Which industry will AI disrupt last? Banking, because of COBOL

Which industry will #AI disrupt last?
At a recent lunch discussion, someone said: “#Banking. Because of #COBOL.”
And that’s not a joke, COBOL powers.
• ~95% of ATM transactions and 80% of card swipes in the US
• ~250 billion lines of code power businesses globally
Much of the core banking backbone still runs on a language created in 1959.

Over time, developers moved away from COBOL. Banks didn’t!
The result?
A shrinking pool of engineers maintaining mission-critical systems…
While institutions hesitate to modernize due to:
• Massive migration costs
• Regulatory scrutiny
• Operational risk

For decades, legacy systems acted as a moat.
Now AI may be turning that moat into a vulnerability.
Recently, #Anthropic announced new #Claude capabilities that claim to:
• Analyze massive COBOL codebases
• Extract business logic
• Translate into Java or Python
• Generate test suites
Compress multi-year migration timelines into weeks!

Markets reacted fast.
#IBM reportedly saw its sharpest single-day fall in 25 years, over 13%, as investors processed what automated legacy migration could mean.

Will the AI software live up to its expectations? Only time will tell!