In this segment of “Office Optional with Larry English,” Larry talks about how to use AI agents to modernize apps and improve business value.
As businesses embrace AI and begin to see real impacts, app modernization has never been more urgent for organizations dragging their feet on getting started.
Standford University’s Artificial Intelligence Index Report 2025 found that 78 percent of organizations reported AI use in 2024, up from 55 percent the previous year. It concludes that “AI has moved from the margins to become a central driver of business value.” Put bluntly: businesses that don’t modernize will fall behind competitors, lose top talent and struggle to deliver a compelling customer experience.
Yet many leaders feel stuck in place, unable to move forward with modernization initiatives for a myriad of fear-based reasons: The cost is too high. The process is too disruptive. The team isn’t prepared to manage the technology. Success feels too elusive. Gartner, for instance, found that less than half of digital initiatives meet or exceed their goals — a statistic that doesn’t exactly inspire confidence.
AI is often viewed as the endpoint of a modernization journey, but what if organizations viewed AI not as the final destination but rather as a powerful accelerator to quickly begin seeing impacts from the latest tools and technologies?
How to Accelerate App Modernization With AI
My company, Centric Consulting, is experimenting with how AI can accelerate the modernization process, making it less expensive and less disruptive while delivering value much more quickly. Our efforts focus on two key areas of code modernization: migrating code from legacy systems and evaluating business test requirements.
Migrating Code From Legacy Systems
We used a custom, enterprise-class AI agent framework to analyze an existing legacy code base, documenting how the code works to understand how it’s been supporting the business or use case. Without AI, this process can take a team weeks to accomplish. Using AI, the team achieved a 10x impact on productivity.
Documenting legacy code is tedious work that must take place before an organization can even begin the migration process. Using AI to analyze and document the legacy code not only speeds up the process and makes it less costly, but it also frees employees to focus on the bigger, more interesting strategic problems of modernization and more quickly get to the meat of modernization work.
AI can also accelerate the next steps of the process: deciding what coding language and architecture is best suited for the use case. AI can quickly compare the options and even offer an outline of an architecture and business feature roadmap, giving people a quick starting point to begin creating a more detailed, actionable plan.
Evaluating AI Readiness
We used a custom AI agent to evaluate over 40 hours of business stakeholder interviews to determine an organization’s AI readiness. The agent analyzed the interviews, cataloging interview notes against assessment criteria. It also produced detailed reports, findings and recommendations, including an actionable roadmap for improving AI readiness and governance for the organization — all in a little over six hours. Without AI, this process would have taken a team weeks to accomplish.
Then, the team used an AI agent to design new architectures, develop a plan based on the requirements and write new features with associated tests. What would have taken two developers months to complete, we were able to do in one week with a single architect.
The Goal With AI and App Modernization Should Be Progress Over Perfection
There’s a potential to use AI for every step along the process of app modernization. When used appropriately, AI isn’t a 10 percent or even a 20 percent multiplier — it can be a 10x multiplier, accelerating the app modernization process and solving timeline and cost challenges of modernization.
That said, there are two important caveats for using AI for app modernization. One, AI is not 100 percent right all the time. Humans must remain in the loop, with frequent checkpoints designed into the process. It’s important to note that AI should be viewed not merely as a tool but as an expertise multiplier. Humans play a vitally important role in ensuring AI has developed a consistent “understanding” of its assigned tasks and providing expert guidance and correction along the way as needed.
Two, an enterprise-class agent is going to produce the appropriate quality of outputs for app modernization work. An enterprise-class agent has clearly defined personas and tools and is able to maintain contextual awareness of the code. Comparatively, a generic AI coding assistant won’t be able to handle the work — instead of the entire repository, it looks at only a few lines or a file of code at most and will likely produce lots of hallucinations.
Many leaders fall into the trap of believing they need pristine conditions — all apps migrated to the cloud, data perfectly modernized and governed — before embracing AI. This mindset is not just limiting. It’s potentially devastating to your competitive position.
Consider the internet adoption curve of the late 1990s: companies like Amazon and eBay launched with imperfect platforms and messy backend systems, gaining irreplaceable market advantages while their competitors crafted ‘perfect’ digital strategies that never materialized in time. Walmart, despite its retail dominance, waited until 2000 to launch a robust e-commerce platform — years behind Amazon’s 1995 start — a delay that created a competitive gap they’re still working to close decades later.
The stark reality? No organization’s data is truly AI-ready. Those waiting for perfect conditions are standing still while competitors race ahead. When it comes to modernization, adopt the mantra “Progress over perfection.” The mountain of legacy challenges may be high, but scaling it incrementally with AI as your climbing gear yields immediate returns. Begin extracting value now, even as you acknowledge greater treasures await once your data foundation is strengthened.
Remember, while AI will not replace your app modernization strategy, organizations using AI to accelerate their modernization will replace organizations who don’t. The AI revolution waits for no one — and the modernization journey you begin today, however imperfect, will create the competitive advantage you’ll need tomorrow.
This blog was originally published on Forbes.com.
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