How Are IBM i Shops Using AI? Fortra and COMMON Want to Know
October 5, 2026 Alex Woodie
Artificial intelligence is taking the world by storm, changing how we do things in fundamental ways. It’s automating complex tasks, accelerating scientific breakthroughs, and shifting how people work. It’s also changing how we interact with the IBM i server, which is the focus of a new survey you can take now from Fortra and COMMON.
Fortra is no stranger to surveys on IBM i, as we see with the IBM i Marketplace Survey. The company ran its first IBM i Marketplace Survey in the fall of 2014 for release in early 2015, back when it was still known as HelpSystems. The 13th annual version of the survey is currently open (you can take it here), and we’re expecting to see the results of it in early 2027.
This fall, Fortra actually is running two surveys. In addition to the Marketplace Survey, Fortra – or more specifically, the division within Fortra that is now being called Power by Fortra – is working with COMMON to run the State of AI in the IBM i Community Survey.
Elizabeth Hau, a marketing campaign manager at Fortra, and Tom Huntington, its vice president of technical services, recently sat down with IT Jungle to talk about the new AI survey.
“It really came from a partnership with COMMON, just trying to get a pulse from the IBM i community about AI and where it’s going and where each company is at on their AI journey,” Hau says. “A lot of it came also from the AI questions on the Marketplace Survey and the responses there, how important that those AI questions are, and just wanting to expand on that.”
Fortra first added an AI component to the Top Concern question, the eagerly anticipated portion of the IBM i Marketplace Survey where IBM i users share their top concerns for the platform. Just 12 percent of survey-takers said AI was a top concern for the 2020 survey, which was actually conducted in the fall of 2019.
The percentage of IBM i Marketplace Survey takers indicating AI as a top concern from 2020 to 2026. (Data source: Fortra)
The IBM i concern over AI hovered around 10 percent for four years. In 2024, 18 percent of survey-takers said it was a concern following the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in late 2022 (the 2023 edition of the survey was open in the fall of 2022, but there was not enough time for the launch of ChatGPT to reflect in the data for the 2023 edition). The figure rose to 30 percent in the 2025 survey and then went to 42 percent for the 2026 survey.
“So it jumped up quite a bit, and I think this spurred that we should have more questions about AI without expanding the current survey,” Huntington says.
Much of the discussion around AI in the IBM i community has been around coding assistants, such as Bob, which IBM introduced one year ago after killing off Watsonx Code Assistant for RPG. Bob has progressed rapidly, and is already up to version 2.0, with a Premium Package for IBM i that’s tailored for the unique demands, technologies, and capabilities of the IBM midrange platform.
Fortra and COMMON will ask users what tools they use in the State of AI in the IBM i Community Survey, which you can take here. Bob will likely feature prominently, in addition to other tools, like ChatGPT from OpenAI, Claude from Anthropic, Gemini from Google, and Llama from Meta Platforms. But Fortra and COMMON are going beyond just the tool question with the survey in their quest to explore other aspects of AI adoption in the community.
“There’s a lot of great tools. It’s not just Bob,” Huntington says. “The other side of it is, how do I connect to my IBM i server securely, and what are the business rules I’m going to use within AI to actually make business decisions?”
Fortra announced the State of AI in the IBM i Community Survey one month ago. The survey itself is composed of 11 questions and takes about two minutes to complete. In addition to questions about skills, security, and access, Fortra asks about how IBM i customers map AI to workflows, how business leadership is talking about AI, how committed they are to AI, where the biggest impediment to deployment reside, and what sort of governance they have in place.
“It’s important to see where people are at in their journey, to see what they’re using and how we can weave our way into some of the challenges that they’re facing, just seeing where people are at right now,” Hau says.
The results of the AI survey will be shared with the community at IBM TechXchange 2026 and COMMON NAViGATE, the combined conference taking place at the end of October in Atlanta, Georgia. There will likely be a webinar where the data is presented.
One of the great things about the IBM i Marketplace Survey is that the same (or similar) questions are asked every year, providing a solid baseline upon which to detect changes in the concerns, tool usage, tech adoption, and makeup of the IBM i community over time.
Will we see something similar emerge with the State of AI in the IBM i Community Survey? That’s the hope at this point, but only time will tell. In the meantime, the 2026 version of the survey will provide a snapshot of where the IBM i community currently sits, which will be valuable in its own right.
You can take the State of AI in the IBM i Community survey at www.surveymonkey.com/r/COMMON-Fortra-AI-Survey-LinkedIn.
