IBM’s launch of its AI coding assistant “Bob” points to a much bigger shift in enterprise modernization. Across the industry, AI tools are being positioned as a way to make legacy systems easier to understand, assess and eventually modernize. And there is real value there.
Some of these tools can read thousands of lines of legacy code, identify deprecated APIs, summarize business logic and surface technical debt in minutes. For organizations carrying decades of operational history, that kind of visibility is a big step forward - but let’s not confuse visibility with modernization.
