From Legacy to Living: How AI Is Reinventing the Modernization Playbook

Let's unpack this a little bit, because I think what I'm seeing more broadly in the industry It's an emergence of a new practice.

It's an emergence of a new methodology, really, that I expect will completely change the way we think about continuous evolution and completely change how we think about how we manage these enterprise systems, which are large, complex, multi-layered with generations of technology, which is as much a financial artifact as it is a technology artifact.

There's amortization timelines.

There's timelines.

We keep these systems around for financial reasons.

But I'm seeing this methodology you're describing that is organically emerging in parallel, you know, like Leibniz and Newton simultaneously discovering calculus.

We're seeing a simultaneous discovery of how to manage this deeper technology renewal.

And what's exciting to me as a data scientist myself is that it is a data-driven approach.

And as you point out, one of the most tricky elements about these things is that these systems have so much time and energy put into them over decades, typically.

And we always struggle to adequately document or keep the information about the systems up to date to be able to then understand them, manage them, modernize them.

And that tends to mean that these environments move into a brick fix mode.

When I worked at General Electric, we did a lot of work in the long-lived asset space for the industrial world.

And Kate, I don't know if you remember the work that we did with offshore drilling, where they had these drill ships.

It's a fascinating environment because you're offshore, you have these immensely complex machines.

However, they are crewed by people that completely interchange with each other.

I think it's every three months, every six months, they have a hitch.

And so over time, the machine and the configuration, the quality of machine, the way that things are set up drifts.

And so the boat that you left, when you come back in six months is a completely different boat that you come back to six months later.

And yet it is into itself a, information system a physical and digital information system that continuously drifts through time and it's not documented and so the people that are running these systems have to rediscover and relearn the system when they come back into it and it seems like the challenge we're dealing with here is not dissimilar that as you say when i first started working in the days when i was coding payroll i took over a huge code base that had been coded by other people and i learned via debugging and i had to debug it to understand how the code base actually worked And you're lighting, warming your hands by fires that other people have lit.

That's the situation we're in.

And if you're an individual managing one of these systems, you just pray it doesn't break or something doesn't go down.

And when it does, you have to go learn the system.

But you're only learning these little tiny elements of the system.

You're never able to wrap your brain around the entire thing because things break.

And so you're in this continuous break-fix cycle of learning.