For years, the rational choice for CIOs was to wrap legacy systems in APIs and hope for the best. The risk of a rewrite was too high, and the systems were stable. That calculus has shifted.
The Talent Cliff is Here
The generation of engineers who wrote and maintained the world's banking and insurance core systems is retiring. The new generation isn't learning JCL. We are approaching a point where these systems will become essentially black boxes, operative, but unchangeable.
AI Enables Safe Migration
We are not advocating for a reckless 'big bang' rewrite. But modern AI agents allow us to dissect, document, and test legacy logic with a speed and accuracy that wasn't possible five years ago. We can now map the 'unknown unknowns' of a legacy codebase before we write a single line of new code.
Modernization is no longer a vanity project; it is a continuity requirement. The window to modernize while you still have staff who understand the old system is closing.