The 1st COBOL newsletter of the year, featuring practical GenAI use cases in COBOL modernization and some of the 2026 trends.
Hi everyone,
Thank you all for an incredible 2025. It’s been inspiring to see more customers upgrading to Rocket Visual COBOL 11.0 and adopting GenAI in Rocket COBOL Analyzer to accelerate modernization without disruption.
Looking ahead, 2026 will bring even more GenAI‑powered innovations shaped by your needs and feedback. Expect richer content, deeper insights, and more customer success stories that show how to drive innovation with COBOL.
Welcome to our first newsletter of the year, featuring practical GenAI use cases in COBOL modernization and some of the 2026 trends to kick things off.
COBOL Now:
High‑value enterprise use cases for GenAI
Industry analysts are clear: GenAI delivers the greatest value when it augments engineers, not replaces them. Here are a few examples of how GenAI is already bringing meaningful impact to COBOL modernization efforts today.
1. Accelerating modernization with lower risks
Today’s COBOL applications often span millions of highly customized lines, where even small errors can disrupt mission‑critical operations. GenAI helps organizations modernize safely and incrementally by improving code understanding, surfacing hidden dependencies, performing impact assessments, and guiding smarter transformation decisions.
2. Boosting developer productivity and closing skill gaps
With GenAI‑assisted tools embedded in familiar environments like VS Code, any engineer can quickly navigate large COBOL codebases, receive real‑time guidance, and understand business logic faster. This speeds up development while easing the pressure created by shrinking COBOL expertise across the industry.
3. Driving new business value and staying competitive
Enterprises can preserve trusted COBOL logic while modernizing it through cloud integration, APIs, and updated toolchains. GenAI accelerates this by improving analysis, integration, and developer workflows, allowing businesses to innovate without pausing operations or compromising stability.
Rocket Software’s approach to GenAI for COBOL modernization
At Rocket Software, we equip engineers regardless of their background to work confidently with COBOL by delivering GenAI‑driven insights grounded in your business context and domain expertise. Our approach is intentionally pragmatic and deterministic.
We don’t push entire applications into an LLM and hope for hallucination‑free results. Instead, we combine GenAI with static code analysis, product documentation, custom‑built prompts, and over 50 years of deep expertise in COBOL and mission‑critical systems.This ensures trustworthy insights, safer modernization pathways, and real enterprise value, not shortcuts that put systems at risk.
Want to go deeper? Read more about how GenAI is transforming COBOL modernization on our blog.
COBOL Events:
Trends for 2026
Watch the recording
The State & the Future of COBOL
Watch the webinar recording to learn how to overcome misconceptions about COBOL, how GenAI is transforming COBOL code analysis, and what’s ahead for modernization in 2026 and beyond.
Voice of COBOL
Thanks to everyone for being part of this vibrant COBOL community! We’d love to hear what would help you get even more value from your COBOL applications this year.
What would you enjoy seeing more of: feature walk‑throughs, GenAI tips, real modernization stories, industry examples, or even something fun like COBOL memes?
Share your ideas in the comments. Your input guides what we create, and together we can make this space even more valuable for you and your business.
