commoneuropecongress2026

The IBM i team wants to try something with the participants of COMMON Europe. We have a chance, at this conference, to collaborate with you on the kinds of things you'd like to see IBM i accomplish with AI in the future. Come to this session to participate as we use collaboration and design concepts to dream about what IBM i might do in the future.

Legacy IBM i applications run the world’s most critical business processes, yet most modernization projects stall because of missing documentation, vanishing RPG/COBOL expertise, and the terrifying risk of touching production code.

In this session we demonstrate our No-Touch Modernization approach using IBM Rational Open Access Handlers to kickstart your modernization. You’ll see live how we bring proven legacy business logic to the browser — fully functional and ready to be optimized
 — while the original RPG programs remain completely untouched.

We’ll show how we automatically extract real business logic, generate clean documentation and AI-ready artifacts that dramatically reduce token costs and hallucinations in LLMs. 

Most importantly, you’ll see how automated GoTo removal, integrated testing, and Agentic AI work together to move beyond rewriting individual programs to truly modernizing end-to-end business processes.

Stop guessing. Start modernizing — safely.

Learning Objectives:

Recognize the hidden risks of modernizing code without modernizing the underlying business processes.

Demonstrate how IBM Rational Open Access Handlers enable a true No-Touch modernization strategy that keeps proven RPG business logic untouched while making it available to modern frontends and AI tools.

Generate clean, accurate documentation and AI-ready artifacts from legacy RPG code that significantly reduce token costs and hallucinations in LLMs.

Build a structured modernization approach that combines automated GoTo removal, integrated testing, and Agentic AI to move beyond rewriting individual programs toward truly modernizing end-to-end business processes.

IBM i clients around the world in industries such as retail, distribution, consumer products, and more continued to innovate throughout 2025. These organizations leveraged open source technologies and infused AI into their business processes to modernize operations, automate routine tasks, and boost productivity in new ways. From smarter automation to cloud optimization, IBM i continues to evolve as a platform for innovation and growth. Join Steve Will, IBM i Chief Technology Officer and Distinguished Engineer, to explore how clients are using IBM i to modernize, integrate AI, and drive digital transformation. You will leave the session with new ideas to advance your business, practical examples of AI-driven innovation, and inspiration to take your IBM i strategy to the next level.

Are you ready to adopt AI-based Assistants and Agentic AI tools on your IBM I?  While these technologies are enticing and extremely powerful, there are limitations and pitfalls to factor into your AI strategy. During this session Carol Woodbury will discuss what the security considerations are that one must make when embarking on an AI project, how should one  configure an Agent on IBM i and what guardrails you can put up to ensure it doesn’t go rogue, what auditing and logging is available to have visibility into AI activity on IBM i, how sessions using mapepire (e.g., MCP servers) manifest themselves in the audit journal, as well as what bad actors are doing with AI and how to protect your organization.