Legacy Migration To New AI-Native Worlds

InnovationAILegacy Migration To New AI-Native WorldsByJohn Werner,Contributor.Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. I am an MIT Senior Fellow & Lecturer, 5x-founder & VC investing in AIFollow AuthorApr 23, 2026, 06:41pm EDTGlowing neon AI letters on a dark digital circuit backgroundgettyHow do you keep systems new and modern in an age where acceleration makes most aging technologies obsolete? There’s a mandate for companies to always be looking at rapid change. From the cloud era, to the AI age, the business world has been struggling with how to keep up with one sea change after another.“In today’s rapidly evolving business landscape, legacy applications often stand as barriers to progress,” writes NNNN at IBM. “These existing systems, characterized by outdated technology and architecture can hinder an organization’s ability to keep up with changing business needs and pose significant security and operational risks. Staying competitive is essential in today’s fast-paced business industry—this is where legacy application modernization comes into play.”In the cloud days, it was replacing old on-premises server systems and their workloads with cloud-native designs. Now, it’s bringing AI-native design to the table, which, again, means changing the build in fundamental ways.At the same time, there’s been a staggering lag in both the public and private sectors. A surprising number of workloads, up until recently, were still run on command line terminals coded in languages like COBOL and Fortran. Now, we have virtual machines, open source code languages like Rust, and AI writing Python, not to mention new tools operating in Linux. But legacy modernization remains a broad challenge.More from BostonI was privileged to help host the Imagination in Action MIT event in Boston April 9 and 10, and we had a jaw-dropping roster of prominent voices in AI, bringing us the latest in what’s going on, here and around the world. One segment in part...