By Isabelle Bousquette

Morgan Stanley is now aiming artificial intelligence at one of enterprise software's biggest pain points, and one it said Big Tech hasn't quite nailed yet: helping rewrite old, outdated code into modern coding languages.

In January, the company rolled out a tool known as DevGen.AI, built in-house on OpenAI's GPT models. It can translate legacy code from languages like Cobol into plain English specs that developers can then use to rewrite it.

So far this year it's reviewed nine million lines of code, saving developers 280,000 hours, said Mike Pizzi, Morgan Stanley's global head of technology and operations.

Modernizing legacy software has always been a major headache for businesses, which sometimes have code dating back decades that can weaken security and slow the adoption of new technology. And yet it's been one of the most difficult problems for new AI-powered coding tools.

These commercial tools are excellent at writing new, modern code. But they don't necessarily have as much expertise in less popular or older programming languages, or in those customized for a given company, Pizzi said. It's an area many tech companies are working on, but at the moment, their offerings don't have the flexibility enterprises need, he added.

That's why Morgan Stanley opted not to wait.

"We found that building it ourselves gave us certain capabilities that we're not really seeing in some of the commercial products," Pizzi said. The off-the-shelf tools might yet evolve to deliver those capabilities, he said, "but we saw the opportunity to get the jump early."

Morgan Stanley, he said, was able to train the tool on its own code base, including languages that are no longer, or never were, in widespread use. Now the company's roughly 15,000 developers, based around the world, can use it for a range of tasks including translating legacy code into plain English specs, isolating sections of existing code for regulatory enquiries and other asks, and even fully translating smaller sections of legacy code into modern code.

But when it comes to full translation, the technology still has some room to mature, he said. It can technically rewrite code from an old language like Perl in a new one like Python, but it wouldn't necessarily know how to write it as efficient code that takes advantage of all Python's capabilities, he said. And that's one big reason humans are staying in the loop, he said.

Where the tool really shines is in translating legacy code into English specs, basically a map of what the code does, according to Pizzi. It's something an ever dwindling pool of developers, trained on super-old or specific coding languages, knows how to do. With those specs, any developer can then write the old code as new code in a modern programming language, he said.

Pizzi said you're not going to see fewer heads in software engineering, just more code -- including more AI apps -- that will help Morgan Stanley deliver on its business goals. Currently, the company has hundreds of AI use-cases in production aimed at growing the business, automating workflows and doing it more efficiently.

But none of that is possible without a modern, standardized, well-thought out architecture, Pizzi said.

"You're always modernizing in tech," he said. "Today, with AI this becomes even more important."

Write to Isabelle Bousquette at isabelle.bousquette@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

June 03, 2025 07:00 ET (11:00 GMT)

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