CAST integrates AI into software development to boost IT departments

CAST, a key player in software intelligence, has unveiled a significant upgrade in its offerings, incorporating artificial intelligence (AI) into application development and maintenance (ADM). This initiative is foreseen to provide unparalleled value to IT departments within Global 2000 companies, particularly in managing vital custom-built applications.

This substantial technological advancement, announced in New York and Paris on December 7, 2023, is a strategy expected to enhance AI's role in ADM. It aims to unlock previously unseen value for the IT organisations of Global 2000 companies regarding their critical custom-built applications. CAST's objective is to focus on the maintenance and modernisation of existing software, tackling a principal challenge in the ADM arena.

Presently, the role of AI in ADM is centred on generating new code. However, well over 75% of ADM resources are traditionally expended on maintaining, enhancing, and modernising existing applications, either in place or for cloud environments. This task requires profound and comprehensive comprehension of each application's unique composition— a challenge that exceeds the current scope of large language models (LLMs) restricted to publicly available data. Consequently, a considerable gap in the existing AI engine's comprehension of application functionality exists, restricting AI's potential in aiding refactoring, modernisation, and cloud migration.

To address this gap, CAST's software intelligence technology offers a solution. It auto-reverses engineering and extracts vast amounts of detailed metadata about the internal structures of complex software systems. This information can effectively ground AI engines, enabling them to understand, maintain, and modernise existing applications with precision and efficiency.

In a collaborative effort, CAST's research and development team has joined forces with several global system integrators and leading AI providers over the last nine months. This collaboration has shown that grounding AI with outputs from CAST's software intelligence technology enables LLMs to illuminate the inner operations of a whole software system. Consequently, AI-powered smart agents will be equipped to assist humans in altering, fixing, modernising, or adapting complex software to a specified cloud environment. The collaboration is nearing a significant milestone with a working prototype anticipated by the close of the year.

This innovation represents a significant leap forward in technology. It is expected to markedly enhance the productivity of ADM teams working on application modernisation and evolutive maintenance. It underscores CAST's dedication to enabling AI to provide substantial additional value to IT organisations globally. It goes far beyond the creation of new code by revolutionising how existing code is comprehended and augmented.