Kresimir Mudrovcic and his team of programmers spend months on end trawling through computer code that can be three times as old as the crew’s youngest members.
Mudrovcic specializes in mainframe technology, involving computers tracing their roots to the dawn of the digital age and the ancient software that sometimes runs on them. Upgrading such systems is painstaking work, often entailing sifting through millions of lines of code to understand how specific functions operate. Mudrovcic, an IT consultant, compares it to archeology.
But the work is getting easier, thanks to the widening use of generative artificial intelligence to do some of the heavy lifting. “AI systems work like that smart, very experienced, very wise old colleague who knows everything,” said Mudrovcic, whose team recently deployed such tools to help speed up modernizing the pension system of a European government agency.
Similar efforts are underway at companies and gove