Experts see opening for IT in Anthropic’s big COBOL code jolt

As IBM made steady recovery after the stock’s historic plunge on February 23, IT industry experts emphasised that AI startup Anthropic’s advances in reading and modernising legacy COBOL code are more likely to unlock opportunities instead of threatening businesses.

Legacy codes have been built upon for more than five decades, creating a ‘spaghetti’ structure, and are therefore conducive to a plug-and-play AI model-as-a-solution. So, even as the pricing per line of code will shrink, the scope of work will increase for tech services as enterprises make this transition, the experts said, adding rewriting COBOL codes entirely could potentially unlock a $1.6 trillion opportunity.