• AI Is Not Just For Developers, It Is For Everyone At Your Company

  June 22, 2026 Alan Ashley

  I’m not a developer. Let me say that upfront, because it matters when I say the things I’m about to say. I’ve always had ideas that I could put forth to somebody who can code. But now, because of AI, I can ask it to do things that I can verbally explain, and it can create what I am asking for. That’s one of the reasons I’m so excited about GenAI.

  Before the GenAI boom started a few years ago, at ARCAD we had already gone down this road with a product called Discover. We had already tied chat into …

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• Bob 1.0 Users Bugged By Lack Of One Feature

  April 6, 2026 Alex Woodie

  The launch of the Bob AI coding tool in late March has been met with considerable amount of hoopla by IBM, as well as anticipation by the IBM i community. The early reception to Bob has been mixed, due in part to the lack of one particular feature.

  Bob is a new AI tool from IBM that’s designed to help developers understand, document, and generate code in a variety of languages and platforms. On the IBM i server, Bob supports RPG, as well as CL, SQL, DDS, and COBOL, while it supports other languages on other platforms. IBM introduced Bob …

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• LegacyBridge Uses AI To Automate Data Entry On 5250 Screens

  March 16, 2026 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops that are interested in eliminating manual data entry on 5250 screens may be interested in a new AI-based offering from a startup called LegacyBridge. According to the product’s developer, LegacyBridge uses computer vision and language AI technology not only to understand the information on source documents like PDFs, but also to navigate the 5250 screen and enter the pertinent data into the appropriate field.

  You could say that Dmitrijs Tarasovs is an automation afficionado. “I’ve had a thing for automating boring, time-consuming tasks long before the AI boom,” he told IT Jungle in an email interview. “Finding  …

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• Fresche Taps AI For New RPG-To-Java Conversion Tool

  November 10, 2025 Alex Woodie

  Fresche Solutions has launched X-Modernize AI, a new offering that uses generative AI technology to convert legacy RPG and Synon code to modern Java. The software, which is based on large language models and its X-Analysis cross-reference and code understanding tool, will speed up code conversion projects by a significant amount, the company claims.

  Fresche Solutions is no stranger to legacy modernization projects and tools that convert RPG code into languages like Java, PHP, and .NET. In fact, the company’s very first announcement after it changed its name from Speedware to Fresche Legacy way back in 2012 was the acquisition …

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• Beta Of MCP Server Opens Up IBM i For Agentic AI

  October 27, 2025 Alex Woodie

  When Anthropic quietly released Model Context Protocol (MCP) in November 2024, it didn’t garner a whole lot attention. But as the agentic AI wave grew in early 2025, the protocol suddenly was hailed as the new standard for integrating AI applications, tools, and data sources. A good indication of just how far MCP has come is the fact that IBM released an early version of the MCP server for IBM i this month.

  Project Bob got the big headlines at the IBM TechXchange conference, which took place the second week of October in Orlando, Florida. And for good reason, as …

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• Big Blue Converges IBM i RPG And System Z COBOL Code Assistants Into “Project Bob”

  October 13, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We have been anticipating the rollout of the Watsonx Code Assistant for RPG on the IBM i platform ever since IBM previewed a code assistant for the System z mainframe platform in August 2023 to help COBOL shops port their applications to Java on the mainframe. And lo and behold, the Rochester team followed suit, but with a slightly different approach, creating a Watsonx Code Assistant for RPG, which was also created using IBM’s homegrown “Granite” large language models.

  Well, apparently, forget all of that. At the TechExchange 2025 developer conference last week, IBM was showing off a new, unified …

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• Profound Logic Adds MCP To IBM i AI Tool

  July 28, 2025 Alex Woodie

  The world of AI is moving extremely fast right now, with new models, techniques, and technologies emerging every week. One of the newest bits of AI tech to catch on is Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol (MCP), which has quickly become a defacto standard for connecting data sources to AI models. Profound Logic, which has been on the cutting edge of AI, is the first IBM i vendor to bring MCP support to the server and the Db2 for i database.

  Anthropic quietly launched Model Context Protocol in late November 2024 as a way to enable large language models (LLMs), such …

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• Using AI To Derive Application Intelligence And Drive Modernization

  April 23, 2025 Marc Dallas

  Everybody in the IBM i space knows that Big Blue is working on a coding assistant based on generative AI models to help developers write better and more consistent RPG applications with what everyone assumes will be a smaller and smaller programming talent pool.

  But there is more to leveraging AI as a tool for application development and modernization than this. There are those who want to be able to use GenAI tools that can analyze and convert code from one language to another – much as the same large language models were first trained to translate between two languages …

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• Eradani Taps GenAI for IBM i Integration Boost

  October 9, 2024 Alex Woodie

  Eradani introduced a new product last month that uses the power of generative AI to simplify the development of code for integration projects involving IBM i. The company says the new product, dubbed Eradani Assist, will allow customers to use natural language to tell the product to build specific application and data integrations, and the product will leverage one or more large language models (LLMs) to generate the integration code.

  Eradani calls its flagship product, Eradani Connect, an “integration hub” that manages communication into and out of the IBM i platform. The software supports application and data integration projects that …

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• Top Priorities in 2024: Security and AI

  January 17, 2024 Alex Woodie

  Two sometimes opposing forces will be at play in 2024: the threat of cybersecurity breaches on the one hand and the promise of tech disruption thanks to AI on the other. Tech leaders, including IBM i professionals, who chart a course through these obstacles will be well-positioned to help their companies and their careers in the years to come.

  First, let’s cover security. It’s no secret that cybercriminals have been ramping up their game over the past few years. Since the Covid-19 pandemic gave online activity a turbo-boost four years ago, cybercriminals have been having a field day with people’s …

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