Talsco Weekly: 🎯 The Right Leader Changes Everything on IBM i

Welcome to another edition of Talsco Weekly

IBM i Briefs: 🔗 IBM + Arm Strategic Collaboration. 🌐 Medhost’s early IBM Bob test impressed. 🧰 IBM i adds clearer override visibility.
AI: 💸 AI inference costs have collapsed 320x — and IBM i shops are positioned to win. 🗄️ IBM i already has what AI needs most: clean data.
Career: 📚 College students just built agentic AI on IBM i — as an extracurricular project. 🔮 The RPG developer of 2030 won’t look like today’s.
Development:⚡ Bob turns RPG comment chaos into instant documentation.
Hiring: 🚫 AI-free hiring zones — protecting the human signal in recruiting.
Leadership: 🎯 The most overlooked variable in IBM i success isn’t the tech — it’s the leader.
Learning: 🟨 RPGLens gives IBM i dev teams a new way to navigate legacy codebases.
Security: 🔒 IBM’s X-Force 2026 report — AI is now both the threat and the defense.
Trends: 💼 Software layoffs are rising. The panic may not be justified.

IBM i Briefs

IBM announced a strategic collaboration with Arm to develop new dual-architecture hardware for AI and data-intensive workloads, combining IBM’s enterprise systems leadership with Arm’s software ecosystem.

You might be wondering who is Arm?

They are the invisible engine behind nearly every device you touch . Arm doesn’t make chips — it designs the architecture that chip manufacturers license and build on. Over 325 billion Arm-based chips have shipped to date, powering smartphones, laptops, cloud data centers, IoT devices, and automotive systems. With 22 million developers on the platform, Arm is now positioning itself as the foundational compute layer for AI — from edge to enterprise.

While not directly tied to IBM i, IBM’s continued investment in AI signals a clear push to lead the enterprise AI market, which ultimately benefits the IBM i ecosystem.

🌐 Medhost’s early IBM Bob test impressed

Medhost, an IBM i healthcare software vendor, says IBM’s new Bob coding copilot sped up impact analysis, helped generate and modernize RPG into free-form, and improved Db2 for i SQL.

Using Bob, we converted older RPG to free format, then migrated data access to SQL — shrinking the manual effort down to just converting the database tables.

Leaders reported meaningful manual-effort cuts, including experiments showing up to 50% less coding, while keeping AI output under the same quality checks as human code.

What we found with our usage of Bob as it’s been the most beneficial AI code assist tool for our RPG and IBM footprint than any other AI tech tool we’ve experimented with.

Takeaway: Bob has come into the IBM i market in a big way. Until late last year, nobody ever even heard of Bob. For those who have argued that IBM does a poor job marketing IBM i, you might want to think again. All bets are on him for AI adoption on the IBM i. No pressure.

Medhost, clearly is the first big case study to help promote Bob.

Now it’s up to the rest of the IBM i community to do the marketing.

🧰 IBM i adds clearer override visibility

IBM i 7.6 TR1 and 7.5 TR7 introduce the OVERRIDE_INFO SQL view to show file overrides for the current job, helping troubleshoot override surprises beyond DSPOVR.

The catch is scope: OVERRIDE_INFO only returns overrides still active in the job, so call-level overrides vanish when a program ends unless you capture them to an outfile first, enabling audits and targeted cleanup like deleting job-level DB overrides.

AI

💸 AI inference costs are in freefall

IDC data shows the cost per million tokens dropped from $32 in 2020 to under $0.10 today — a 320x reduction in six years.

Gartner projects another 9x drop by 2030.

The catch: next-gen mixture-of-expert models may consume 100x to 1,000x more tokens to reason through answers, meaning total inference spend could rise even as per-token prices collapse.

What does this mean for IBM i shops? Let’s look at it in a different light. While many IBM i shops have been on their modernization journey for a long time (spent a lot of money), maybe it’s the ones that have been slow to pull the trigger now have their chance to catch-up.

AI needs most is what IBM i has always had: a fully integrated system where OS, database, and hardware are one.

Because as AI inference costs keep falling, the cost barrier to deploying AI as part of modernization drops too — meaning IBM i shops that move now can modernize faster (and more affordably) than the early adopters could.

In fact, the next article shows why IBM i shops are in a perfect position.

🗄️ IBM i shops already have what AI needs most: clean data

Did you know that 44% of AI projects fail due to data quality — not model quality.

IBM i shops running DB2 have had structured, validated, governed data for decades.

The platform everyone calls “legacy” has the foundation modern companies are spending 6–12 months trying to build.

You’re not behind on AI.

You may already be ahead.

Career

📚 The IBM i Agentic iMPACT AI Student Project

There is a misconception out there that the colleges are not teaching the IBM i.

College students at Pennsylvania College of Technology just built agentic AI solutions on IBM i — from scratch, as an extracurricular project.

Learn more about the challenge.

🔮 The RPG developer of 2030 won’t look like today’s

RPG isn’t fading — it’s evolving. The platform remains mission-critical, but the role is shifting. Tomorrow’s RPG developer must master SQL, REST APIs, Git-based DevOps, and AI-assisted workflows like IBM Bob. Technical chops alone won’t cut it. Business acumen and communication skills are now table stakes. The language survives. The developer must grow.

Development

⚡ Bob turns RPG comment chaos into instant documentation

Here is a quick tutorial that shows how IBM i Bob can scan an entire RPGLE/SQLRPGLE repository and apply standardized triple-slash comment headers — automatically.

Bob reads each program’s logic, generates a purpose description and feature list, and inserts a clean, consistent header block.

What used to take days of manual editing now takes one well-crafted prompt.

New team members actually understand what they’re looking at.

Takeaway: If you have not taken a look at Bob yet, you might want to. While there are other options, Bob is build for IBM i.

Hiring

🚫 Creating AI-free zones in hiring

With 93% of employers using AI in recruitment and 77% of candidates using it to write applications, the signal-to-noise ratio has collapsed.

Here is a company that is protecting the interview.

It’s really not much different than what we do.

Sure, we might use AI to help with automation, but when it comes to screening candidates.

Real human interaction and conversations is the only answer.

Leadership

🎯 The most overlooked variable in IBM i success isn’t the tech

It’s the leader.

I had a conversation this week that stopped me cold.

An IBM i Solutions Architect. Deep expertise across Development, BI, Data Warehousing, WMS, and ERP. That alone is rare. But here’s what made it different — he has already implemented a live AI initiative that solved a real business problem. On IBM i. Done. Shipped. Working.

And his approach to driving projects and getting business buy-in? Simple. Straightforward. No politics. No noise.

We’ve said it before: modernization doesn’t stall because of the platform. It stalls because of leadership. The wrong leader in the architect’s seat costs you years. The right one changes everything.

This is the person who walks into a complex IBM i environment — multiple tech stacks, competing priorities, years of tribal knowledge baked into the code — and makes sense of it. Fast.

The Hire, Train & Mentor model only works when there’s someone worth following.

If you’re an IBM i hiring manager sitting on a Solutions Architect search — or you know you need one but haven’t pulled the trigger yet — let’s talk.

This kind of talent doesn’t stay available long.

Learning

🟨 IBM i devs got a new coding copilot

It’s an exciting time in the RPG dev community. With AI tools, the amount of useful utilities and resources that are being build by the community are popping up everywhere.

RPGLens is an IBM i code intelligence tool that helps teams understand, navigate, and work faster in RPG codebases, with quick access to program and file context. It is positioned as a practical aid for modernization and day-to-day development by making legacy IBM i code easier to search, interpret, and maintain.

Security

🔒 What is a Threat Intelligence Report — And Why You Should Care

As attackers use AI to scale operations, security leaders must use AI to proactively secure their people, data, and infrastructure.

IBM’s X-Force Threat Intelligence Index 2026 report highlights key cyber threat trends and actionable security insights for the year. Watch the 6 minute video.

Trends

💼 Software layoffs are rising. But zoom out — it’s a drop in the bucket

Apollo Global Management’s chief economist finds that software sector job losses, whatever the cause, remain negligible relative to the overall churn in the U.S. labor market. BLS data confirms the decline in software employment is insignificant compared to broader labor market movement.

💡 Note: this is focused on software development roles in the tech sector. IBM i hiring often follows a different pattern since many roles sit inside industry and IT departments. Some of the same pressures exist, but the impact is different.

The cause. Is it AI? Over hiring and trimming the fat? That deserves a deeper dive in future issues of TW.

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