For many technology leaders, application modernisation is less a strategic choice than a constant weight they carry. Critical systems must keep running, budgets are under pressure, specialist skills are disappearing, and every delay increases risk.

Leaders know legacy applications are holding their organisations back – but past experience has shown modernisation to be slow, expensive, and disruptive, with uncertain payoff. So the work is postponed, technical debt grows, and teams spend more time keeping the lights on than building for the future.

AI is changing that reality. It is redefining not just how quickly applications can be modernised, but what modernisation feels like for the people responsible for delivering it. Tasks that once required months of manual effort – like code analysis, dependency mapping, upgrade planning and testing – can now be completed in hours or days, with engineers shifting their focus from repetition to oversight, judgement and improvement. Modernisation moves from a high‑risk transformation programme to a repeatable, scalable capability that fits the way organisations actually operate.

Application modernisation at the speed of AI explains how this shift becomes practical in 2026. It sets out why this is the year AI‑enabled modernisation moves to enterprise scale, how organisations can define an AI‑ready future state, and how leaders can modernise at pace without sacrificing security, governance or architectural discipline. The paper introduces a clear six‑step lifecycle designed to support incremental transformation across large application portfolios while preserving the business logic, IP and workflows teams depend on.

This report is written for CIOs, CTOs, enterprise architects, and transformation leaders who are accountable for both today’s stability and tomorrow’s progress. It provides a structured approach for reversing the maintenance‑to‑innovation spend ratio, reducing operational risk, and embedding modernisation as a continuous capability – so teams can move forward with confidence, not fatigue.

Download the whitepaper to learn how application modernisation can shift from a persistent burden into a sustainable advantage for your organisation, delivered at the speed of AI.

Download the PoV