IBM i leadership changes, Power hardware performance, AI initiatives for IBM i, open‑source tooling updates, succession planning and hiring strategies, career retirement schedule, vscode‑rpgle development release, cost‑effective modernization advice, security concerns about shadow AI, free virtual learning events, and brief commentary on naming disputes.
Welcome to another edition of Talsco Weekly
- IBM i Brief: 🪜 One Retirement, A Whole New Bench. 📈 IBM Stumbled. Power Had Its Best Quarter in Years..
- AI: 🧱 AI with IBM i. 🐝 BeeAI. 🔄 Why Multi-Model AI Is the Future of Enterprise Architecture.
- Career: 🎮 Steve Will’s retirement schedule, revealed.
- Development: 🚀 vscode-rpgle 0.33.9: Small Fixes, Real Relief.
- Hiring: 🧩 Succession is a system, not a scramble.
- Leadership: 🤝 The last act of a good IBM i leader.
- Learning: 🔧 Free, Virtual, and Aimed at Your Next Skill. 🎤 Forty-Nine Sessions. One Platform. ⚖️ IBM i A Niche, Yes. Afterthought, No.
- Modernization: 🧭 Google’s AI Pitch: Modernize Your Mainframe by Leaving It. 🔄 Stop Modernizing. Start Lowering the Cost of Change.
- Security: 🔒 Shadow AI Is the New Shadow IT. 🛡️ IBM i’s New Superpower: Knowing What You’re Exposed To.
- Commentary: 🤔 Two Naming Fights, One Distraction.
IBM i Brief
🪜 One Retirement, A Whole New Bench
Steve Will retired. The bench barely blinked.
Kris Whitney, who built the popular Db2 Mirror, is the new chief architect. He shipped the product. Now he sets direction. And the handoff runs deeper than one seat: Keri Olson now directs IBM i development, with new senior roles for Brandon Pederson and Amy Blea.
IBM promoted builders from within. That is what succession looks like when you plan for it. Does your shop have a plan that deep? If not, reach out .
📈 IBM Stumbled. Power Had Its Best Quarter in Years.
IBM’s Q2 disappointed Wall Street. Revenue rose just 1 percent, guidance was trimmed, and a mainframe slump drove the miss. Underneath, the Power line that runs IBM i had its strongest quarter in years, with IT Jungle estimating Power revenue up about 41 percent on the Power11 cycle.
Our Take: The story Wall Street told and the story IBM i shops should hear are different. The hardware under your applications is not fading. It is accelerating.
AI
A new IBM guide maps how to bring AI to IBM i workloads: comparing stacks from IBM-native to open source, showing how Power hardware accelerates models on-premises, and profiling solutions IBM i teams know, like IBM Bob .
The IBM i Angle: Shops that never rushed to the cloud keep the edge. Your operational data sits in Db2 for i, and now the route to AI is documented. New words to learn: stack, MCP, agentic. Same platform underneath. A force multiplier, not a replacement.
BeeAI is a pair of open, Linux Foundation projects born at IBM Research: one framework for building rule-bound agents, one stack for deploying them. Both are MCP and A2A native, framework-agnostic, and free of vendor lock-in.
Our Take: That IBM i MCP server the guide points to? Here’s where those tools get orchestrated. Expose IBM i through MCP, then compose agents from open, vendor-neutral pieces instead of betting the shop on one platform. The blocks are IBM’s, and they’re open.
🔄 Why Multi-Model AI Is the Future of Enterprise Architecture
The winners built foundations, not demos.
Rapid AI experimentation has produced plenty of impressive demos and very few production systems. Enterprises keep optimizing for today’s model instead of designing for scale. Real progress requires architecture, governance, context, orchestration, and business ownership operating as one. Different workloads need different models, so orchestration matters more than raw model choice. As AI matures, architecture becomes the competitive advantage that lasts.
The IBM i Take: This is IBM i’s argument, made by an enterprise analyst. Integrated by design, governed at the core, one foundation instead of a hundred bolted-on services. The community’s patience with the hype now looks like foresight.
Career
🎮 Steve Will’s retirement schedule, revealed
His retirement schedule is heavy on video games.
That’s Steve Will’s own read on the weekday plan he just published, six months before retiring as IBM i’s Chief Architect. Alongside the games: Star Trek re-watches, morning workouts, and a deliberate absence of social media and phone games.
Breaking It Down: Funny how personal the exit is. Some leave the moment the passion fades or the culture sours. Others keep a hand in the craft. Some pivot, some travel, some return to work altogether . Steve is scripting his. Most of us won’t, and probably should.
Development
🚀 vscode-rpgle 0.33.9: Small Fixes, Real Relief
Community tooling for RPGLE keeps getting sharper.
The latest vscode-rpgle release adds quality-of-life wins for anyone editing RPGLE in VS Code. Jump straight from an opening block to its matching close on IF/ENDIF, DO/ENDDO, or SR/ENDSR, a real time-saver in dense legacy members. Bracket matching, fixed-format embedded SQL handling, and large-file performance all improved too.
From the Field: This is what open-source IBM i tooling looks like when the community shows up. See the full changelog , then update and give it a spin.
Hiring
🧩 Succession is a system, not a scramble
You cannot document a retirement at the exit interview.
Clean code stays easy to change. A ready bench works the same way. The plan comes first, not the panic. RPG veterans are heading for the door, and the important part of the job never made it into the docs. It lives in their heads. So talk to them now. Regular, honest conversations about what they touch and why. Then turn those answers into an onboarding template.
Let’s talk about your IBM i succession plan.
Leadership
🤝 The last act of a good IBM i leader
This community gave you a career. Return the favor.
Hiring is the plan. Leadership is who carries it out. If you have led an IBM i team and retirement is close, you have one project left. Call it a duty or servant leadership. The platform treated you well. Pass the baton on purpose. Document what only you know. Mentor the next hire. Whether you gave this shop twenty-five years or two, the question is the same. Did you leave it better than you found it?
Learning
🔧 Free, Virtual, and Aimed at Your Next Skill
Curiosity is cheap. Reps compound.
Two IBM Bob events are live for the community right now: the AI Builders Challenge and the free Dev Day: Bob in Action hackathon, August 27 to 30, with IBM i and IBM Z tracks.
Breaking It Down: The prizes point to IBM TechXchange 2026 in October. The underlying current is talent. Shops facing succession gaps just got a low-cost way to build AI muscle before the retirements land.
🎤 Forty-Nine Sessions. One Platform.
IBM TechXchange 2026 is IBM’s flagship technical conference, spanning watsonx, IBM Z, storage, Red Hat, and the full portfolio. Inside that lineup, IBM i and Power claimed 49 sessions.
Not a booth. Not a hallway conversation. Forty-nine slots on the agenda of the company’s biggest developer event, competing for stage time against every brand IBM sells.
Hold that number. The next block is about what it signals.
⚖️ IBM i A Niche, Yes. Afterthought, No.
Know the difference.
Our Take: Forty-nine IBM i and Power sessions, inside an event running more than a thousand, is a small slice. Call it niche and you are right. Call it an afterthought and the agenda disagrees. Afterthoughts do not get 49 sessions and deep expert time at IBM’s marquee developer event. The community has spent years feeling overlooked. This lineup says otherwise.
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