Predictions to content creation: AI’s powers explode

The programming language Cobol was first used in 1959. It still powers many critical systems around the world that handle large amounts of data and transactions. But the number of developers who know Cobol is dwindling, given that the language is barely used now. Who then will maintain these critical systems? The way out seems to be to convert the Cobol codes into Java codes. The world still has lots of Java coders. But then, it would be a hugely laborious process to convert all of that code.

Last month, IBM announced that it will use generative AI to do this conversion. Since ChatGPT was introduced late last year, generative AI models have proven to be excellent at code generation – they have learnt from the humongous amount of code that has been written over the past decades.