Turnover risk for IBM i, succession planning, IBM i updates (encryption key management in 7.6, $240 M AI inference partnership), AI tools and impact (IBM Bob, HUMANTODO, AI‑augmented developer roles), career and leadership insights, learning resources (MC ChatMaster, n8n integration, user‑group roundup), modernization strategies (Redbook, PHP 8.6 on IBM i), security findings (2026 breach report), new vendor Relion Solutions, and related events and resources.
Welcome to another edition of Talsco Weekly
- IBM i Brief: 🔑 Inside the Encryption Key Management Changes in IBM i 7.6. 🔓 IBM’s $240M bet on open-source AI inference.
- AI: 📊 The AI jobs apocalypse never showed up.
- Career: 🧩 HUMANTODO. 🐝 The AI era is rewriting the developer job description.
- Development: 🧰 IBM Bob adds multi-agent AI and modernization tools.
- Leadership: 🤝 What makes a role exciting? The manager.
- Learning: 📚 Review – MC ChatMaster. 🔌 n8n + IBM i: Connect your IBM i to modern automation. 🗺️ IBM i & Power Systems User Groups: The 2026 Roundup.
- Modernization: 🎥 Steve Jobs: Start With the Customer, Work Backwards. 📕 Modernizing IBM i Applications: the new IBM Redbook.
- Open Source: 🐘 PHP 8.6 is coming soon to IBM i.
- Security: 🔓 IBM’s 2026 breach report: the costliest year yet.
- Vendor: 🚀 Relion Solutions launches into the IBM i space.
IBM i Brief
🔑 Inside the Encryption Key Management Changes in IBM i 7.6
IBM i 7.6 rewrites how encryption keys are handled. Shops can now bring their own keys through IBM Key Protect for IBM Cloud, wrapping existing AES keys so they unlock only when Key Protect allows it. Master keys get tougher too. No more defaults, always encrypted on disk, and optional OS-level BYOK that gates every IPL behind a key.
Powerful for compliance, but recovery just got more complicated. Exclusive to 7.6.
🔓 IBM’s $240M bet on open-source AI inference
The token price war reaches IBM Cloud.
IBM and Together AI signed a multi-year, $240M deal to stand up the first large-scale inference cluster on IBM Cloud, built on NVIDIA HGX B300 systems and Spectrum-X networking, and going live in early 2027. The partnership targets open-source model inference, lower token costs for enterprises, agentic workloads, and hybrid cloud scale. Together AI already serves 400 trillion tokens a month. The message to enterprises weighing closed models is hard to miss.
Our Take: The interesting number is not $240M. It is the token cost. When open models get enterprise-grade infrastructure, the build-versus-buy math for AI shifts under everyone, IBM i shops included.
AI
📊 The AI jobs apocalypse never showed up
The jobs apocalypse never came. The rewrite did.
A year after CEOs predicted half of entry-level white-collar work would vanish, the mass layoffs never landed. Something quieter took hold instead. “Despite the lack of mass job devastation, a shift is still under way: AI is changing the nature of work, with employers increasingly expecting job seekers to have AI skills.” In IBM i shops the pattern is the same. The RPG developer who pairs with IBM Bob and agentic tooling clears the bar. The one who waits gets measured against people who already did.
From the Field: The headcount fear was the wrong fear. As one economist put it, “AI is destroying some jobs and creating others that have to implement, sell, fix and develop AI systems.”
That is the job now.
Career
Let AI write most of it. Not all of it.
HUMANTODO is a simple idea: tell your coding agent to leave gaps, maybe 20%, for you to finish. The AI handles the boilerplate. You write the hard logic. They call it the IKEA effect for code, and it fights the slow drift toward passive review.
You stay sharp because you are still solving the real problems.
From the Field: New to RPG? Write the code yourself. You only understand what you build.
🐝 The AI era is rewriting the developer job description
The work is not disappearing. It is changing shape.
The panic says AI erases developer jobs. The reality is stranger. The Main Thread lays out the new vocabulary of agent work: jobs, contracts, guardrails, ownership.
One of its own examples is IBM Bob, whose architecture separates the agent from the harness that runs it. RPG developers get a front-row seat, because Bob was built for their platform.
Writing code is no longer the whole job. Defining what the machine may do, and owning what it produces, is. Deep systems knowledge is exactly what it takes to govern an agent well.
The green screen taught judgment. Judgment is now the product.
Development
🧰 IBM Bob adds multi-agent AI and modernization tools
Bob is no longer just a coding assistant.
IBM expanded Bob into a multi-agent development platform, adding model routing, cost analytics through Bobalytics, and isolated subagents for long, complex tasks. The bigger news for us is the modernization side. Bob now ships premium packages for IBM i, IBM Z, and Java, kept distinct. The IBM i package brings remote file system integration, IBM i-specific operating modes, and workflows built around real IBM i maintenance practice. Jack Henry is already using Bob on its RPG codebase.
Our Take: This is the cost-of-change thesis with a product attached. Repeatable, auditable workflows will not make your RPG younger, but they lower the cost of changing it.
Leadership
🤝 What makes a role exciting? The manager.
The best IBM i leaders hand over the keys.
I am working a role right now, and the exciting part is not the tech. It is the manager the new hire will report to. A servant leader who grows people instead of guarding turf. That is how IBM i knowledge reaches the next generation. Titles fade. A great manager changes a career.
Learning
An AI chatbot trained only on IBM i.
MC Press built a chatbot on 6,400 articles and 113 books, four decades of curated platform expertise. Ask about RPG, SQL, Db2, or Python, and every answer links back to the source and the author behind it. Training on vetted IBM i material means fewer hallucinations. An eight-question free trial lets you judge the depth before you commit.
The IBM i Angle: General models guess. This one cites the community’s own experts.
🔌 n8n + IBM i: Connect your IBM i to modern automation
A community developer, working alongside AI, built a custom n8n node that plugs IBM i into modern business workflows. It runs on Mapepire, so data access stays authenticated and controlled. The design is deliberately restrictive by choice, keeping your IBM i data locked down. For self-hosted n8n, install it from the GUI under Settings > Community Nodes > Install. The code lives on GitHub: n8n-nodes-ibmi-mapepire .
The IBM i Angle: Integration is no longer the wall between IBM i and the rest of the stack. Open tooling plus AI keeps lowering the cost of change.
🗺️ IBM i & Power Systems User Groups: The 2026 Roundup
The generation that built these systems is retiring, and user groups are where their knowledge gets passed down before it walks out the door. Here is the active map, region by region.
Canada
- Toronto Users Group (TUG) — Ontario
West
- OCEAN — Costa Mesa, CA
South
- Central Texas IBM i User Group (CTXiUG) — Austin / San Antonio
- IMUG Midrange Users Group — Nashville, TN
Midwest
- IBM i Midwest User Group (iMWUG)
- Southeast Michigan IBM i Users Group (SEMIUG) — Rochester, MI
- West Michigan IBM i Users Group (WMSUG) — Grand Rapids, MI
- QUSER — St. Paul, MN
- Large User Group (LUG) — Rochester, MN
- Wisconsin Midrange Computer Professional Association (WMCPA) — Elm Grove, WI
Northeast & Mid-Atlantic
- Long Island Systems Users Group (LISUG) — Syosset, NY
- Mid-Atlantic Group of IBM i Collaborators (MAGiC)
National & Europe
Regional conferences worth the trip
Full directory with contacts and meeting formats lives at TechChannel .
Our Take: Turnover is the real risk to IBM i, not age. These rooms are the succession plan. Find yours and show up once.
Modernization
🎥 Steve Jobs: Start With the Customer, Work Backwards
The best modernization advice is decades old.
Jobs’ rule was simple. Start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology. Not the other way around. Point that at IBM i and the whole modernization fight looks different.
Modernization, backwards. IBM i is the base layer. The system of record, with decades of business process stacked inside it. To a young hire or a new CEO, the green screen looks old. They are not wrong. But looking old and being done are different things. It is almost certainly still doing the job. Ripping it out is rarely the answer, and often the costly one. Leveraging it is. And leveraging it means modernizing what already works.
AI, problem-first. Bob is the shiny new tool, and every developer wants a spin. That pull is technology-first, and Jobs would catch it. But point it at the real problem and it earns its keep. Decades of RPG hold business logic no one fully remembers. AI can weave through that code and make the system legible again. Start with the pain of a codebase no one can read. Then the tool is solving something, not just demoing.
Hire for the outcome, not the checklist. Job specs still lead with the stack. RPG, DB2, CL, then ten years stapled on to gate it. None of those describe the work. That is technology-first hiring, and it fills seats without solving anything. Work backwards from the outcome you need delivered and the role looks different. So does the candidate. The checklist describes a resume. The outcome describes a hire.
Our Take: The IBM i Developer is not an RPG holdout. This is the engineer who reads the base layer and speaks the newer stacks, the one who ties it all together. That developer is core to who we serve. The CEO sees old tech. The developer sees leverage. Start with what the business needs, and they are looking at the same thing.
📕 Modernizing IBM i Applications: the new IBM Redbook
IBM just dropped 810 free pages on modernization.
IBM published a new Redbook, Modernizing IBM i Applications, on August 10. It runs 810 pages and covers modernization at every level of the operating system, from modern development concepts to building applications that are functional, intuitive, performant, and secure. It works whether you are evolving existing workloads or starting fresh. Free to download. But the part worth pausing on is the contributor list.
From the Field: Read the names behind it. It is a who’s who of the platform, and in this community that list gets personal. How many of these developers do you know? How many have you worked with?
Open Source
🐘 PHP 8.6 is coming soon to IBM i
PHP 8.6 is coming. IBM i helped build it.
PHP 8.6 lands late this year with better diagnostics, security hardening, and performance, and Seiden Group is already prepping IBM i shops to adopt it. The standout is the contribution running the other way. A Seiden Group engineer authored a PHP 8.6 proposal that shows function arguments in error messages, so a failed built-in tells you which argument broke it. The company also flags PHP 8.2 reaching end of life.
Our Take: If you run PHP on IBM i, this is the team. Development, security, troubleshooting, and now shaping the language itself. No one covers PHP on the platform end to end like Seiden Group does.
Security
🔓 IBM’s 2026 breach report: the costliest year yet
AI is now both the weapon and the blind spot.
IBM’s 2026 Cost of a Data Breach Report puts the global average at a record $4.99 million, up 12 percent in a year. The driver is AI. AI-powered attacks rose 56 percent and added roughly $1 million per breach. Worse, shadow AI showed up in 43 percent of incidents, more than double last year, and most organizations admit they have no governance in place to control it. The tools are inside the building already.
Our Take: The real exposure is the AI nobody is governing. We already mapped the fix : pen test what you have, then govern what you connect. The IBM i version of this report is its own conversation.
Vendor
🚀 Relion Solutions launches into the IBM i space
A new IBM i vendor just launched.
Relion Solutions is new. The people are not.
Nobody on this team is new to IBM i, and nobody is even close to retiring.
You get the depth of engineers who have seen everything the platform can throw at them, with the runway of a team planning to be here for years. Experience without the cliff.
The bench proves the point. This team holds some of the best names in IBM hardware, OS, and backup and recovery. Good people attract good people. The best technologists want to work alongside their equals, and word travels fast in a community this small.
Small, nimble, and niche, they picked a lane and mastered it.
That is what a healthy ecosystem looks like.
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