Developers increasingly expect to work through modern tools such as Visual Studio Code and browser-based applications. 

Businesses want their IBM i applications to connect and integrate more easily with wider enterprise platforms. And artificial intelligence (AI) is beginning to influence how IBM i development teams work.

The challenge for IBM i leaders is adopting these changes without losing the governance and control that protect production systems. 

That challenge is what the latest release of Remain Software’s IBM i change management tool TD/OMS addresses.

Watch the full presentation on TD/OMS V18.1 with Andy Nicholson below.

What’s new in TD/OMS V18.1?

TD/OMS V18.1 is built around four connected components:

• TD/OMS continues to provide lifecycle control, approval, and deployment governance.
• Octo gives developers a modern browser and Visual Studio Code experience.
• APIs allow the platform to connect with other systems and automated processes.
• Octo AI Studio provides a governed route into artificial intelligence.

Together, these four elements turn TD/OMS into a broader, more open DevOps platform for IBM i, rather than a standalone change management tool.

What challenge does TD/OMS V18.1 address for IBM i developers?

IBM i teams are under pressure from two directions at once. 

Developers want to work in the tools they already use elsewhere. 

The business wants IBM i systems tied into its wider enterprise tool set. Often that requirement is complicated with the desire to start using AI within the business. 

The risk is that adopting modern development tools and AI capability comes at the cost of the approval, testing, and deployment control that keeps production IBM i systems stable. 

For an IT leader responsible for that system, that’s a trade-off not to take lightly.

Remain’s Octo tool makes TD/OMS capabilities available through the browser and Visual Studio Code, so developers can work through familiar, modern tools while staying inside the same controlled TD/OMS lifecycle used today.

Version 18.1 also improves the day-to-day development experience within that lifecycle:

• Component dependencies are now grouped and easier to filter, so developers can see what a change will affect more quickly.
• Task solutions can be narrowed by object type and environment, cutting down on unnecessary searching.
• Branches can be stashed with a recorded reason instead of being permanently deleted, so in-progress work is retained safely rather than lost.

These changes reduce unnecessary searching, improve awareness of the impact of a change before it is made, and help developers manage change more safely. 

None of the changes introduced as part of the new release alters the approval and deployment controls TD/OMS already enforces.

Put together, TD/OMS provides the control, Octo provides the modern experience, APIs provide openness and integration, and Octo AI Studio provides governed intelligence. 

For an IBM i organisation, that combination means the ability to modernise the development experience and start using AI, while keeping the traceability and deployment controls the business already depends on.

For a technical lead, that means a familiar, modern working environment connected to the wider enterprise tool set. 

For a business leader weighing risk against reward, it means that IBM i modernisation and AI adoption do not have to come at the expense of control over a system the business runs on.

Explore TD/OMS with Proximity

Proximity resells and supports TD/OMS as part of a wider set of IBM i application services and development tools.

If your organisation is running IBM i and weighing up how to modernise and manage development processes, contact Proximity to arrange a demonstration of TD/OMS.

The post TD/OMS V18.1: Modern Development Tools and Governed AI for IBM i appeared first on Proximity.

In this episode, we’re still in Lyon, but for this second part, we look at a couple of the technical announcements, including Mapepire [pronounced MAH-pup-ee], the second technology refresh for 7.6 and the announcement of a new Power11.

Mapepire – The new way to access DB2 for the IBM i?

So, while at COMMON Europe, I joined a session on Mapepire, the new way to access DB2, which dramatically improves upon conventional technologies.

This technology presentation was completed by IBM’s very own inimitable Jesse Gorzinski, MBA.

So, what is Mapepire? Well, this technology is a cloud-friendly, database access layer technology that runs on IBM i and communicates with clients through secure WebSockets and is built with simplicity and performance in mind. It consists of a server component on IBM i and a set of SDKs for languages including Java, Python and TypeScript with more languages planned in the future.

And why the name Mapepire [pronounced MAH-pup-ee]? Well, Jessie explained that we have programming languages such as Cobra, Viper and (of course, the ever popular) Python, so when Jesse was thinking about creating a venom fast database connector, the South American pit snake seemed apt.

Now, traditionally, JDBC and ODBC connections can involve several different services and network flows before the first database operation takes place. Mapepire simplifies this by using a single port and a single server entry point. Jesse explained that it’s four main design principles involved:

• Portability – It can be used from environments where traditional IBM i drivers may be difficult or impossible to deploy
• Encryption – Connections are encrypted, with TLS providing both encryption and server authentication. Mapepire is intended to simplify certificate configuration considerably compared with traditional database connectivity.
• Performance – The performance demonstrations in the presentation show Mapepire completing queries more quickly and consistently than the Node.js ODBC driver in the examples tested. Connection pooling can further reduce overhead by reusing database jobs.
• Consistency – The SDKs are intended to behave similarly across languages, using consistent class names, methods, configuration options, parameters and error handling too.

This sounds like a utopian data connection layer!

Mapepire runs locally on IBM i, which can help reduce uncontrolled JDBC and ODBC connection sprawl.

Existing IBM i security controls still apply, including:

• Object authority
• Database server exit points
• User-profile controls
• Workload and subsystem management

A new configuration file also allows administrators to permit or deny connections based on user profiles and IP addresses.

Or in other words, it’s secure by design.

Ok, but JDBC and ODBC already do most of the work, right?

Well, when you compare Mapepire with traditional JDBC and ODBC connectivity, the biggest difference is simplicity.

Mapepire uses a single port and encrypts data by default, which immediately reduces some of the complexity normally associated with securing database connections. It still works with familiar IBM i controls, including system exit points, so organisations are not losing the security and governance mechanisms they already rely on.

It also offers enhanced CCSID support and is designed to work in more modern environments. Another important advantage is direct support for multiple client languages, making it easier for developers to access Db2 for i from a wider range of applications and platforms.

So the real appeal of Mapepire is that it keeps the IBM i controls customers already understand, while making secure, portable Db2 access much simpler for modern development.

And, while we’re still officially in a technology preview, plans are afoot for further enhancements. The near-term plans include Kerberos support, improved handling of large objects, a PHP client, a full JDBC client and more complete API documentation.

Beyond that, there are longer-term possibilities such as C# support, an improved Go client and data compression.

As always with roadmap items, these plans are forward-looking and may change, but they do show the direction of travel.

But, now confirmed – within OS7.6 TR2, Mapepire will be delivered as part of the IBM i operating system itself, which will be a significant step towards standardising it as a key component within the platform.

I’m excited, and IBM clearly sees Mapepire as a broader, more secure and portable access layer for Db2 for i across a growing range of languages and development environments.

Clearly, this is a technology to watch!

Technology refresh 2 for IBM i 7.6

Mid July saw the release of OS 7.6 TR2, and this version enjoys some useful additions…

This release is a broad update focused on security, resilience, modern development, system administration and support for the latest Power hardware. There is no single headline feature dominating the release.

Instead, IBM has delivered a substantial collection of practical enhancements aimed at making IBM i easier to secure, manage, develop on and modernise.

One of the strongest themes is external key management.

IBM i Cryptographic Services can now integrate natively with IBM Key Protect for IBM Cloud, allowing organisations to export, store, wrap and use encryption keys through an external key management service.

IBM has also strengthened protection for IBM i master keys.

The Save/Restore key can now be removed from the partition load source, meaning encrypted master keys remain unavailable until the appropriate key is supplied during or after the IPL.

When combined with system ASP encryption, this can prevent the partition from completing an IPL without the required key. Keys can be retrieved from a Platform Keystore or supplied manually through a Remote Key Agent.

*RPG continues to gain useful new capabilities for building more robust and maintainable applications.

ASSERT-F and ASSERT-T allow developers to validate conditions and take an appropriate action, such as raising an exception, recording a warning or calling a test procedure.

Generic message IDs simplify ON-EXCP handling by allowing related groups of messages to be monitored together. LIKE(EXT) can now define an individual field directly from an externally described file, reducing duplicate definitions.

And the new %LOOKUPNE and %TLOOKUPNE functions make it easier to find the first array or table entry that does not match a specified value.

Navigator for i receives another sizeable update. It can now use Java 21 where available and includes improvements across performance monitoring, networking, security, work management and file system administration.

Notable additions include a multi-system CVE overview, support for performance notebooks, new Performance Data Investigator charts, improved TLS configuration tools and the ability to configure SMTP OAuth authentication.

The open source Code for IBM i ecosystem continues to move quickly.

The main extension now includes MFA support for IBM i 7.6, password expiry checking, password changes, SSH key passphrase authentication and a new Environment view for managing actions, profiles and variables.

And, as highlighted in the previous article, TR2 has also moved to Mapepire as its SQL runner, with IBM reporting improved performance.

A number of security improvements have been introduced, including component signature checking, safer temporary directories and checks on home directory permissions.

Other extension updates improve RPG and CL language support, SQL development, automated testing and debugging.

A new IBM i FileSystem extension provides more detailed access to QSYS objects, authorities, locks, usage information and object-specific actions directly from VS Code.

Db2 for i receives several functional and security enhancements, including a new SQL error log, trigger pseudo columns, URL encoding and functions for converting values to and from system timestamps.

IBM has also expanded its range of SQL based IBM i Services. Particularly useful additions include services for:

• Identifying relevant CVEs
• Checking local Group PTF currency
• Examining audit journal entries
• Reading data journal information
• Viewing geographic mirroring status
• Managing Service Tools Server configuration
• Checking CL command syntax
• Reporting on external key management
• Examining job names, users and numbers

The growing number of IBM i Services continues IBM’s strategy of making operating system information and administration functions accessible through SQL.

Power11 S1112 entry-level server release

Also in July, we saw the OFFICIAL announcement of the S1112 Server.

This is IBM’s new entry-level, one-socket Power11 server, designed for smaller environments, and is available in both rack-mounted and deskside configurations.

The biggest point for IBM i customers is that the S1112 sits within the P05 software tier. IBM i partitions can use up to four cores and 64 GB of memory, which makes it quite the flexible powerhouse for the SME’s.

This could genuinely be a game changer – Enterprise-grade technology no longer needs an enterprise-sized footprint… or cost.

And that’s it for your two-part, IBM i Update report from COMMON Europe.

I’m Andrew Nicholson, and we’re Proximity, your application support, maintenance and development partners that are in your corner.

If you missed it, you can check out Part 1 of July’s upate here, or access all the IBM i Updates in one place.

Alternatively, if you’d like to receive the latest IBM i Update hot off the press to your inbox, subscribe to the IBM i Update on LinkedIn.

The post IBM i Update #38 – Mapepire, Technology Refresh 2 for 7.6 and the release of a new entry-level Power11 appeared first on Proximity.

This month, Andy Nicholson visits COMMON Europe and catches up with a raft of IBM Champions, discusses the latest technology and enjoys a ‘thank you and farewell’ with retiring Chief Architect and CTO, Steve Will.

Overview of Common Europe 2026 in Lyon

Now, during the heatwave in June, I visited COMMON Europe in Lyon.

The event was 3 ½ days of latest education, technology and trends delivered by top IBM and industry-leading speakers.

So, let’s take a look at some of the key announcements, ideas and conversations to come out of the event.

First, the venue was situated on the banks of the Rhone River in the City International Conference Space, and honestly, it was baking hot.

Thankfully, the amphitheatre enjoyed air conditioning, and that’s where we enjoyed the keynote by Katarina Gospic, a member of the global advisory board for WatsonX.

In this, and to a packed auditorium, she provided pertinent insight into how you can use AI to better effect and what tools… and skills are needed for maximum results.

The auditorium was just one part of the event space, and just outside the doors was the main expo area, otherwise known as the greenhouse.

Yes, here delegates baked themselves while quaffing quite excellent coffee and delectable French pastries.

The Expo area also housed many of the exhibitors, of which there were a healthy number, all of whom were eager to provide insight and help where needed.

The next generation of IBM i developers

There were plenty of talks and round table discussions too. One particular roundtable involved COMMON Board Member and IBM i NextGen stalwart, Zouhair Oulli and fellow IBM Champion, Tom Wellmann.

It was wonderful to see so many young people getting engaged with the platform.

NextGen positions IBM i as a gateway to exciting opportunities for burgeoning developers, with support for modern tools and practices.

And, newcomers will enjoy the backing of a community that will support the building of their knowledge through education, networking and real world examples and that’s what Zouhair discussed through his own experience.

He spoke on the opportunities, discussed ideas for how Common can support the the next generation of talent and initiatives for the IBM i community.

And, with IBM i skills in short supply and modernisation and AI booming, developers who master the platform can gain valuable cross platform experience and strong career opportunities.

Later in the day, I caught up with Zouhair and Tom and asked what NextGen was and what the roundtable discussion involved…

Zouhair: “First, let me introduce NextGen. It is part of COMMON Europe and aims to support young people who have recently joined the IBM i community, or who are considering a career in it, by providing useful resources, guidance and mentoring. During yesterday’s roundtable, we gathered ideas from the young people attending the event. Their feedback will help us improve NextGen and the ways in which we support people entering the IBM i community.”

Andy: “Fantastic. Tom, you are very much part of this next generation. What has inspired you most about attending this event?

Tom: “Hearing about other people’s experiences, I would say. I’ve heard and read a great deal about these events, and I have attended the German equivalents, but I had never been able to come to this one before. Now I am finally here, and I’m very happy to be part of it. It has been great so far.”

Andy: “Fabulous. It is great to see you, Tom, and you too, Zouhair. Zouhair, to finish, which IBM i technology inspires you most at the moment?”

Zouhair: “At the moment, I would say VS Code, because you can do so much with it. You can create your own extensions, it is open source, and it enables a large community of people to collaborate. That is what I like most about it.”

My thanks to Zouhair and Tom for their time and efforts with NextGen.

Networking at Common Europe

For me, the most valuable part of COMMON Europe was the networking.

The sessions and presentations provided plenty of insight, but it was the conversations between them that really brought the event to life.

Meeting IBM i professionals from across Europe created opportunities to exchange ideas, compare experiences and discuss the challenges organisations are facing in the real world.

Those informal conversations often lead to the most useful insights, new partnerships and future opportunities. COMMON Europe is not simply about learning what is happening across the IBM i ecosystem.

It is about building relationships with the people who are shaping its future.

Alan Seidan discusses VS Code and modern languages for IBM i

First, I met with Alan Seiden and asked him about the two sessions he delivered at the event…

Alan: “The first was “Securing Your Open Source”. It covered areas we do not hear about as often on IBM i, such as securing Node.js, Visual Studio Code extensions, PHP, Python, web applications and APIs. We all need to be mindful of security. The second was “RPG Unit Testing Made Easy with Visual Studio Code”. Unit testing is so important for any modernisation or transformation project, and for putting guardrails around AI. With these extensions, it is now much easier than before.”

Andy: “Absolutely. Visual Studio Code has really come to the fore over the past few years. Do you see it becoming the mainstay moving forward, or could it eventually be replaced by Bob?”

Alan: “Bob is really based on Visual Studio Code, so I think they work hand in hand. The extensions you can run in VS Code can also run in Bob, and IBM sees it that way too. IBM continues to contribute to Visual Studio Code, and all those extensions gain extra mileage, or kilometres, because they can also be used in Bob. I see that moving forward at an even faster pace than before.”

IBM Champions Charles Guarino and Koen Decorte explain their favourite part of the event

I also caught up with IBM Champions, Charles Guarino and Koen Decorte, at the Gala Dinner and asked what the best part of the event was…

Koen: “AI, I would definitely promote it. Definitely go and learn all about it.”

Charles: “There’s a very high level of interest in AI for sure. But back to the best part, it’s the people, of course. It’s like coming home.”

Mike Davison explains what he’s looking forward to at Common Europe

I also had the good fortune to meet my fellow retro gaming enthusiast, Mike Davison. He was in the main expo ‘hot house’ on the Fortra stand.

Mike: “The event has been fantastic, Fantastic. We have had a lot of traffic to the Fortress stand. We have got a Millennium Falcon prize to give away, which is generating lots of footfall for us. So really, really good start to Common Europe in Lyon this year. As for sessions I’m looking forward to? I’m looking forward to catching up with my old boss Ash Giddins who is presenting Administration Runtime Expert (ARE) – one of IBM i’s most powerful, yet overlooked, tools.”

Roberto De Pedrini on the AI coding journey

I also had the pleasure of meeting Roberto De Pedrini again. Now, for those long time subscribers to the IBM i Update, you may remember that one of the first articles I covered some years back was Roberto using ChatGPT 3.2 to develop RPG.

Roberto: “Yes, we started by trying ChatGPT with RPG. It was good because it could create RPG code, and we were beginning to use this kind of assistant, but that was only the start. Now we have much more. We do not only have ChatGPT; there are many large language models we can use. We also have IBM Bob, which can help us change RPG code, create documentation and much more. Today, we can do more than simply create or change code. We can compile it and test it directly on IBM i. That is fantastic because we can use an LLM to understand the code, make the changes we need, and connect the whole process to IBM i. It is very interesting and represents a real change in how we develop in RPG, as well as COBOL and every other language we can run on IBM i. That is very cool.”

Gala Dinner Summary

Now, in the evening of Tuesday 16th June, a 20 minute wander through the glorious park saw us reach the Gala Dinner. Delegates and guest flooded the venue to enjoy an evening of great food, maybe a little too much drink and good company too.

My thanks for Common Europe and to Common France for hosting such a super soiree.

IBM i Chief Architect Steve Will’s parting advice

At the end of July, one of the most familiar and respected figures in the IBM i community will bring an extraordinary career to a close.

Steve Will is retiring after more than 41 years with IBM.

His career reaches back to the original development of the AS/400, and since 2007 he has served as IBM i Chief Architect, helping to shape the strategy and direction of the operating system.

Kris Whitney has been appointed as his successor as IBM i Chief Architect and he joined Steve on the stage to make the announcement.

For many people, Steve has become one of the most recognisable public faces of IBM i.

He has explained its strategy, defended its relevance and helped customers understand where the platform is heading.

However, for his final IBM i Guided Tour, Steve chose not to talk about technology, roadmaps or future releases.

Instead, he offered something much more personal: the lessons he has learned about building a fulfilling career. The presentation was titled Steve’s Advice for… Well, You’ll See.

That unfinished title was deliberate because, as the presentation developed, so did its meaning. Steve’s central concern was not simply of success, status or even happiness, but fulfilment through the development of character.

Or as Aristotle put it, to be eudaimonian in nature.

Now, I’m not going to dissect the entire presentation… you should really check it out yourself. But his message eventually came down to three wonderfully simple points for fulfilment: Learn, bring yourself, and be a good person.

So, while Steve was ostensibly talking about a career in technology, the qualities he described extend far beyond IT.

Curiosity, empathy, collaboration, supporting your people and contributing to something meaningful. These are all qualities that can bring fulfilment to life as well as work.

After 41 years at IBM, this advice may be one of Steve Will’s most valuable contributions of all.

Later that day, I had the opportunity to interview Steve – perhaps his LAST interview as CTO?

I asked him what he thought his greatest achievement was in IBM i over the years…

Steve: “You know, difficult question, and you warned me I was gonna have to talk about it. Putting together the team that I’ve got with so many technologists who can also take what they have built and explain it to the community, that team is extremely competent, extremely visionary, and cultivating them and growing them has probably been the most important thing that I’ve done. I’ve kept the platform alive in a lot of ways, but they’ve been my team, and so the team is probably the biggest thing.”

A great leader and human, thank you Steve…

Now, episode #38 will be following soon, with another Update from Lyon featuring a couple of technical presentations.

But for now, that’s it for episode #37 of your IBM i Update.

I’m Andrew Nicholson, and we’re Proximity, your application support, maintenance and development partners that are in your corner.

If you missed it, catch up on our previous IBM i Update, or access all the IBM i Updates in one place.

Alternatively, if you’d like to receive the latest IBM i Update hot off the press to your inbox, subscribe to the IBM i Update on LinkedIn.

The post IBM i Update #37 – Common Europe Lyon July 2026 Review appeared first on Proximity.

For an IBM i shop, that phrase needs a bit of a translation. 

A recent Fresche Talks session, “IBM i Data to AI-Ready Analytics: Where Your Growth Comes Next”, brought together Fresche’s analytics and data leads to answer the question directly.

It’s a useful reference point for anyone running RPG, COBOL or Synon applications on IBM i and wondering what to do next with AI.

We work with IBM i teams every day on support, development, modernisation and integration projects and the conversation in that session mirrors what we hear from clients: the interest in AI is real, but so is the caution. 

Nobody wants to put decades of business-critical code and data at risk just to chase a trend. 

Below, we’ve pulled out the four questions IBM i leaders ask most often, answered using what was actually said in the session.

What does AI-ready data actually mean for IBM i?

Db2 for i holds decades of accumulated business data. The vast majority of that business data was never designed with AI in mind. 

Traditional IBM i system object and column names were often limited to ten characters, resulting in abbreviated names that can be difficult to interpret outside the original application. 

That combination means raw Db2 for i data may not be sufficiently documented, contextualised, integrated or governed to be used directly by an AI application.

Making data AI-ready means addressing that gap on three fronts: cleaning and organising the data, making it readily and securely accessible to external analytics and AI platforms.  

In practice, that context takes the form of longer, descriptive field and table names and column descriptions layered on top of the existing database, plus governance so the data can be trusted once it’s in use. It also usually means bringing in data from outside IBM i, such as CRM systems, and combining it with the IBM i data in one place.

How do you modernise IBM i data access without risking what already works?

The instinct with any modernisation conversation is to assume it means migrating off IBM i.

That has the potential to be an expensive project with real business risk attached. 

That’s not the starting point the Fresche Talk session described. 

The approach discussed is augmentation rather than migration: adding or mapping descriptive SQL table and column names, aliases, views and column descriptions without altering the underlying data or core application logic that already runs the business.

From there, journal-based replication captures inserts, updates and deletes from the IBM i journal and applies those changes to a connected data platform.  

That’s where the metadata, additional data sources and AI access controls get added. The production system carries on exactly as it did before. Several vendors already run a replication tool for disaster recovery or high availability, and the session made the point that AI-focused replication adds no more overhead, and no more risk, than that existing tooling.

How does an MCP server actually expose IBM i data and code to AI tools?

Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers came up repeatedly in the session as the practical mechanism for connecting IBM i data and code to AI agents, whether that’s a GPT-based agent, Copilot, Claude, or something else. 

Once IBM i data is replicated into a governed data warehouse with metadata attached, an MCP server reads that structure and exposes it to chat agents directly, which is what lets a business move from producing static reports to letting people ask direct questions of governed, authoritative data.

The productised MCP server described in the session is read-only by design. 

Write-back is possible, but it requires more than the standard product: it needs its own governance layer, and in most cases it has to pass through the existing application logic that already validates the data, rather than writing to Db2 for i directly. 

That matters on IBM i specifically, because validation rules are often built into the RPG, COBOL or Java program layer rather than the database itself, so bypassing that layer on a write-back path would bypass the checks that keep the data reliable in the first place.

MCP capability also now extends to code and job data. 

X-Analysis, Fresche’s application analysis and documentation tool for IBM i, has added MCP capability, exposing program structure, logic and business rules so they’re consumable in tools like VS Code. 

Presto, Fresche’s browser-based UI modernisation tool, can add a chat or reporting layer on top of green-screen applications using the same approach.

At Proximity, we deliver both X-Analysis and Presto to IBM i clients across many managed services and modernisation projects, so this shift toward AI-connected tooling builds directly on capability many teams already have in place.

How do you protect personal and sensitive data once IBM i data is exposed to AI??

Governance was treated as a first-order requirement, not an afterthought. 

This includes personal and special category data under UK GDPR, as well as PII and PHI in jurisdictions where those terms apply too. 

Two controls came up specifically: logging every tool call made against an MCP server, so there’s a full record of who accessed what data, and assigning clear ownership of governance, whether that’s a dedicated chief data officer in a larger organisation or a shared finance function in a smaller one.

The alternative, without a governed access layer, is what the session called out directly: users export data to Excel and share or analyse it outside any oversight, or turn to publicly hosted AI tools because no approved option exists, feeding company data into models with no control over where it ends up. 

US healthcare organisations subject to HIPAA were highlighted as being particularly exposed to this risk.. Building the governed access layer first, before AI tools are rolled out more broadly, is what prevents that shadow IT problem rather than reacting to it after the fact.

What the result looks like in practice

Put together, this doesn’t require replacing the production IBM i applications. 

RPG and COBOL programs, and the validation logic inside them, stay exactly as they are. 

Replication overhead sits in line with disaster recovery tooling most businesses are already running. And the outcome for the business is a move away from static, IT-produced reports toward direct question-and-answer access to trusted data, delivered through a governed MCP layer with a full audit trail behind it.

That’s a meaningfully different starting point from “replace the platform” or “just plug an AI model into the database,” and it’s why the session is worth watching in full if you’re weighing up where to start.

Watch the full session:

If your team is looking at what it would take to make your own IBM i data AI-ready, without a migration project and without exposing personal or sensitive data in the process, get in touch with Proximity. 

We support, develop, modernise and integrate IBM i applications for UK businesses through a team of 40+ IBM i application specialists.

As a Fresche Solutions partner, we can also talk you through where X-Analysis, Presto or a governed data layer would fit your IBM i estate specifically.

Learn more about Fresche Solutions

The post What “AI-Ready” Actually Means for IBM i Data appeared first on Proximity.

For organisations relying on the IBM i platform to run business-critical applications, however, the question has always been different: how can AI be adopted without compromising the stability, security and reliability that IBM i is justifiably known for?

At the recent i-UG i-Power Conference, that question was answered with absolute confidence. 

AI has not only arrived on IBM i, but it has matured into a practical tool that can help solve real business challenges.

With solutions such as IBM Bob, a specialist implementation of IBM watsonx Orchestrate, organisations can bring the benefits of generative AI directly into existing green-screen applications, database structures and business processes. 

Rather than replacing established systems, AI is enhancing them.

Tackling the IBM i skills gap through AI modernisation

One of the biggest challenges facing IBM i users is not the platform itself. 

IBM i continues to be recognised for its reliability, resilience and long-term value. 

The real challenge is maintaining decades of bespoke applications as experienced IBM i developers retire, move company, or are redeployed onto other projects, and valuable knowledge leaves with them.

Many businesses depend on complex RPG, COBOL and CL applications that have evolved over many years, and in some cases, decades. 

These systems are often poorly documented, making it difficult for new developers to understand how they work or where to begin when making changes.

This is where IBM i AI modernisation can deliver immediate value.

Rather than embarking on expensive and high-risk IBM i migration or replatforming projects, businesses can use AI as an assistant that helps interpret existing applications and preserve valuable knowledge.

And assistant is the operative word there. It is not a complete replacement for IBM i expertise. 

During hands-on demonstrations at i-Power, attendees saw IBM Bob analyse legacy code in real time. 

Using a simple natural language interface, developers could ask questions such as:

• “Summarise what this SAMCO programme does.”
• “What is the purpose of this application?”
• “Explain how this section of code works.”

Within seconds, the AI analysed the source code and returned a clear, easy-to-understand explanation.

By dramatically reducing the time required to understand legacy applications, AI helps shorten the learning curve for new IBM i developers while making experienced teams significantly more productive.

Moving IBM i AI modernisation beyond development

The benefits of IBM watsonx Orchestrate extend well beyond software development.

System administrators can use AI to explore database schemas, identify system anomalies, locate relevant documentation and support modernisation projects with greater confidence. 

AI becomes an additional member of the team, helping experienced IBM i developers complete routine tasks more efficiently while reducing the risks associated with changes to critical systems.

This demonstrates an important point about IBM i AI modernisation: modernising your IBM i environment does not mean replacing it. 

It means giving your existing teams better tools to work more effectively and efficiently.

Building a smarter future for your IBM i

We can’t stress enough the importance of having reliable IBM i developer resources on hand to determine whether the actions an AI model is taking are actually correct. 

Whether your objective is to accelerate development, document decades of legacy code or improve operational support, combining AI with experienced IBM i expertise offers a practical and sustainable path forward.

At Proximity, we help organisations modernise their IBM i applications through development, ongoing support, maintenance and strategic modernisation services. 

If you’re ready to begin your IBM i AI modernisation journey and future-proof your IBM i applications, get in touch with our expert team to discuss your requirements and arrange a comprehensive systems assessment.

In partnership with Fresche Solutions, we are also offering a free, no obligation IBM i Modernisation Proof of Concept (POC). The POC provides an opportunity for IBM i shops to validate the return on investment for transforming RPG code to Java.

As well as taking advantage of Proximity’s team of IBM i specialists, the POC also uses X-Modernize AI from Fresche Solutions.

The post IBM i AI Modernisation: How watsonx Orchestrate is Bridging the Skills Gap appeared first on Proximity.

This month we visited the i-Power event in Milton Keynes and amongst the workshops and presentations, we learn more on the BOB premium edition for i and explore what it offers beyond the standard edition…

And don’t worry, there’s a COMMON Europe Special Episode coming soon…

iPower 2026 Conference in Milton Keynes June 2026

Now, at the beginning of June, i visited the i-Power event in Milton Keynes. It was a two day event with the first day being dedicated to workshops… and it’s with the workshops that we’ll start as there were many.

For the Update, I tend to focus on one particular session to give you a perspective on what’s included.

And for this episode, I’ll feature the IBM AI session which discussed BOB and WatsonX Orchestrate.

The all-day session was hosted by IBM’s very own Andrew Laidlaw.

The workshop was split into two halves, with the morning session focusing on IBM Bob.

IBM Bob workshop

Our very own Dylan (or Bob Dylan as he’s now called) was there, and he joined the session that included installation and set-up, plus a hands-on workshop including guided examples of RPG coding, refactoring and documentation, plus the opportunity to play with it further to create your own code.

In the days following the workshop, we took BOB for a spin ourselves, and you can read all about our initial thoughts here: AI for IBM i Development: Our Hands-On Review of IBM Bob

Agentic AI with watsonx Orchestrate with Andrew Laidlaw

The feedback from the morning session was extremely positive, and the packed room was eager to get back to it in the afternoon, where Andrew provided an insight into Agentic AI using IBM’s own Orchestrate platform, where they used the tool to generate new agents and automation to perform specific, unique business tasks.

Fresh from the workshop, I took the opportunity to debrief with Andrew to discuss the session and the pathway for modernisation and AI on IBM i. 

I opened with a question on AI and asked if he felt that AI gives the IBM i Community a new way to modernise systems without having to replace them? 

Andrew made the point that AI gives IBM i customers a new route to modernisation without necessarily replacing the systems they have spent decades building.

Tools such as IBM Bob can help teams better understand and document their existing code, while also supporting future planning, new functionality and integration with both IBM i native tools and external systems.

Rather than forcing organisations to start again, AI can help them unlock more value from the systems they already rely on.

You can watch the full interview here.

iPower Gala Dinner – Networking, Socialising, and Celebrating

After a full day of workshops, sessions and conversations, the gala dinner gave everyone a chance to relax, catch up and enjoy the social side of the i Power event.

These events are always about much more than the technical content.

They are about bringing the IBM i community together, giving people time to talk properly, share ideas, compare experiences and build relationships that often continue long after the conference has finished.

It was also a great reminder of what makes this community so special.

Around the room, you had developers, vendors, IBM champions, partners, customers and long-standing friends of the platform all sharing the same space.

Good food, good conversation and a few laughs along the way.

After a day spent looking at the future of IBM i, AI and modernisation, the evening was a chance to celebrate the people who continue to make this platform so important.

iPower Keynote with Scott Forstie – Using AI to combat IBM i key challenges

The following morning, Scott Forstie took to the stage for the keynote and opened with a simple but important message.

Your IBM i runs everything, and Bob is there to help you run faster.

That set the tone for the session, because this was not presented as just another AI experiment. It was positioned as a practical response to the very real pressure IBM i teams are under today.

Those pressures will sound familiar to many organisations:

• Critical systems are often supported by a shrinking pool of experienced people.
• Too much knowledge still sits in people’s heads rather than in documentation.
• New developers can take months to become productive on older codebases, while every change request carries a level of business continuity risk.

At the same time, modernisation pressure is growing, maintenance backlogs are getting larger, and teams are being asked to do more with the same resources, or in some cases, fewer.

The keynote then moved into how IBM Bob can help address those challenges with Andrew Laidlaw addressing the congregation.

The core message was that Bob supports productivity and modernisation across six key areas: understanding, explaining, refactoring, generating, transforming and testing.

In practical terms, that means helping new team members understand complex applications more quickly, generating documentation and diagrams, standardising code, accelerating new feature delivery, supporting modernisation from older RPG to more modern approaches, and reducing defect risk through generated tests.

What I thought was particularly interesting was that Bob was not positioned purely as a coding assistant.

The keynote described Bob as an AI-powered development partner across the whole IBM i software development lifecycle.

That means it has relevance not only for developers, but also for DevOps teams, business architects and CTOs:

• For developers, it supports planning, coding, debugging, compiling, documenting, testing and understanding.
• For DevOps, it can support deployment, CI/CD, testing and reviews.
• For architects, it can help extract business logic, identify system dependencies and support documentation.
• For CTOs, the focus is on reducing technical debt, improving workforce stability, lowering operational risk and speeding up innovation.

There was also a strong emphasis on the developer ecosystem around IBM i. The keynote referenced the Open VSX registry and showed how IBM i tooling is increasingly available through VS Code compatible editors.

That matters because it reinforces the direction of travel. IBM i development is continuing to move into more modern development environments, while still retaining the strengths of the platform.

Another important theme was context. Generic AI tools can be useful, but they can also guess when they do not understand the platform properly.

The message from the keynote was that Bob is being shaped to understand IBM i more deeply, using IBM i documentation, Redbooks and platform specific knowledge to provide more accurate and useful responses.

That is a major point for this community, because IBM i development is not generic development. It has its own language, patterns, tooling, database, operating environment and history. More on this later…

The keynote also included feedback from IBM i developers who have already used Bob. The examples focused on modernisation, design documentation, onboarding and test case creation.

One of the strongest themes was that Bob can help capture and share knowledge from large and complex applications, including programs with tens of thousands of lines of code.

That has obvious value when organisations are trying to onboard new developers or reduce dependency on a small number of senior people.

I will come on to the IBM Bob Premium Package for i shortly, because that deserves its own section.

But the wider message from the keynote was clear.

IBM is positioning Bob as a way to preserve critical business logic, reduce risk in change cycles, scale senior knowledge across teams, help new developers ramp faster, and shift IBM i teams from maintenance towards modernisation and innovation.

For me, the important point is that this is not about replacing IBM i developers.

It is about giving them better tools. Bob is being presented as a way to make existing teams more productive, help businesses understand the applications they already rely on, and support a more confident approach to modernisation.

IBM Bob Premium Package for i Overview

Now, Bob has been busy beavering away, swatting up on IBM i.

And as such, on June 24th, the Bob Premium Package for i was released to the IBM i Community. But what’s it all about and what makes it different from the standard package?

Well, in simple terms, it takes the foundation of IBM Bob and tailors it for IBM i.

The Bob Premium Package for i adds direct IBM i connectivity, RPG-focused skills, curated IBM i documentation, expert RPG code generation with IBM i nuanced refactoring, curated technical documentation and unit test generation.

That matters because it shows IBM is not approaching AI-assisted development on IBM i with a one-size-fits-all mindset.

Instead, Bob Premium Package for i appears designed as a platform-aware assistant that understands the realities of IBM i development, from RPG application structures through to the modernisation pressures many organisations are now facing.

Its another sign that IBM sees AI-assisted development not as a replacement for IBM i expertise, but as a way to help preserve, accelerate and extend it.

What separates the Bob Premium Package for i from IBM Bob?

The important distinction is that IBM Bob and the Bob Premium Package for i are not really competing versions of the same idea. It’s just that the premium package for i is a version of BOB especially made for the IBM i.

Think of Bob as a car… normal cars do a splendid job on the road, but when you head for the hills, you need a an off-roader, otherwise you’ll get stuck in the mud.

Yes, the Premium package for i is the car equivalent of a RangeRover.

So, while IBM Bob is the broader AI development partner… the Bob Premium Package for i builds on that foundation but takes it ‘higher’ in the mountainous world of IBM i.

Ok, so what separates it?

Well, the most important detail is that Bob Premium Package for i adds IBM i-native context – grounding the responses in IBM i application logic and native platform practices.

It adds direct connectivity, instead of relying on disconnected copy and paste.

The premium package for i will make use of the development partitions you have on your Power server, making the development and support of your environment familiar to your current practices, enabling read, write, compile, run SQL and test actions too.

It applied specialised skills, curated modes, prompts and workflows for specific RPG, SQL and DDS tasks… to help, understand, explain, refactor, generate, transform, test, compile and manage data too.

And it provides a unified workflow including old RPG to modern RPG routines, business rule extraction from monolithic programs, and DDS to DDL conversion… plus mode-specific commands focused on particular IBM i tasks.

And it’s these four points that explain why the Premium Package for i is different from normal Bob: it is intended to move AI assistance closer to the actual IBM i development workflow.

And why does this matter to IBM i Teams? Well, for IBM i teams, the value of Bob is practical.

It could help new developers understand older applications faster.

It could help experienced developers capture knowledge that may currently live only in their heads.

It could support safer change by improving understanding, documentation and test coverage

And it could help teams spend less time deciphering legacy code and more time modernising the systems the business already depends on.

That is the real opportunity.

Not AI as a novelty, but AI as a way to reduce operational risk, improve knowledge transfer and give IBM i teams more confidence when working with complex, business-critical applications.

So, the Bob Premium Package for i as the more complete version for real IBM i development work. It adds direct IBM i connectivity, a unified developer workflow, specialised IBM i skills and workflows, fewer tokens, better results, and an integrated user experience.

So, while standard IBM Bob already supports IBM i modernisation tasks, the Bob Premium Package for i is designed to take that further by adding native IBM i connectivity, IBM i-specific modes, curated skills, source member access, compile/test capabilities and guided workflows for real IBM i modernisation activity.

Comparison: IBM Bob vs Bob Premium Package for i

Ok, a briefest of deep-dives this table highlights where the difference really sits:

Standard IBM Bob gives development teams a general AI partner across the software development lifecycle. It can help with understanding, generating, refactoring, documenting and automating development tasks across enterprise software projects.

The Bob Premium Package for i adds a more specific IBM i lens. It is aimed at teams working with code and the live IBM i application environments. That changes the value proposition from general AI assistance to something more closely aligned with the way IBM i teams actually work – on the box itself.

So, the biggest shift is context. With direct IBM i connectivity and IBM i-specific capabilities, Bob can move away from disconnected copy-and-paste usage and closer to real application development.

For organisations running business-critical IBM i systems, this is where the announcement becomes significant.

The goal is not just faster code generation. It is safer change, better documentation, improved knowledge transfer and a more practical route to modernisation without losing the business logic that already works.

Great! But this stuff isn’t free… well, after the free trial anyway.

IBM Bob Premium Package for i Pricing

In terms of costs, the IBM BOB Premium Package for i is positioned above the base plans.

So first, a customer would need to choose the appropriate plan for them. In this, Bob allows you to have a free trial with 40 Bobcoins… I’ll get to those in a minute.

Once they’ve been consumed or a month has elapsed, you have a choice of three tiers.

First, Pro at $20 per month is a continuation of the 40 Bobcoin model, so if you’re an occasional coder, a solo developer or a small shop, this may be the tier for you.

Next is Pro+, this provides 160 Bobcoins and may be the sweet spot for most IBM i shops while Ultra is $200 per user per month and provides 500 Bobcoins, the tier for heavy coding and modernisation.

Now after that, i’d probably recommend that the IBM i shop purchase the Premium Package for i. This is an additional $20 per month but does contain all the nuanced IBM i niceties.

IBM Bob: What are Bobcoins?

So, what are Bobcoins? Bobcoins are essentially usage credits.

Instead of just paying for the tool, you’re paying for the amount of AI work you actually use.

Small tasks cost very little, but bigger jobs like code refactoring or modernisation use more coins. It’s a simple model, but it does mean AI becomes something you actively manage, not just switch on.

So, Bobcoins act as a simplified way to measure AI consumption:

• Small tasks: 0.1–0.5 coins
• Code modernisation: 2–5 coins
• Complex workflows: higher usage

This effectively turns AI into a metered resource, rather than a fixed-cost tool.

Should you choose IBM Bob Premium Package for i?

So, the IBM Bob Premium Package for i is not being positioned as another generic AI coding assistant.

IBM makes it clear that they see a real opportunity in helping IBM i teams understand, document, modernise and safely evolve the systems their businesses already depend on.

So, it’s not just that it can generate code, but that it can work with IBM i-specific context, documentation and system knowledge to produce more relevant answers.

And that matters because hallucination and generic AI output are obvious concerns for anyone working on business-critical systems. IBM are positioning Bob as a colleague you can trust.

IBM Bob won’t remove the need for IBM i expertise

The key point here is that AI is a powerful tool, a trusted colleague even. But it is not the whole story. Used on its own, IBM Bob can generate code, explain logic and speed up repetitive tasks.

But without experienced people managing and guiding the work, there is still a risk of missing what really matters.

The best results come when AI works as part of the team.

Let Bob help with the repetitive work:

• Documentation
• First pass analysis
• Routine development tasks.

Then let the developers and business experts apply the judgment, experience and understanding needed to make the right decisions.

For IBM i, this is not about replacing developers. It is about giving teams better tools so they can modernise with more confidence.

So, in closing, I’d say that it’s important to remember that IBM Bob will not remove the need for IBM i expertise; instead, it’ll amplify it.

Once development becomes metered and scalable, the real question becomes, who’s managing it, controlling it, and making sure it delivers value?

And for IBM, that’s where the real opportunity sits.

But for now, that’s it for this June 2026 Update.

I’m Andrew Nicholson, and we’re Proximity, your application support, maintenance and development partners that are in your corner.

If you missed it, catch up on our May IBM i update, or access all the IBM i Updates in one place.

Alternatively, if you’d like to receive the latest IBM i Update hot off the press to your inbox, subscribe to the IBM i Update on LinkedIn.

The post IBM i Update: June 2026 – IBM Bob Premium Package for i appeared first on Proximity.

Recently, some of our IBM i development team attended the iPower conference, hosted by i-UG, where they had the opportunity to experience IBM Bob, an AI-powered software development assistant tailored specifically for the IBM i ecosystem.

Following the workshops, our developers, Darren and Dylan, took IBM Bob out for a spin in a real-world trial environment. 

We sat down to discuss our findings, what we learned, and how IBM i users can responsibly start experimenting with AI.

Read on below for our hands-on review of IBM Bob.

Where IBM Bob shines: System context and modernisation

Generic AI coding assistants like ChatGPT are great for general-purpose code, but they fall short when it comes to the highly specialised nuances of the IBM i language base. 

That is where IBM Bob brings a significant shift to the IBM i community.

As Bob has been developed by IBM, and specifically for the IBM i, it is deeply integrated into the IBM i file system (IFS), so it not only knows where to look, but it also knows what to look for. 

It understands system dependencies, library structures, and the context of your specific environment. 

During our trial, we discovered three key areas where Bob could add immense value to an IBM i development team:

1. Code conversion and modernisation: One of the first tasks we threw at it was converting legacy RPG III code into modern RPG ILE. Bob handled this with, quite frankly, impressive accuracy, making it a potentially powerful tool for IBM i modernisation projects.
2. Legacy documentation: If you have business-critical programs that haven’t been touched in 15 years, Bob is incredibly useful for parsing the logic. It can review a legacy program, identify the other programs it calls, list the physical or logical files it interacts with, and generate comprehensive documentation to help developers understand what the system is doing. 
3. SQL optimisation: When asked to look at our database interactions, Bob accurately suggested improvements to optimise our SQL statements. It predicted a 50% to 60% performance improvement, and when we ran the update, the benchmark numbers proved it right!

It is worth noting that Bob could, for instance, be used in conjunction with Fresche’s X-Analysis suite for application documentation. 

Alternatively, Fresche has added AI capability natively into X-Analysis, which is a new development to the already impressive X-Analysis tool. 

The challenges: Pushing the boundaries of generative code

It wasn’t all seamless, however. 

When we pushed Bob past analysis and optimisation into completely writing or modifying complex chunks of execution code, we did manage to break it.

Using these AI capabilities requires “Bob Coins” (the platform’s token system). 

When Bob got things wrong, we had to prompt it to fix its own errors, which quickly burned through our token allocation. 

We even jokingly asked it for our Bob Coins back, but unfortunately, the AI couldn’t help us there!

For this reason, we don’t see it completely writing new code from scratch just yet, though we are highly anticipating the new Premium version to see how these capabilities mature.

A roadmap for IBM i teams: How to get started

If your organisation is looking to trial IBM Bob or similar generative AI tools on the IBM i, we highly recommend a cautious, phased approach:

• Start with read-only permissions: Do not give an AI tool write access to your code repositories or production environments right from the start. Start by configuring its permissions to ‘read-only’.
• Focus on analysis first: Use the tool to analyse your codebase, map out workflows, and document business logic. Let it show you how it understands your files and system structure before you let it modify them.
• Build team experience: Allow your developers to build familiarity with the IDE extension (it runs comfortably inside VS Code for i) in a safe sandbox environment before integrating it into active development workflows.

Accelerate your IBM i modernisation with Proximity

AI tools like IBM Bob are shifting the landscape of what’s possible, but maximising their value still requires seasoned IBM i expertise. 

We’ve been using various AI tools within our IBM i support and development team for the past year-or-so. 

The challenges we identified with Bob are not unique and should be a cautionary tale for any IBM i shop considering using AI within their toolset.

AI shouldn’t be used as the only or main tool for IBM i projects. 

It should be seen as a tool to speed up the process. You simply can’t escape the fact that without a skilled IBM i development resource.

Tools such as IBM Bob, no matter how good they are, could get you into a lot of trouble, and fast.

Whether you are looking to modernise legacy RPG code, document decades of technical debt, or simply need expert support to keep your core systems running at peak performance, Proximity is here to help.

Ready to transform your green screens or optimise your IBM i applications?

To learn how our development and support services can future-proof your business, contact Proximity today

The post AI for IBM i Development: Our Hands-On Review of IBM Bob appeared first on Proximity.

In this episode of the IBM i update, we ask whether IBM i is the perfect platform for native agentic AI? How MCP will be the bridge between your data and AI automation. Ask when IBM i skills become a resilience risk and the latest on the events circuit too…

You can watch the video above or read the blog post below…

IBM Announces IBM Bob Premium

First, we start with BOB, and IBM announced this month that the Bob Premium Package for i is planned for general availability on 24 June 2026.

But what is the Premium Package?

In simple terms, it takes the foundation of IBM Bob and tailors it for IBM i.

The Bob Premium Package for i adds direct IBM i connectivity, RPG-focused skills, curated IBM i documentation, code generation, refactoring, technical documentation and unit test generation.

That matters because it shows IBM is not approaching AI-assisted development on IBM i with a one-size-fits-all mindset.

Instead, Bob Premium Package for i appears designed as a platform-aware assistant that understands the realities of IBM i development, from RPG application structures through to the modernisation pressures many organisations are now facing.

Its another sign that IBM sees AI-assisted development not as a replacement for IBM i expertise, but as a way to help preserve, accelerate and extend it.

Common Norge in Oslo

Now, at the start of the month, I enjoyed the pleasure of attending the COMMON Norge Professional Day in Oslo.

This event brought together the IBM Power community for a packed agenda centred on Power11, AI and the evolving role of IBM Power in enterprise technology.

Hosted at the IBM Client Centre, which was just a nice walk along the riverbank from my hotel in the centre, the event combined strategic sessions from IBM experts with practical technical content for the wider Power and IBM i community.

The day opened with a focus on Agentic AI, exploring how organisations can move beyond isolated AI projects and begin turning artificial intelligence into operational and commercial value.

This theme continued throughout the agenda, with sessions showing how IBM Power is being positioned as a secure, resilient and increasingly AI-ready platform for mission-critical workloads.

I enjoyed meeting new contacts, and the food and company were excellent. Now, I wish I could report more, but unfortunately, the majority of the presentations were in Norwegian – thankfully for me, the slides were mostly in English, so I was able to follow along.

There was one presentation in English, however, and that was mine!

Yes, for the first time, I presented an IBM i Update live.

Here I covered a few pertinent articles from recent updates, including project BOB, what AI means for IBM i developers and analysing the results of the IBM i Marketplace Survey.

My summary? Well, what stood out most was the direction of travel. IBM Power is no longer being discussed purely in terms of stability and reliability, although those qualities remain essential. Increasingly, the conversation is about how the platform can underpin AI, automation, modernisation and secure enterprise innovation.

My thanks to Erik Aasland and the Common Norge team for their invitation and hospitality.

Is IBM i the perfect agentic AI operating system?

Now, while IBM i was not designed for the AI era, many of the design decisions that made it successful may now make it ideal for enterprise AI. So, could IBM i be the perfect agentic operating system?

Well, this was a prevailing theme that ran through the PowerUp event in New Orleans at the end of April.

That IBM may be repositioning IBM i entirely – not just to survive the AI era, but to lead in it.

And that’s because of the intrinsic nature of the architecture of IBM i that provides the foundation layers the AI needs to operate effectively…

Now, this starts with data.

And unlike many open systems environments, where organisations often have to stitch together databases, data lakes, middleware, security layers and governance tools, IBM i already has its core business data tightly integrated into the platform through its integrated Db2.

And this matters! Because AI is only useful when it can access trusted, meaningful, well-governed data.

For IBM i customers, the data often already sits alongside the business logic, security model and operational processes that give it context. That makes IBM i a strong candidate for AI use cases such as:

• Querying live operational data
• Generating business insight
• Supporting decision-making
• Monitoring transactions
• Helping users understand trends and exceptions

The point is not just that IBM i has data. It has business-critical data with context.

In addition, Enterprise AI cannot simply be allowed to wander through business systems unrestricted.

There has to be security in place to help protect the system and data integrity, without being overtly complex, to set up and manage and of course, this is where IBM i has a natural strength.

Security and identity are not bolted on as an afterthought.

They are part of the platform’s design, and that gives IBM i a credible foundation for AI that is not just clever, but controlled.

AI needs to know:

• Who is asking the question
• What that person or agent is allowed to access
• Which actions are permitted
• Which data should remain protected
• How authority is controlled

For agentic AI, this is vital. If an AI assistant or agent is going to interact with live business systems, it must operate within a controlled authority model.

IBM i already has strong native concepts around users, object authority, adopted authority, auditing, access control and system-level governance.

Then there’s access and identity. You see, agentic AI needs to know who is asking, what they are allowed to see, and what actions they can perform.

IBM i already has strong user profiles, authority models and access controls to manage trust, permissions and accountability across the platform.

Now, AI agents are not just chatbots; they may need to run tasks, monitor activity and trigger processes.

IBM i already has native capabilities around job scheduling, batch processing, job queues, message queues and operational state.

These are the kinds of platform-level capabilities that AI agents need if they are going to become useful inside real enterprise environments.

Or, In other words, IBM i already understands how to run business processes reliably. This is a major advantage when you start thinking about AI agents that need to support operations rather than just produce text.

AI agents need to understand:

• What task are they performing
• When should it run
• What happened previously
• What state is the process in
• Whether something is completed, failed, or requires attention

IBM i has always been trusted for transactional workloads. Orders, invoices, stock movements, financial postings, warehouse updates and customer records need to be processed accurately and reliably.

For AI, this is critical.

If AI is going to make recommendations, explain what happened, support users, or eventually trigger actions, then businesses need confidence that the underlying platform can maintain integrity.

That means:

• Transactions must be reliable
• Changes must be traceable
• Activity must be auditable
• Compliance requirements must be supported
• Business-critical processes must not be compromised

IBM i’s strength here is that auditability and transactional integrity are deeply embedded in the platform. This makes it far better suited to serious enterprise AI than environments where governance has to be created after the fact.

If AI is going to support or take action in enterprise environments, businesses need traceability and IBM i already has strong auditing, logging and compliance capabilities built into the platform.

The final point is operational visibility.

AI becomes much more useful when it can understand not just the data, but the wider operating environment. IBM i can expose a huge amount of system information through logs, messages, jobs, queues, SQL Services, performance data and operational monitoring.

This is where IBM i Services and SQL Services become particularly important. They provide a structured way to access system information, which can then be used by AI tools, assistants or agents.

That opens the door to AI use cases such as:

• Summarising system health
• Identifying abnormal activity
• Explaining job failures
• Helping support teams triage incidents
• Reviewing performance trends
• Surfacing risks before they come out

So, what does this mean?

Well, simply speaking, Enterprise AI needs more than a large language model. It needs a trusted operating environment around it.

It needs integrated data, security, identity, scheduling, transaction integrity, auditability and operational visibility.

And these seven foundations are not new concepts on IBM i.

They are part of the platform’s design. And that is what makes IBM’s positioning so interesting.

While many organisations are trying to assemble these capabilities across multiple tools and platforms, IBM i customers may already have much of the required foundation in place.

How MCP is the bridge between IBM i and agentic AI

Now, while the foundational aspect is all there within IBM i, we’ll still need to connect and interact with external systems, tools and data sources.

That’s where MCP (or Model Context Protocol) comes in.

You see, MCP acts as the bridge between IBM i and Agentic AI… Because AI is only useful when it can work with real business context, across the enterprise.

So, your IBM i will already contain huge amounts of trusted operational data within the Db2. However, other operational data, services and processes may be within external systems – perhaps stored within SQL.

MCP gives AI agents a way to access that information in a structured, controlled and useful way.

That means an AI model could, for example, connect to IBM i data, query sales information, review operational trends, inspect system status, or help produce reports based on live enterprise data.

Jesse Gorzinski demonstrated this idea at POWERUp, showing how an IBM i-based MCP server could connect an AI model to sales data in Db2 for i and then generate a PowerPoint presentation from the insights it found.

The important point is that this is not about wrapping a chatbot around an old system.

As Adam Shedivy explained at POWERUp, the opportunity is to build agents that participate in the operating model itself: agents that can reason, decide and act over business processes in a controlled way.

And this is where IBM i becomes especially compelling.

Because the platform already has the core capabilities agentic AI needs: identity, security, scheduling, state management, auditability and access to trusted data.

MCP does not replace those strengths. It exposes them to AI in a more modern and standardised way.

That is why MCP could become such an important part of the IBM i AI story. It provides the connective tissue between AI models and the live enterprise systems where real business happens.

In other words, MCP may be the mechanism that allows IBM i to become not just AI-enabled, but genuinely agentic-ready.

The IBM i skills gap could be your biggest resilience risk

IBM i has always had a strong reputation for resilience.

For many organisations, that resilience conversation has traditionally focused on infrastructure: hardware reliability, backups, high availability, disaster recovery, replication, role swaps, cyber recovery and data protection. All of that matters.

But there is another form of resilience that is becoming just as important: application resilience.

That same argument applies just as strongly to the applications running on IBM i. Because for many businesses, the real risk is not simply whether the IBM i platform is available.

It is whether the business has the right people, knowledge and support model in place to keep the applications running, changing and recovering when needed.

One of the most important observations in Ash Giddings’ article is that deep IBM i knowledge is often concentrated in a small number of individuals.

These are the people who understand the nuances of the environment, the dependencies between applications, and the practical steps required when something unusual happens.

I’m sure that this will sound familiar to many IBM i customers:

• They know which jobs need to run in which order.
• They know which programmes were changed for a specific customer requirement ten years ago.
• They know which interfaces are business-critical, even if they are not well documented.
• They know what to check when a warehouse process, invoicing run or EDI flow fails.
• That knowledge is incredibly valuable.

But if it exists only in people’s heads, it is also a risk.

When those individuals retire, move roles, reduce hours, go on holiday or are unavailable during an incident, the business can quickly discover that its application resilience is weaker than expected.

High availability can help keep systems running. Disaster recovery can help restore or switch environments. Infrastructure resilience is essential.

But application continuity depends on more than the machine being available.

A business also needs to know:

• Who understands the application landscape
• How core processes work
• Where the customisations are
• What dependencies exist between systems
• How incidents are triaged and resolved
• How changes are tested and promoted
• How support is provided when the internal expert is unavailable

This is where application managed services become part of the resilience conversation.

The objective is not simply to outsource support. It is to reduce dependency on individual knowledge and build a more sustainable operating model around the application estate.

Many IBM i applications have been developed and refined over decades. That is often a strength. These systems reflect the business in detail and support processes that generic software would struggle to replicate.

But over time, documentation can drift. Development standards can change. Interfaces can multiply. Batch processes can become harder to understand.

Business logic can become embedded in code, procedures and operational routines that are not always visible to new team members.

A good application managed service should help turn that tribal knowledge into managed knowledge.

That means building an understanding of:

• The application structure
• Core business processes
• Key programmes and data flows
• Batch schedules and dependencies
• Interfaces to third-party systems
• Known issues and recurring incidents
• Change and release processes
• Business-critical periods and operational priorities

This is not a one-off exercise. It should be part of an ongoing service model, where knowledge is continually captured, refined and shared across a wider team.

That is what reduces resilience risk.

A more mature approach would ask:

• Are key applications documented?
• Are critical processes understood by more than one person?
• Are interfaces mapped?
• Are batch schedules and dependencies visible?
• Are support procedures repeatable?
• Are changes tested and promoted in a controlled way?
• Are external specialists familiar with the environment before an incident occurs?
• Is there a plan for retirements, absence or skills loss?

These questions are not always comfortable, but they are necessary.

And the time to act is before the skills walk out the door.  Many organisations only address IBM i skills risk when it becomes urgent.

• A key developer retires.
• A support analyst leaves.
• A critical incident exposes a knowledge gap.
• A project stalls because nobody fully understands an area of the system. A business change becomes risky because the application impact is unclear.

And by then, the business is already on the back foot.

A better approach is to treat application knowledge transfer as a planned resilience activity.

That can include discovery, documentation, shadowing, support onboarding, code analysis, process mapping and gradual transition into a managed service model.

The aim is not to replace internal teams. In many cases, the best model is a blended one: internal business knowledge supported by external IBM i specialists who provide depth, cover and continuity.

That gives the organisation more confidence and avoids the classic risk of relying on one or two people to carry an entire application estate.

IBM i remains one of the most resilient enterprise platforms available.

But platform resilience is only part of the story.

If the applications running on IBM i are critical to the business, then the skills, knowledge and support model around those applications must be treated as part of the resilience strategy too.

High availability protects the environment. 

Disaster recovery protects the recovery path. And Application managed services protect the knowledge, support and continuity around the business logic itself.

That distinction matters.

Because when IBM i skills become scarce, the risk is not just technical.

It’s operational, it’s commercial, it’s organisational.

And for many businesses, the real question is no longer whether IBM i can keep running.

It is whether the people and processes around it are resilient enough to keep the business running with it.

i-UG’s i-Power 2026 event preview with Steve Cast from Fresche

And finally, we’ve a couple of events coming up that I’ll be attending and even speaking at – yes, in the middle of June, we have the COMMON Europe event in Lyon France.

Now, if you’re looking to attend, please join me for the IBM i Update Live – yes, a presentation of some of the hit articles and a little more will be presented by me late Monday afternoon. Do join me if you can.

But before then, we have the i-Power event in Milton Keynes at the beginning of June.

I’ll be there too, hosting the Proximity/Fresche booth at the event.

Please do come and say hello!

Now if you’re ‘umming and arring’ about attending, or just don’t know what to expect – I spoke with COMMON Board member Steve Cast to provide an insight and a bit of a preview. You can see the full interview here:

Time is now of the essence, so if you would like to join the event, please register here – https://iugipower2026.sched.com/

And that’s it for this months update.

I’m Andrew Nicholson, and we’re Proximity, your application support, maintenance and development partners that are in your corner.

If you missed it, catch up on our April IBM i update.

Follow this link to access all the IBM i Update’s in one place.

Alternatively, if you’d like to receive the latest IBM i Update hot off the press to your inbox, subscribe to the newsletter version on LinkedIn.

The post IBM i Update: May 2026 – Is IBM i the perfect platform for native agentic AI? appeared first on Proximity.

After three years in Northampton, the Leonardo Hotel in Milton Keynes will host this year’s event.

• Dates: Tuesday 2nd June and Wednesday 3rd June 2026
• Location: The Leonardo Hotel Milton Keynes, 300 Midsummer Boulevard, MK9 2HP, Milton Keynes, UK

Andy Nicholson sat down with fellow IBM Champion, Steve Cast last week to discuss the conference.

Steve is Senior Vice President, EMEA & APAC at Freshe Solutions, and holds the positions of Treasurer of Common Europe and Marketing Director of i-UG.

Catch the full interview in the video below:

In recent years, the i-Power conference has focused on AI and open source capabilities within the IBM i platform as well as interfacing data on POWER for AI purposes.

The theme for 2026? 

AI on IBM i has come of age. 

Day 1 (Tuesday): Workshop Day

• Features a mix of full-day and half-day workshops.
• Gala Dinner takes place in the evening.

Day 2 (Wednesday): Conference Day

• Features keynote presentations to the whole conference, individual conference sessions, networking, and refreshments.

Who should attend i-Power?

IBM i developers, System Administrators, IT leaders, or a mix of topics for all? 

Steve explains:

“We try and stream or section off different parts of the event for different audience members. Very much the first day, so that’s the Tuesday this year, is very much orientation around technical education. So by virtue of it being education and workshops, almost certainly that’s attracting a technical audience. The second day, with the IBM keynote, so what’s IBM roadmap look like? What are the AI solutions that IBM are working on? Everybody’s talking about Bob, so IBM Bob and how that’s going to revolutionise the way we develop software. All of those kind of topics draw in the decision makers, not just the technical teams”.

Those sessions at i-Power confirm what, to many IBM i shops, is the primary concern to the IBM i platform.

The growing skills gap. 

As we’ve explored in previous editions of the IBM i Update, our IT leaders and System Administrators in the IBM i community face a critical resource shortage. 

They’re often managing teams where developers are nearing retirement age.

This is the reality highlighted in the latest Fortra IBM i marketplace survey which highlights that as the number one concern for IBM i based businesses. 

This shortage of experienced RPG developers means business critical IBM i applications are at risk, leaving businesses in urgent need of reliable application support and continuity.

IBM’s Bob has been positioned as a developer assistant designed to help close this gap by enabling newer developers to gain understanding of so-called legacy code.

However, there is a potentially dangerous misunderstanding among some in the IBM i community.

Bob is an assistant for coding, it is NOT a modernisation solution for your entire IBM i application estate.

Steve points out in the interview that is not the tool to convert applications from RPG to another language or to eliminate years of legacy technical debt.

For that, you need skilled, experienced IBM i developer specialists.

“I don’t think there’s much of a shortage of kind of Java developers or open source knowledge,” comments Steve. 

He adds: “They’re all coming out of university, people with those kind of skills. The legacy RPG understanding is a little harder to teach. So maybe with something like Bob that helps us to understand the code. But a really critical point, if I may, is that Bob is very much a developer assistant, so a coding assistant. I think there’s a little misconception that Bob is somehow going to modernise your entire application or understand that entire application”

That’s not what IBM are trying to do with Bob. Bob is there to aid us as a developer.

It’s not there to kind of transform the entire application from one form of RPG to another, or RPG to Java, or whatever route you want to go. Bob’s not really the tool for that.”

For those of you who are interested in learning more about IBM Bob, i-Power has two full day workshops on Day 1 which delve into the possibilities further.

IBM AI: Bob & watsonx Orchestrate is split into a morning (Bob) and afternoon (watsonx) session. The morning includes hands-on demonstrations of some of the capabilities of Bob’s AI-powered Software Development assistant.

The afternoon focuses on IBM Agentic AI through watsonx.

In the other Bob-focused workshop, Carol Woodbury and Scott Forstie look at cyber security around the use of Bob with a demonstration of “the power of using IBM Bob for IBM i security tasks.

In addition, they’ll discuss the security safeguards and proper configurations you’ll want to consider when implementing AI.”

Register for i-Power 2026

You can register and see a complete schedule of events over the two-days through the i-UG website. With the packed itinerary, there’s bound to be something of interest for everyone.

The post What to expect at i-UG’s i-Power Conference 2026 appeared first on Proximity.

In this episode of the IBM i update, we discuss AI on IBM i and ask if we’re heading for a productivity breakthrough or is this just a bubble that’s about to burst?

You can watch the video above or read the blog post below…

Opportunity vs risk of AI on the IBM i

AI has become impossible to ignore in the IBM i world.

Gartner, the huge multi-national technology analyst firm is rather cautious on AI.

If you search ‘bubble’ on their website you get a slew of results that paint a tone of tempered optimism, where the opportunity is acknowledged, but the risk of inflated expectations and short-term disillusionment is never far behind.

As reported by The Register, Gartner’s view is sobering. Estimates suggest that up to 70% of AI projects could fail, while as many as 75% of vendors in this space may disappear.

Scary right? But let’s put some context behind these figures.

The Gartner report was mainly geared towards mainframes, a place where scale and interdependency of these systems make full migration physically and financially unrealistic for most enterprises.

So, the failure rate is largely about ambitious mainframe transformation programmes, not practical IBM i augmentation projects. I would suggest that the 70% failure reflects expectation – not technology failure.

Indeed, Gartner themselves advise caution due to what they describe as “The gap between the ‘marketing promise’ of generative AI…” As such, set your expectations accordingly.

As for the 75% of vendors disappearing, well, every emerging tech scenario goes through this.

The AI bubble vs the .com bubble

If you’re as old as I, then you’ll remember the .COM bubble where all anyone needed to throw money at a project was an idea – valuations of companies exploded with no proven business model.

Thousands of startups launched and investors piled in on potential, not delivery. Most of these startups disappeared within a few years.

Today, we’re seeing the same with products being rebranded as ‘AI-Powered’ but I think we’re learned enough (and with hindsight) understand that expectations shouldn’t run before reality.

So yes, many startups and business born on the AI revolution will appear and disappear just as quickly, and poor projects will fail – thousands of them.

But also, today the .COM the market is now larger than ever anticipated with Google and Amazon leading the charge.

AI is different from the .com era.

The fundamentals are stronger, the technology real and adoption being driven by tangible business value.

The lesson from the dot-com era isn’t that the technology failed – it’s that the hype did.

And we’re seeing the same pattern emerge with AI.

For IBM i organisations, the opportunity isn’t in chasing the bubble, but in applying AI where it genuinely adds value – on top of systems that already work.

How you can achieve good AI outcomes

What should we apply to ensure that we’re not just another nearly-run?

Well, good AI outcomes come from strong foundations:

1. Clear governance
2. Clean architecture
3. Well documented
4. Trusted data
5. Well-defined processes
6. Good people

So, this isn’t a signal to avoid AI, it’s a warning to approach it with clarity, structure and good dollop of realism.

AI-assisted tools can significantly reduce the time, cost, and risk of modernisation, but they need to be applied with a clear understanding of where they add value.

But perhaps the most critical component of this your data.

Indeed, IBM are saying the same thing.

Within their, ’Your AI is only as good as your data’ white paper, IBM explain that “In the AI era, no matter what industry you’re in, you’re in the data business.”

So, AI is only as good as the data that goes into it.

And this alone makes your organisation’s data its most important asset.

You can download a copy of the white paper here.

According to IBM, high-quality data isn’t just about volume, it’s data that is

• Accurate and correctly reflects the business, its processes and outcomes too
• Complete, with all data being present with no missing pieces
• Consistant and uniform across the systems and matching formats [dates, currency, decimal place…)
• Timely, up to date and available for when it’s needed (even archived data)
• Fit for purpose, so relevant for the task in hand be that for process, reference or even audit

IBM are clear – poor data quality is one of the most common reasons that AI initiatives fail.

Put it simply, AI models learn from whatever you give them, garbage in, garbage out.

If the data is flawed, biased or incomplete, the output will be flawed – at scale.

So, where success previously meant good code, in the AI era, success means good data.

AI-based code modernisation on the IBM i

When we have that good data in place, what can we do with that foundation layer?

Well, AI-based code modernisation is moving from concept to commercial reality on IBM i.

As highlighted recently in IT Jungle, new tools are emerging to help organisations understand legacy applications faster, uncover hidden business logic, assist with refactoring, and accelerate productivity.

We’re seeing the likes of Profound Logic, ARCAD and Remain Software providing teams with tools that analyse, convert and test complex estates.

Fresche too provide such tools but in addition, their XA-AI extracts the business logic and leverages this scematical information to support the generation of meaningful – connected code.

And of course, there’s Project Bob that’s pushing AI-assisted development and code understanding further into the mainstream.

But be aware, this isn’t push-button modernisation.

AI doesn’t replace skilled developers; it amplifies them. Human judgement is still critical for preserving business logic, validating outputs, and governing change.

And that’s the big opportunity: not AI replacing developers, but experienced IBM i teams using AI to modernise faster, reduce risk, and do more with scarce skills.

Amid the AI hype, the platform itself keeps evolving… albeit it slower in other areas as IBM i Technology Refresh appears to be arriving later than usual, reportedly to align with a broader Power announcement.

Rather than cause for concern, it may point to a bigger coordinated platform story involving IBM i 7.6 TR2, and potentially new Power hardware.

So, what may be coming downstream?

Well, this is all speculation but we may see better support around AI-assisted development tooling while improvements for project Bob have already been mooted.

Sticking with the AI theme, enhancements to SQL services for metadata access (of which will enhance AI-assisted analysis) plus features aimed at making IBM i data easier to expose to AI workloads may become present too.

Security is always a priority and I’m sure we’ll see more around zero-trust too. It would be a joy so see improvements in performance maybe enhancing DB2 (although this is more akin to tuning a Ferrari).

What are your thoughts, you do you think will be announced – let me know in the comments below.

PTF Guide – Updates for Java Security within the Java SDK / Runtime

And finally, this month’s PTF Guide is really a security story, centred on significant Java vulnerabilities affecting IBM i.

IBM has issued fixes across 7.4 through 7.6, with updates to Java, defective PTF and QMGTOOLS groups.

The takeaway is simple: patch discipline remains a key part of IBM i risk management.

Another reminder that on IBM i, stability doesn’t happen by accident… It’s maintained.

And that’s it for this months update.

I’m Andrew Nicholson, and we’re Proximity, your application support, maintenance and development partners that are in your corner.

If you missed it, catch up on our March IBM i update.

Follow this link to access all the IBM i Update’s in one place.

Alternatively, if you’d like to receive the latest IBM i Update hot off the press to your inbox, subscribe to the newsletter version on LinkedIn.

The post IBM i Update: April 2026 – Is AI on IBM i a productivity breakthrough, or a bubble ready to burst? appeared first on Proximity.