Companies spend millions updating old systems, only to discover they don't understand what exactly they are modernizing.
For decades, business logic has been hidden in COBOL, RPG, and CL code written by engineers who have since retired. No one documented the rules, and the knowledge left with the people.
This is not just a technical problem. It's a hidden financial black hole: budgets balloon, deadlines slip, and the ROI from digitalization investments remains an illusion.
Mohit Gupta, CEO of Damco Solutions, explains in an article for Forbes Technology Council how artificial intelligence is changing the game.
AI acts as 'institutional memory': it analyzes source code, extracts business rules, builds dependency maps, and creates documentation at machine speed.
Traditional methods required months of manual labor by experts, whose findings became obsolete immediately after completion. AI, on the other hand, reads the actual behavior of the system today and updates knowledge automatically.
The most expensive part of modernization is the discovery phase. This is where companies most often lose money: making decisions based on incomplete data and then redoing already launched projects.
AI compresses this stage without sacrificing quality, allowing for all dependencies to be seen in advance and avoiding costly surprises mid-transformation.
However, AI cannot completely replace humans. Only experts can assess whether an old rule still aligns with current business reality and what risks each decision entails.
The most valuable outcome is not new technology, but the organization's ability to understand its own systems with precision and manage them transparently.
Knowledge that previously resided only in the minds of a few specialists becomes accessible, documented, and reusable throughout the company.
Modernization ceases to be a one-off project and transforms into a continuous competency that yields returns for years.
Companies that invest first in such 'organizational intelligence' gain a sustainable advantage over those who continue to struggle with their own forgetfulness.
Ultimately, success is measured not by which platform is in production, but by how much better the organization now understands, adapts, and makes decisions about its money and processes.
