New York and Paris – Dec. 7, 2023 – Today, CAST, the leader in software intelligence technology, announced a strategic advancement in its technology, enhancing the role of artificial intelligence (AI) in application development and maintenance (ADM) to unlock unprecedented value for the IT organizations of the global 2000 companies, related to their critical custom-built applications. This development aims to address a major challenge in the realm of ADM, which primarily involves the maintenance and modernization of existing software.
Today, the use of AI in ADM is focused on generating new code. However, typically well over 75% of ADM resources are devoted to maintaining, enhancing, and modernizing existing applications, either in place or for cloud environments. This process requires a deep and holistic understanding of the unique makeup of each specific application — a challenge that goes beyond large language models’ (LLMs) current scope, which is restricted to publicly available information. Consequently, there is a significant gap in the existing AI engines’ understanding of how these applications work, which limits AI potential for assisting refactoring, modernization, and cloud migration.
CAST software intelligence technology fills the gap by automatically reverse engineering and extracting vast amounts of detailed metadata about the internal structures of these complex software systems. This data can effectively ground AI engines, enabling them to understand, maintain, and modernize existing applications with a high level of precision and efficiency.
Over the past nine months, CAST’s research and development team has collaborated with several global system integrators and leading AI providers. This collaboration has now conclusively demonstrated that grounding AI with outputs from CAST software intelligence technology allows LLMs to elucidate a whole software system's inner workings. As a result, AI-powered smart agents will be able to assist humans to change, fix, modernize, or adapt complex software to a targeted cloud environment. The collaborative effort is nearing a significant milestone with the completion of a working prototype expected by year’s end.
This technological innovation marks a substantial leap forward, as it is expected to greatly boost the productivity of ADM teams working on application modernization and evolutive maintenance. It underscores CAST's dedication to enabling AI to provide significant additional value to IT organizations worldwide, far beyond the creation of new code – by revolutionizing how existing code is understood and enhanced.
An in-depth outline on enabling AI engines understand vast custom software systems and automate their modernization is available at learn.castsoftware.com/ai-with-software-intelligence.
About CAST
CAST, the software intelligence leader, provides software that ‘understands’ multi-technology software systems and automatically derives insights about their inner workings–interactions between all its elements, transaction flows, data access paths, changes needed to move to cloud, open-source risks, green impact, ISO 5055 compliance, etc. It is used globally by thousands of digital leaders, helping them make smarter decisions, maintain, and transform custom software with greater speed, and exert better ongoing control of the risks involved. Visit castsoftware.com.