In July, I invited you to join us on a journey. Through our statement of direction, BMC outlined a bold vision for the future of mainframe modernization—a vision where artificial intelligence (AI), generative AI (GenAI), and the cloud would become essential tools in simplifying mainframe transformation. Today, I’m excited to share the next major step in that journey: the introduction of BMC AMI Assistant.
Before we delve into the powerful capabilities of BMC AMI Assistant, it’s important to understand the real-world impact this technology can bring to your organization as you strive to simplify and transform the mainframe environment. At this pivotal moment for the mainframe, organizations are not only scaling their workloads, but also looking to modernize the way they work. For example, application development leaders have told us that they are eager to move developers and system programmers (SysProgs) off the green screen and onto modern tools that accelerate innovation, lower operational costs, and address the widening knowledge and skills gap.
BMC AMI Assistant is paving the way for the future of mainframe environments, providing your organization with a roadmap for GenAI-driven solutions that are common in other IT landscapes but now tailored for the mainframe. By simplifying complex tasks, automating routine processes, and enabling teams to innovate faster, BMC AMI Assistant can help your organization fully embrace new ways of working—modernizing mainframe applications and operations to stay competitive while maximizing the value of your existing infrastructure.
Increasing productivity across the talent pool
Mainframe organizations are grappling with a demographic shift: Senior-level mainframe professionals are retiring, taking decades of “tribal knowledge” with them, and leaving a knowledge gap behind. Customers are also needing to grow mid-career professionals and identify the next generation of leaders to hand the reins to. By embracing GenAI enhancements in the daily workflow, mainframe organizations ultimately will have more productive people, more collaborative teams, and a stronger, more resilient organization that can withstand the day-to-day pressures of ransomware attacks, regulator needs, and new initiatives with confidence.
According to the 2024 BMC Mainframe Survey, this shift is stark. Since 2019, there has been a 23 percent drop in respondents with 20+ years of mainframe experience, while the number of respondents with six to 10 years of experience has increased by 14 percent.This demonstrates a clear demographic change that is reshaping how organizations manage and optimize their mainframes.
Simultaneously, mainframe priorities have evolved. AIOps, once ranked ninth as a priority in the 2023 survey, rose to the third-place priority in 2024, and for large organizations, it became the second-highest priority. However, managing AIOps is becoming increasingly complex. In fact, 60 percent of extra-large organizations that prioritize AIOps report that they plan to use GenAI to tackle this complexity. Additionally, a recent study found that one of the top potential GenAI use cases in financial services is code modernization. It is clear there is value to be captured by embracing this new technology.
This is where BMC AMI Assistant steps in. BMC AMI Assistant is not a separate solution—it is BMC’s implementation of GenAI technology, infused directly into existing BMC AMI solutions across the stack of applications, operations, data, and security, transforming everyday activities into more intelligent, responsive, and intuitive experiences for your practitioners. This allows organizations to leverage GenAI without having to leave the products they are already working in. By automating tasks, providing real-time insights, and offering actionable recommendations, BMC AMI Assistant helps bridge the knowledge gaps in mainframe expertise, simplifies the effort of mainframe management, and eases the burden of managing increasingly complex workloads.
A strategic AI partner for mainframe management
The roadmap for BMC AMI Assistant is designed to seamlessly integrate into the BMC AMI solutions your teams already use, enhancing and simplifying your daily management operations with the power of “in-product” GenAI capabilities. Whether you’re a developer navigating complex code, an operator diagnosing performance issues, or an IT manager reviewing metrics and reports, GenAI-driven functionality will enrich the tools you already know, providing advanced capabilities without adding complexity to your environment. Acting as both a copilot, guiding teams with real-time insights, and an autopilot, automating routine tasks, the assistant will help ensure continuity and efficiency.
At a broader level, BMC aims to continue the deep partnerships with our mainframe clients and ensure that the innovations we put into our overall portfolio help you continue to simplify the mainframe platform so it can be treated like any other IT platform, with common approaches to management and tools that excite new practitioners to get involved in this space.
Bridging the knowledge gap with BMC AMI Assistant
BMC AMI Assistant can act as one critical element of your organization’s strategy to address the significant loss of expertise from the loss of retiring mainframe professionals by encoding expert knowledge into the products themselves. This enablement, along with education and recruitment, can be the “third leg in the stool” of an organizational strategy for talent preservation and growth.
One core element of our approach is to enable all team members across a mainframe environment to be more efficient and productive, regardless of their skill level:
- Developers: Real-time code explanations simplify complex legacy code, empowering even those new to mainframes to work efficiently.
- SysProgs: AI-driven root cause analysis allows SysProgs to identify and resolve incidents faster, ensuring operational resilience without relying on expert intervention.
- IT managers: Real-time insights and proactive recommendations generated automatically by GenAI help IT managers optimize performance, reduce inefficiencies, and make faster, smarter decisions.
By infusing GenAI into BMC AMI solutions, BMC AMI Assistant not only bridges the knowledge gap for next-generation mainframers, but also empowers developers, SysProgs, operators, and IT managers at every level. It enhances productivity by automating repetitive tasks and providing real-time insights and recommendations, enabling even seasoned mainframe experts to make faster, more strategic decisions while focusing on initiatives that drive greater efficiency and innovation within their organizations.
BMC AMI Assistant in action: The new capabilities available now
I am delighted to announce today three key areas where BMC AMI Assistant is now available for application development and operations teams, and couldn’t be prouder of our engineering team who have brought these new AI-driven capabilities directly into the BMC AMI solutions you rely on.
- Eliminate the fear of changing complex unfamiliar code: Now supercharged with GenAI-driven BMC AMI Assistant, BMC AMI DevX Code Insights eliminates developer roadblocks by providing rapid understanding of complex code. From within the daily workflow, developers can instantly comprehend unfamiliar code, enabling confident maintenance and extension of mainframe applications. The in-product experience allows code explanations to be inserted as comments, empowering developers to review, extend, and test code with unprecedented efficiency.
- Expand mainframe development to include industry-standard VS Code: BMC AMI DevX Code Insights, with its new GenAI functionality, is now available in BMC AMI DevX Workbench for VS Code, allowing developers to quickly understand complex and unfamiliar code with real-time runtime visualization, structure, and logic charts for guided improvement. From the familiar VS Code environment, developers can track data flows, refactor complex programs, and comment out dead code, simplifying mainframe software development. Now, users of Workbench for VS Code will have access to the GenAI services of BMC AMI Assistant, and, from the editor of BMC AMI Workbench, get the benefit of code explanations.
- For organizations that leverage BMC AMI DevX Workbench for VS Code and hold a license for BMC AMI DevX Code Insights, BMC AMI Assistant can extend its AI-driven capabilities to BMC AMI DevX Code Debug and BMC AMI DevX Code Coverage. This allows developers to streamline software development processes, enabling teams with limited mainframe expertise to work more effectively and efficiently.
- Resolve issues faster and minimize downtime: BMC AMI Assistant has been infused into BMC AMI Ops Insights (Beta), providing an explanation feature specifically for SysProgs. It delivers root cause analysis and explanations for performance issues and outages in mainframe systems in clear, plain language. SysProgs can gain a clear understanding of the root cause, show how metrics and KPIs are interrelated, and, in upcoming versions, receive actionable recommendations to speed up the resolution process. This infusion of GenAI helps ensure faster recovery and reduced downtime by delivering the insights SysProgs of all experience levels need to resolve issues quickly.
Reducing toil while continuously improving mainframe development
Development and IT managers often struggle with the manual effort of gathering, analyzing, and interpreting the multitude of metrics necessary to make informed decisions and continuously improve the mainframe application development process. Reducing this toil while still obtaining actionable insights is crucial for optimizing performance.
Earlier this year, BMC introduced a cutting-edge feature within BMC AMI zAdviser Enterprise (available as a SaaS solution, but currently in Beta for on-premises deployment), an early example of how we’re leading the way in mainframe transformation. Powered by GenAI, BMC AMI zAdviser Enterprise automates repetitive and redundant tasks, allowing users to focus on more strategic initiatives. This is a prime example of how BMC continues delivering innovative technologies that empower organizations to modernize their mainframes efficiently.
BMC AMI zAdviser Enterprise’s autopilot capabilities allow users to automatically generate detailed reports on key DevOps metrics (including summary, analysis, and recommendations for improvement), enabling IT managers to monitor and optimize performance continuously. This example highlights our ongoing commitment to driving mainframe modernization through the power of AI.
Conclusion: You’ve never mainframed like this
BMC AMI Assistant is just the beginning of a broader effort to make mainframe environments simpler and more efficient through the power of AI. As the assistant’s capabilities expand, it will continue to reduce complexity and enhance efficiency across mainframe operations, all within the BMC AMI solutions you already rely on.
With BMC AMI Assistant, we are fulfilling our promise to simplify mainframe management and address the knowledge gap left by retiring experts. By automating tasks and providing real-time insights, this GenAI-powered assistant transforms how you manage teams and optimize mainframe environments.
As we continue to enhance its capabilities, BMC AMI Assistant will help your teams simplify mainframe management with confidence and ease. The future of mainframe transformation is here, and you’ve never mainframed like this.
To learn more, watch this video in which Six Five Media’s Steven Dickens and Mike Vizard talk with BMC Vice President of R&D David Jeffries and Senior Product Development Architect Anthony DiStauro about BMC AMI Assistant and the future of AI on the mainframe.
