Kyndryl, a leading provider of mission-critical enterprise technology services, released its first global Modernization Report, which found that as organizations expand investments across legacy and modern platforms, modernization increasingly requires business orchestration, not technology consolidation.
"AI is creating new possibilities and raising expectations for the business outcomes technology should deliver," said Martin Schroeter, Chairman and CEO, Kyndryl. "Modernization is about preparing for what comes next, and the leaders making the most progress are investing across their technology environments—strengthening resilience and putting those investments to work where they deliver the greatest value."
Based on insights from 2,000 business and technology leaders across five continents and 12 industries, the research shows how AI is reshaping investment priorities across infrastructure and applications, while also challenging organizations' operating models.
According to the report's findings, the need to adopt AI now outranks priorities to reduce spending, replace legacy systems, or address a shrinking pool of legacy systems expertise. AI is the top driver of increased mainframe and edge computing use, the second-biggest driver for SaaS and private cloud expansion, and the leading reason organizations are upgrading their networks and application portfolios. Every organization with a mainframe now reports plans to deploy AI to the platform.
Together, these trends are creating more complex technology environments and new operational challenges for technology leaders.
Nearly half of respondents said they are behind schedule on their modernization goals. Agentic AI, which can autonomously plan and execute tasks, is emerging as a way to modernize faster. Ten percent of organizations have deployed agentic AI in production for modernization, applying it to typically time- and skills-intensive tasks of dependency mapping, code conversion, and generating documentation. Early adopters reported stronger outcomes, with 67 per cent saying they are ahead of or on track with modernization goals, compared with 51 per cent of other organizations.
