In the world, financial transactions are processed daily worth 3 trillion dollars using a 64-year COBOL programming language, which almost no one is studying. Despite the fact that most educational institutions stopped his teaching a decade ago, Cobol remains one of the leading programming languages for mailframes widely used in the banking sector, automotive, insurance, state, healthcare, and finance.
According to the International Journal of Advanced Research in the Field of Science, Communications, and Technologies, 43% of all banking systems still use Cobol, which processes these transactions in the amount of 3 trillion dollars per day, including 95% of all operations at the US ATMs and 80% of all transactions with credit cards.
The main problem is that now few are interested in the study of COBOL. Programming on it is considered bulky and ineffective, and the code is read like an English lesson. Moreover, the coding format requires thoroughness and is not flexible, and compilation takes much more time compared to competitors. Because of this, experts who know how to work with Cobol and support it are becoming an increasingly rare occurrence.
IBM offers a solution to this problem using AI. The company has developed an AI assistant for coding (Watsonx), which helps to translate the old Cobol code into more modern languages, thereby saving programmers many hours of reprogramming. This process can be simplified before transforming the essay in English into EspiRanto using Chatgpt. It allows programmers to take part of the Cobol code and convert it to Java using Watsonx. However, in practice, everything is not so simple.
Skyla Lumis, Vice President of IBM Z Software in IBM, emphasizes: “AI Assistant can provide up to 80-90 percent of the necessary result, but additional adjustments are required. This is a means