Most Enterprises Moving Fast To Adopt AI To Accelerate Mainframe Modernisation: Kyndryl

IT infrastructure services provider Kyndryl has released its State of Mainframe Modernisation Survey, declaring that 2024 is the year of artificial intelligence adoption on the mainframe. The survey also showed that while modernisation projects are delivering significant financial benefits, many organisations continue to face skills shortages, preventing the transformation of complex, critical systems.

As business leaders face economic, competitive, technological and regulatory challenges, they are increasingly seeking to derive new value from their IT estate, including the mainframe. The survey of 500 business and IT leaders showed that 86% of respondents are quickly adopting AI and generative AI to accelerate their mainframe modernisation initiatives.

A third of respondents indicated that the platform has become a foundation for running AI-enabled workloads. Additionally, almost half aim to use generative AI to unlock and transform mainframe data into actionable insights.

According to survey respondents, IT modernisation projects and patterns are yielding substantial business results, including triple-digit one-year return on investment of 114% to 225% and collective savings of $11.9 billion annually. Almost all organisations have opted for a hybrid IT strategy — a combination of modernising on the mainframe, integrating with public/private cloud, and moving applications and data off the platform. Furthermore, 96% of respondents are migrating some workloads — on average 36% — to the cloud.

Respondents identified enterprise-wide observability as critical to effectively leveraging all data across their hybrid IT environment. Around 92% of respondents indicated that a single dashboard is important for monitoring their operations, but 85% stated they find it difficult to do this properly. AI-powered open integration platforms can solve this challenge, helping organisations gain observability, orchestration and efficiency into their technology environments.

Many survey respondents are still grappling with a skills shortage, especially in new areas such as generative AI that can facilitate mainframe transformation and help alleviate the skills gap. In addition, security skills are in high demand due to increasing regulatory compliance requirements, with almost all respondents flagging security as the key factor driving modernisation decisions. With this increased pressure, the survey revealed that 77% of organisations are using external providers to deliver mainframe modernisation projects.