For today’s CIOs, AI is a central strategy—a vehicle for supercharging efficiency, spurring innovation, and getting products out the door faster. As new capabilities begin to flood the market, leaders are now solidifying their AI vision into concrete plans: 75% say they are working more closely with business units to develop AI applications.
To reap AI’s benefits, leaders must first create an ROI-based implementation strategy, migrate legacy applications to the cloud, and modernize them for AI workflows. But in today’s rapidly evolving business environments, it’s imperative to adopt new methods and models that not only reduce development and deployment time but also improve the quality of deliverables while reducing risk.
Agentic AI is helping transform migration and modernization procedures. Using an Amazon Web Services (AWS) agentic AI framework, IBM Consulting can help companies develop an ROI-based plan, automate migration and modernization workflows, and optimize performance after applications have launched. With human-directed AI agents doing most of the work, the entire process can be accomplished in record time.
Building the business case for modernization
IBM’s migration and modernization process begins with assessing the client’s goals. Targeting the right AI initiatives is critical for today’s technology leaders—42% say they would be willing to pay a premium for solutions that meet their company’s specific needs.
But determining business value in advance is tough to do. CIOs and their teams, recognizing the importance of modernization, often plow ahead anyway, confident that relevant use cases will show up. That doesn’t always fly with business leaders—a situation that can cause plans to backfire.
“One of our biggest challenges was delivering modernization plans that made sense to IT teams, but line-of-business owners failed to see the impact,” says Vikas Ganoorkar, Global Cloud Migration and Modernization Practice Leader, IBM Consulting.
To solve the problem, IBM Consulting recently acquired Txture, an Austrian company whose software helps consultants to quickly understand client IT systems and design modernization plans focused on maximizing business impact.
Combining the capabilities of Txture with IBM Cloudability products (previously Apptio) for optimizing cloud spend, IBM used AWS services to develop AI agents that speed assessments and give companies a clear picture of AI’s financial impact. Agents automatically assess the application portfolio, analyzing codebases, dependencies, and challenges and defining optimal migration architectures. Then they generate business cases and ROI estimates.
“We can actually show companies at the assessment stage how modernizing and scaling specific applications will reduce costs, give you better ROI, and allow teams to innovate and deliver the products customers want faster. Most of our competitors don’t do that,” says Vikas.
When plans are aligned with key company goals, organizations experience fewer development snags and can hit the ground running once applications are launched.
Executing tasks and optimizing solutions with agentic AI
Agentic AI excels at managing complex tasks efficiently, often adding value along the way. IBM’s migration and modernization framework is a case in point, accelerating technical processes while improving accuracy and results.
AI agents automate cumbersome code transformation and modernization tasks, including language migration, framework upgrades, refactoring, rehosting, and more. Automated deployment is not only faster, but more reliable, operating 24/7 without making mistakes. Agents also test and validate the newly migrated and modernized applications to ensure functional accuracy and performance.
Once migration and modernization are complete, AI agents continue monitoring application performance on AWS, automatically adjusting to prevent problems, improve reliability, and optimize performance. They can also add new functions, including automating security and compliance monitoring tailored to meet company and industry standards.
The critical importance of keeping humans in the loop
Companies understandably don’t want to have their mission-critical systems managed entirely by AI agents, which can generate hallucinations and other errors. And many high-level tasks lie beyond agents’ current capabilities.
“AI can’t automate everything,” Vikas says. “Leaders need to make important decisions and provide agents feedback to help them improve.”
At IBM Consulting, humans provide strategy, guidance, and oversight for all agentic AI processes. IBM consultants work with IT leaders to develop an AI architectural vision for the company and identify opportunities for increasing efficiency and income—including some that lie beyond standard migration paths. The goal is to create scalable, secure solutions that don’t compromise on compliance, business alignment, or architectural integrity.
In contrast, AI agents manage data-intensive and repeatable tasks, such as discovery, planning, transformation, and validation. They can handle most of these activities on their own, but IBM’s framework alerts humans to resolve challenges if they reach their limits.
IBM and AWS: stronger together
A strong IBM and AWS partnership is essential to the agentic AI system’s success.
“AWS has the largest share of the public cloud market, and our customers feel safer and more confident when they know we endorse each other and speak the same language,” Vikas says.
AWS technologies, AI models, and its capability to create targeted AI services are also invaluable. These capabilities speed the creation of IBM’s AI agents and ensure that they work together efficiently.
“Using our tooling, IT teams can reduce the heavy lifting involved in developing AI agents and deliver the best outcomes for their customers as they migrate and modernize applications,” says Vamsi Yanamadala, Partner Solutions Architecture Leader, AWS.
The partnership’s benefits don’t end there.
“Migration and modernization are one-step processes, but by running our agentic AI systems on AWS, CIOs can continue to improve applications and innovate as they scale,” Vikas says.
Jumpstarting your AI future
By developing AI agents on AWS and orchestrating them under the guidance of human experts, IBM Consulting greatly reduces the time and headaches of application migration and modernization. As a result, CIOs can finally realize their dreams of launching, running, and scaling transformative AI solutions.
To learn how agentic AI can help you achieve your modernization goals faster, visit ibm.biz/ai-modernization today, or read the ebook: IBM + AWS: Reimagine application migration and modernization with AI.
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Source: News