Fujitsu has unveiled an AI system capable of understanding COBOL — the ancient programming language still underpinning trillions of dollars of global banking and government infrastructure — and automatically generating design documentation in minutes rather than hours.
IBM, which has long dominated COBOL modernisation services, faces a significant new competitive threat as AI dramatically lowers the expertise required for legacy system analysis.
COBOL was created in 1959 and remains in active use at 95% of major global banks, most government agencies, and a significant portion of the healthcare sector. An estimated 220 billion lines of COBOL code are still in production worldwide.
The problem has always been expertise. The average COBOL programmer is over 55 years old, and the number of people who can maintain these systems is shrinking rapidly. Fujitsu's AI solution could fill this gap.
The system works by parsing COBOL source code, identifying business logic patterns, and generating structured documentation in Japanese and English. It can process a 100,000-line COBOL program in approximately 20 minutes, compared to the weeks it would take a human expert.