Gartner: AI is not a silver bullet for mainframe exit

The promise of AI providers to accelerate the departure from mainframes and legacy code should be viewed with skepticism, according to a new analysis by Gartner market researchers. “More than 70 percent of mainframe exit projects initiated in 2026 will fail to produce the intended benefits due to an overestimation of generative AI tooling capabilities,” they predict in a current analysis.

Among investors, it is currently common to make AI capabilities the sole measure of a company's health. This is one of several factors currently leading companies to use AI even where it is not sensible. However, Gartner analysts warn that most mainframe exit projects could lead to cost overruns and, moreover, endanger business and operational continuity.

The field of AI services for mainframe exits will also thin out considerably, Gartner estimates. “By 2030, 75 percent of vendors operating in the 'mainframe exit' market will either pivot their business models or cease to exist,” is the forecast here.

Bright future for the mainframe

Market researchers, on the other hand, see a significantly more positive future for the mainframe. Despite the trend towards cloud-native architectures, the mainframe remains the leading platform for certain business-critical applications. Thanks to unique, integrated functions, these systems can boast “unmatched” resilience, security, high availability, and transaction integrity.

Because of these properties, enormous amounts of transaction data have accumulated on the mainframe platform over decades. Their volume and complex interconnections make a complete migration “physically and financially impossible” for most large companies anyway.

Accordingly, Gartner expects a decreasing urge to exit the mainframe. Instead, companies are focusing on moderate modernizations. Generative AI can be helpful here, for example, to more easily identify technical debt or improve support. However, AI shows significant limitations in automated conversion of legacy code.

AI panic caused IBM to crash

The topic of legacy mainframes has recently come up due to a widespread fear in the stock markets about which industries and business models will be disrupted by AI next. An announcement by provider Anthropic that Claude could significantly accelerate time-consuming processes for modernizing COBOL source code caused IBM's stock price to drop sharply in February.

However, IBM doesn't just earn money from supporting old systems – the z17 mainframes introduced in April of the previous year achieved record sales, the company announced in January with its Q4 2025 results. In addition, the company had already presented its AI tool for more efficient conversion of COBOL to Java in 2023.

(axk)