for many users. “Cloud technologies aren’t simple. Even though the cloud has been around for several decades, few people really understand how these different services and technologies work,” says Dmitry Panenkov.

Granularity in sovereignty

The company, which says it has been developing its platform for eight years, explains that it is based on an existing architecture: a network connecting various cloud providers, a unified gateway enabling seamless interaction with them, and control mechanisms designed to prevent erratic responses from AI models. According to Dmitry Panenkov, this is what sets Emma apart from a simple chatbot connected to an infrastructure. “The usual problem with models is hallucination. They can understand your prompt and do what they think you want, which is often different from what you actually need.”

The aim is therefore twofold: to make the cloud more accessible to non-specialists, whilst providing guidance on the actions that can be taken. A user unfamiliar with prompts could, for example, ask a model to generate the context required for deployment. The platform would then tailor its responses to the user’s level of understanding. “If someone says: ‘I don’t understand any of this, just help me with the deployment – let’s create a step-by-step guide’, the platform does just that,” explains the CEO.

Sovereignty is one of the arguments put forward. Emma would enable a company to choose precisely which clouds are authorised for certain projects or data, and then disconnect other environments – including hyperscalers – not only at the logical level, but also at the network level. An administrator could thus restrict a project to certain providers – for example, European ones – and prevent users from adding others.

A transformation of the profession

However, Dmitry Panenkov makes a clear distinction between the role of the platform and that of the client. Emma can notify a user when a workload is being transferred from one jurisdiction to another – for example, from the European Union to the United States – and alert them to the risks associated with sensitive data. However, he believes that responsibility for such a transfer lies with the company that orders it. “We can only be responsible for matters in which we are directly involved,” he explains.

The platform can also generate reports on the infrastructure: the location of resources, interconnections, actions carried out by users, changes made, flows between environments, usage and costs. Emma also says she can forecast how an infrastructure will evolve and recommend optimisations, for example when a provider becomes more expensive than a comparable alternative. “We monitor and track everything related to the infrastructure, its behaviour, what people are doing, and how data flows between these environments. But we do not have access to the data itself,” explains Dmitry Panenkov.

Prior to this launch, Emma mainly targeted large organisations using multiple clouds and spending several million euros or dollars a year on infrastructure. The new concept aims to broaden this market by lowering the barrier to entry. However, Dmitry Panenkov does not present Infrastructure-as-Prompt as signalling the end of technical skills. Rather, he sees it as a transformation of the profession. “It’s not about replacing engineers. It’s more of a shift in the profession,” he says. Specialists would spend less time manually maintaining infrastructure and more time defining, overseeing and optimising its use.

This simplification may also create a new risk: if deployment becomes very easy, users may end up creating a proliferation of unnecessary environments. “You still need operators – someone who understands how to work with Infrastructure-as-a-Service in the way that suits your needs – so as not to burn too many tokens or deploy a lot of things that aren’t relevant,” emphasises the CEO.

Emma, still growing

Emma Technologies claims to be in a phase of rapid growth. Dmitry Panenkov states that the company doubled its turnover last year, employs around 100 people and is targeting revenue of 50 to 60 million euros this year. He believes this figure could exceed 100 million if several ongoing discussions with major organisations come to fruition. The company had originally planned to recruit a further 100 staff in 2026, before revising this strategy. “We have started to become more efficient and productive,” he explains, highlighting the internal use of AI assistants and automated development tools.

Behind the product launch, Emma is therefore championing a broader vision of the cloud. For Dmitry Panenkov, infrastructure must become a resource that is as easy to use as a web browser. Users shouldn’t have to understand all the technical details to get an application online, any more than they need to know the command line to access the web. “What really matters is that your application is always available to your users. Nobody cares about infrastructure for infrastructure’s sake.”