Welcome to another edition of Talsco Weekly

IBM i Briefs: 💰 The 12% line item hiding in IBM i’s 2027 pricing.
AI: 🤖 IBM i admins, the Power11 sidecar has your name on it.
Development: ⏰ Your version of Bob may stop working September 30.
ERP: ⚙️ Infor’s IBM i users spent a week on AI. Now ask about 2026.
Hiring: ⏳ AI isn’t the biggest threat to your IBM i bench. Retirement is.
Leadership: 💸 Developers felt 20% faster. They were 19% slower.
Learning: 🎧 Still hearing “legacy”? IBM’s Power GM has an answer.
Open Source: 🧰 IBM i’s green-screen toolkit is packing up.
Security: 🔐 The IBM i admin every shop wants right now.
Trends: 🏭 McKinsey’s AI trends run straight through IBM i’s industries.

IBM i Briefs

💰 The 12% line item hiding in IBM i’s 2027 pricing

IBM’s annual price hike lands January 1.

IBM quietly told business partners in early September that its annual price harmonization takes effect January 1, 2027. Customers did not get a formal announcement letter.

Power Systems hardware is spared. The software around it is not.

Power Systems software rises 9 percent, and IBM i Software Maintenance (SWMA) rises 12 percent. Technology Lifecycle Services maintenance goes up 10 percent.

IBM cites inflation, currency swings, supplier costs, and tariffs, plus the value of new AI and automation features.

Current pricing holds through December 31. That gives shops a window to renew or buy at today’s prices.

Why It Matters: SWMA is the line that keeps climbing. It rose 10 percent in each of the last two years, and now it’s 12. Read that as a nudge toward subscription.

Ask your IBM partner two questions before December 31. What does renewing SWMA cost compared with moving to subscription? And what can you lock in now?

Every dollar spent on a surprise renewal is a dollar that doesn’t go to your next hire.

AI

🤖 IBM i admins, the Power11 sidecar has your name on it

The new S1112 puts AI next to IBM i.

IBM’s new single-socket Power11 server, the S1112, makes room for a sidecar.

On the 10-core model, the box splits into partitions. IBM i gets up to four cores and keeps entry-level P05 pricing. The other six run a Linux partition right beside it.

That Linux side is where the AI goes. Every Power11 chip has on-chip Matrix Math Acceleration, so AI inference can run on-prem without GPUs, right next to your Db2 for i data. Nothing leaves the building.

IBM’s AI architect for IBM i has simple advice: if your answer on AI is maybe, buy the 10 cores.

Our Take: IBM i admins, this is your time to shine.

Someone has to stand up that Linux partition, patch it, manage the Python environment, and wire it securely to Db2 for i. That’s rarely the RPG developer.

The admin who already owns the box, the partitions, and the security is the natural owner of the sidecar.

Learn Linux on Power now. Shops buying the 10-core model will need that person, and the ones without one will be looking to hire.

IBM i admin ready to own the sidecar? Let’s talk about where that skill set is in demand. Book a call.

Development

⏰ Your version of Bob may stop working September 30

Bob V2 is required. Premium is optional.

If you run IBM Bob 1.0.3 or 2.0.0, it stops working September 30. The V2 upgrade is not optional.

V2 is faster, with parallel tool calls, background tasks, and task-level rollback.

Premium for i is the bigger news. For $40 per user per month on top of your Bob plan, Bob works directly in QSYS and the IFS: edit, compile, run CL and SQL.

ERP

⚙️ Infor’s IBM i users spent a week on AI. Now ask about 2026.

inPOWER 2026 put AI at the center.

inPOWER 2026 wrapped last week in Pewaukee, Wisconsin. It’s the annual gathering for Infor’s IBM i ERPs: XA, LX, and System21.

This year, AI ran through the whole agenda. A full day of AI content opened the week. Sessions covered AI in manufacturing, a live demo taking an idea to a working app with an AI agent, IBM Bob, and building tools on top of the ERP without replacing the system of record.

A Thursday case study walked through automating an AP remittance process with AI, including where human technical and business knowledge stayed essential.

One session title said it best: “AI for the Skeptical, the Curious, and the Slightly Terrified.”

Our Take: AI got the spotlight. The roadmap deserves a follow-up call.

Coming out of last year’s inPOWER, Infor targeted 2026 for a stack of changes across its IBM i ERPs:

IBM i 7.6 support for XA, LX, and System21
REST APIs for all three
System i Workspace Liberty, a browser-based UI, targeted for the third quarter
XA Release 9.2 reaching end-of-life, with customers encouraged to move to Release 10

The third quarter ends next week. If you run one of these ERPs, ask your Infor rep where each item stands and what it means for your upgrade plan.

Then ask the harder question: who on your team will do the work? REST APIs and AI tools only pay off when someone knows both the ERP and IBM i.

Hiring

⏳ AI isn’t the biggest threat to your IBM i bench. Retirement is.

Demographics may matter more than AI.

The biggest threat to the labor market may not be AI. According to Indeed’s chief economist, it’s demographics.

The US civilian labor force shrank from 171.5 million to 169.7 million between December and August. Retirements are rising, fertility is falling, and immigration is declining. Indeed expects industries less exposed to AI to be hit hardest.

Her advice to employers comes down to three moves. Hire for skills, not titles. Stop treating a degree as proof of ability, and invest in upskilling. And offer the pay and perks people actually want, including remote and flexible work.

Our Take: On IBM i, both things are true. Boomers are retiring, and the knowledge going with them is still very much needed.

AI is closing part of that gap. It can walk a newer developer through old RPG in minutes, which makes adjacent talent more viable than ever.

What it can’t replace is judgment about how your business runs. Hire for skills, pair new people with a veteran, and let AI shorten the ramp.

Short on IBM i talent, or ready to widen the net? Let’s talk. Book a call.

Leadership

💸 Developers felt 20% faster. They were 19% slower.

The hidden cost of AI coding is people.

Developers using AI tools felt about 20 percent faster. A randomized trial found they were 19 percent slower, mostly from reviewing and fixing AI output. A follow-up with newer agentic tools found productivity improved.

That gap is the point of IBM’s piece on where AI development costs hide. Tokens are easy to count. Review time, rework, and validation are not.

One telemetry study of about 22,000 developers found median pull request review time up 441 percent as AI output rose.

Costs rarely disappear. They move.

Our Take: On IBM i, those moved costs land on one desk: your senior developer.

AI can write RPG faster than ever. Someone still has to review it against decades of business logic, and that person is usually the one closest to retirement.

If AI is in your plans, so is the reviewer. Hire or develop that capacity before the pull requests pile up.

Planning for AI and a retirement at the same time? Let’s talk. Book a call.

Learning

🎧 Still hearing “legacy”? IBM’s Power GM has an answer

IBM makes its case for IBM i’s future.

Every IBM i professional has heard the word legacy. Usually from someone who has never logged on.

At COMMON’s POWERUp 26 opening session, IBM Power General Manager Hillery Hunter made the counterargument: IBM i remains one of IBM’s most strategic platforms.

She covers new IBM i and Power11 capabilities, where IBM keeps investing, and how agentic AI creates opportunities for the business. It also covers modernization strategies and IBM’s AI roadmap for Power.

The recording sits behind a short form. COMMON members sign in.

New to IBM i: Watch this before anyone calls your platform a dead end. You’ll hear where IBM is putting its money.

Been around a while: You know it works. This is where it goes next, and a gut check on whether your skills are headed the same way.

Open Source

🧰 IBM i’s green-screen toolkit is packing up

The tools you grew up on are moving.

The tools IBM i developers learned on are moving into VS Code.

Code for i, launched by Liam Allan in 2021, is nearing 93,000 installs and now leads RDi in usage. Its IBM i FileSystem extension, production-ready since June 1, handles 22 object types, plus the jobs and spooled file views admins live in.

Next is a DDS renderer built to handle what SDA does. SDA is one of the ADTS green-screen tools IBM wants shops to leave behind. The renderer is not production-ready yet.

The direction is clear. One editor, one workflow, built on SQL services.

Our Take: Reread your job descriptions. If the posting still says “RDi required,” you may be screening out the developers you most want, the ones already working in VS Code.

The platform skill is RPG, SQL, and knowing the system. The editor is a preference.

Hire for the first, and let people bring the second.

Security

🔐 The IBM i admin every shop wants right now

The security skills gap is widening.

AI is helping attackers write malware, run phishing campaigns, and find vulnerabilities at machine speed. The window to detect and respond keeps shrinking.

A security vendor’s 2026 skills gap report puts numbers on it. More than eight in ten organizations reported at least one breach in the past year. More than half of those hit put the cost above $1 million, up from 38 percent in 2021.

Yet security hiring is stalling. Companies struggle to find senior talent, and boards push back on new security headcount even when they call it a priority.

From the Field: We’re seeing a clear rise in IBM i shops asking for one profile: the admin with real security experience.

It makes sense. IBM i has a well-earned reputation for security, but that reputation assumes the system is set up properly. Default settings, loose object authority, and forgotten user profiles quietly undo it.

The admin who can lock that down, and prove it to an auditor, is one of the most valuable people on the platform right now.

Trends

🏭 McKinsey’s AI trends run straight through IBM i’s industries

Where AI goes next, and who it hires.

McKinsey’s 2026 Technology Trends Outlook ranks 14 technologies. Four are AI-specific, and AI amplifies the other ten.

Two findings stand out for IBM i. Physical AI is showing up first in manufacturing and logistics, because that’s where the payback is clearest. And inference is overtaking training, with chips now designed around specific AI workloads.

The hiring data shows where each trend stands. In the four AI trends, more than 75 percent of job postings are still R&D.

Cybersecurity is further along. More than half its postings are operations, sales, and administrative roles. It’s past the lab and into deployment.

Our Take: Look at who runs IBM i: manufacturers, distributors, logistics companies, retailers, banks, and insurers. Two of those, manufacturing and logistics, are where McKinsey says physical AI lands first. And the data AI needs, meaning orders, inventory, and shipments, already lives in Db2 for i.

That puts IBM i shops closer to AI value than most, if they have the people. Three openings stand out:

Development. AI is writing code faster than teams can review it. RPG developers who can direct and review AI output are the scarce skill.
Infrastructure. Inference chips are the hardware story of the year. Power11 already carries on-chip AI acceleration, and someone has to run those workloads.
Security. It’s the trend hiring for operations now, not research.

The industries are positioned. The question is whether the talent is.

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Talsco Weekly: IBM i just got a sidecar. Who’s riding in it?