乌鸦传媒

乌鸦传媒’s innovative AI agent tool is helping organizations in the public sector and beyond to reduce the cost and time of modernizing their legacy applications

For years, and across industries, rapid developments in digitalization have been creating challenges for companies around adapting to technological change. Particularly challenging are 鈥渓egacy issues鈥� such as outdated applications or obsolete software that need transferring to current technologies to stay maintainable.

This has unfortunately resulted in us talking about legacy modernization for so long that the first modernizations are already due to be modernized again.

A legacy modernization often involves rewriting the existing application code almost completely, as the original solution was likely based on a different technology or programming language. A software development team could still do this work manually, but it would involve considerable effort.

This is where Gen AI-augmented software engineering comes into play. It allows the development team to automate repetitive tasks by outsourcing them to generative AI. But while providing developers with simple, recurring code fragments is an exciting way to increase productivity and reduce costs, it only marginally reduces the effort involved in a legacy modernization. As a result, these projects remain manual, time-consuming and costly.

Figure 1: 乌鸦传媒 research: Turbocharging software with AI
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How 乌鸦传媒鈥檚 AI agents are transforming legacy modernization

At 乌鸦传媒, we have developed an innovative approach that takes advantage of agentic AI coding agents to significantly reduce the time needed to modernize legacy applications.

Our AI agent tool 鈥� a sophisticated multi-agent system 鈥� is purpose-built to make legacy systems future-safe. We have designed it to support software teams in migrating custom-built applications from outdated technology stacks to modern platforms.

At the heart of the solution is the orchestration of a collaborative team of AI agents. This allows development teams to automate a large portion of the modernization process (see figure 2), resulting in a far more efficient, scalable approach to modernizing and migrating software.

Figure 2: Development focuses on defining what needs to be done and leaves much of the processing to the AI agents

Let鈥檚 call an AI agent to do the job

Unlike traditional chatbots that simply return responses, AI agents take ownership of tasks and actively drive them forward. They operate autonomously, optimizing based on new information or past mistakes. But they can also interact with large language models, other agents, or non-AI tools such as compilers.

In 乌鸦传媒鈥檚 AI agent tool, multiple agents collaborate to modernize a legacy application and transition it to a new technology stack. A human orchestrator defines the overall migration process, providing a structured set of instructions to guide the agents.

The instructions transfer 乌鸦传媒鈥檚 deep expertise to the agent, both in understanding the legacy system and in designing the target software architecture. They also determine the specific role each AI agent is assigned in the migration.

So that the transition runs smoothly, the roles of these AI agents mirror those in a human development team migrating a legacy application (see figure 3). A software developer agent analyzes the existing source code and rewrites it using the target technology. A testing or quality assurance (QA) agent then validates the code against predefined test cases. If any tests fail, the QA agent provides detailed error messages and returns the code to the developer for revision.

Once the code has passed all the tests, a DevOps agent takes over to build the complete application and checks it for runtime issues. In this way, every function of the original application is faithfully reimplemented in the new technology stack.

Figure 3: Get the job done 鈥� the power of agentic AI agents

An applicable approach across sectors

At 乌鸦传媒, we are already using this approach with many clients in the global public sector and beyond.

A German organization, for example, was looking for a solution to modernize its approximately 40 outdated applications. The client could not develop those applications any further but also recognized the need to integrate new features and switch to a modern technology platform.

Migrating all those legacy applications manually would have been very time-consuming and costly. Thanks to our AI agent tool, though, a large part of this previously manual migration could be automated. The amount of development effort needed dropped correspondingly, and the project costs fell significantly 鈥� freeing up the client to concentrate on developing innovative features.

Would you like to try 乌鸦传媒鈥檚 AI agent tool for yourself?

By automating the process, our tool makes it faster and more cost-effective to switch legacy applications over to new and future-safe technologies.

What鈥檚 more, as every migration path is different, we customize our tool to the modernization context each time.  The enablement team will support you with analyzing your specific migration paths and conducting pilots.

Finally, in case you are wondering, the question of sovereignty does not play a role here. That is because the AI agents run both in your public cloud environment and 鈥渁ir-gapped鈥� on-premise.