2024 is the year of AI adoption on the mainframe, according to the State of Mainframe Modernization Survey from Kyndryl.

The survey also reaffirmed that while modernization projects are delivering significant financial benefits, many organizations continue to face skills shortages, preventing the transformation of complex, mission-critical systems.

As business leaders face economic, competitive, technological and regulatory challenges, they are increasingly seeking to transform and derive new value from their IT estate, including the mainframe. The survey among 500 business and IT leaders reveals that 86% of respondents are quickly adopting AI and generative AI to accelerate their mainframe modernization initiatives.

A third of respondents indicated that the platform has become a foundation for running AI-enabled workloads.

Additionally, almost half aim to use generative AI to unlock and transform critical mainframe data into actionable insights.

According to the survey, IT modernization projects and patterns are yielding substantial business results, including triple-digit one-year return on investment (ROI) of 114% to 225% and collective savings of $11.9 billion annually.

Almost all organizations have opted for a hybrid IT strategy — a combination of modernizing on the mainframe, integrating with public/private cloud, and moving applications and data off the platform. Furthermore, 96% of respondents are migrating some workloads — on average 36% — to the cloud.

Respondents identified enterprise-wide observability as critical to effectively leveraging all data across their hybrid IT environment. In fact, 92% of respondents indicated that a single dashboard is important for monitoring their operations, but 85% stated they find it difficult to do this properly.

The survey also confirmed that many respondents are still grappling with a skills shortage, especially in new areas such as generative AI that can facilitate mainframe transformation and help alleviate the skills gap.

In addition, security skills are in high demand due to increasing regulatory compliance requirements, with almost all respondents flagging security as the key factor driving modernization decisions. With this increased pressure, the survey revealed that 77% of organizations are using external providers to deliver mainframe modernization projects.