AI-assisted modernization for regulated industries

In regulated industries, modernization is not just an infrastructure challenge. It is a control challenge, an auditability challenge and a business continuity challenge.

Healthcare organizations depend on legacy platforms to process claims, manage administration and support critical customer and operational workflows. Financial institutions still rely on deeply interconnected systems for payments, data products, batch feeds and reporting. Energy companies often run essential operational applications that are stable enough to keep the business moving, yet difficult to explain, risky to change and increasingly costly to maintain.

That is why modernization in regulated environments demands a different standard. The question is not simply how to move faster. It is how to modernize mission-critical systems without compromising compliance, resilience or trust.

Publicis Sapient helps organizations meet that challenge with Sapient Slingshot, our AI-powered software development and modernization platform. Slingshot is designed to surface hidden business logic, generate reviewable specifications, improve testing and maintain traceability across the delivery lifecycle—with humans in control throughout.

Why regulated modernization is different

In high-stakes environments, legacy systems often do far more than run old technology. They encode claims logic, payment rules, reporting obligations, operational dependencies and years of institutional knowledge shaped by regulation and business change. Much of that logic is buried in COBOL, batch jobs, copybooks, outdated stacks or tightly coupled integrations. Documentation is often incomplete or missing. The people who understood the system best may have retired or moved on.

This is why modernization so often stalls. It is not only because the infrastructure is old. It is because understanding the system well enough to change it safely is hard.

In regulated industries, slower is not automatically safer. Long timelines keep fragile systems in production longer, extend dependence on scarce specialists and leave operational and compliance risk in place. Manual reverse engineering can consume months before meaningful transformation begins. And when specifications, code and tests are disconnected, teams end up recreating evidence for auditors and risk stakeholders late in the process.

A better model starts by making the system understandable before changing it.

From legacy code to governed modernization

Sapient Slingshot helps organizations modernize from a clearer source of truth. Rather than jumping directly from old code to new code, Slingshot creates a governed specification layer between the legacy estate and the future-state platform.

That process begins by analyzing existing applications to:
This matters in regulated environments because modernization success is measured by more than delivery speed. Leaders need confidence that business-critical behavior has been preserved, that quality is visible, that controls are embedded and that evidence is generated throughout delivery.

Slingshot is built for that reality. It helps turn opaque systems into explainable assets and supports a connected flow from code-to-spec, spec-to-design and design-to-code, with testing and deployment readiness carried forward. The result is faster modernization with stronger governance.

Human-in-control by design

AI can accelerate analysis, specification, code transformation and testing. But in regulated industries, AI alone is not enough.

Publicis Sapient keeps engineers, architects, product teams and business stakeholders in control at every critical step. AI-generated outputs are reviewed, refined and validated before they move forward. Business teams confirm that the modernized application preserves the behavior that matters most. Engineers maintain accountability for quality, maintainability and production readiness.

This is what makes AI-assisted modernization enterprise-ready for regulated environments. It is not black-box automation. It is governed acceleration.

What this looks like in practice

Healthcare: moving faster without losing business confidence

A leading U.S. healthcare organization had spent years trying to modernize a large portfolio of legacy business applications built on COBOL. Traditional methods had converted fewer than 10 percent of applications. The environment included more than 10,000 green screens running on expensive mainframes that were difficult for modern developers to work with.

Using Sapient Slingshot, Publicis Sapient helped generate functional specifications, behavior-driven development stories, optimized user interfaces and maintainable Java and React code. Cloud-native developers without deep COBOL expertise were able to contribute, while engineers reviewed every output and business teams validated that core functionality was preserved.

The outcome was a modernization effort that moved 3x faster, reduced modernization costs by more than 50 percent and created a more scalable cloud-native foundation. Just as important, the process built trust because outputs were visible, reviewable and tied back to validated business intent.

Financial services: making complexity auditable before code changes begin

In banking, the challenge is often not just the age of the system but the complexity hidden inside it. Publicis Sapient worked with a major retail and commercial bank to modernize highly complex legacy programs supporting financial and payments-related services.

Using AI-assisted analysis with Slingshot, teams analyzed hundreds of files and nearly half a million lines of code across critical programs. The work surfaced buried rules and dependencies, then translated them into program overviews, flowcharts, field mappings, target-state architecture and execution-ready user stories.

The results showed why this governed approach matters in financial services: a 70 to 85 percent reduction in manual code-to-spec effort, 95 percent accuracy in generated specifications and faster migration planning and execution. Most importantly, the modernization path became more traceable and auditable before major code changes began.

Energy: reducing black-box risk while protecting operational continuity

RWE faced a different but equally high-stakes challenge. One application supporting power plant operations was more than two decades old, had no accessible source code, no documentation and no experts left to maintain it. It was a black-box dependency tied directly to operational resilience.

With Slingshot and human engineering oversight, Publicis Sapient recovered readable source code from binaries, rebuilt the runtime on a modern stack, refactored the codebase, extracted business logic and generated documentation for future teams. The application was modernized in two days.

What mattered most was not just the speed. A system that had been opaque became readable, reviewable and maintainable. Business logic was surfaced through data-flow and relationship artifacts. Documentation and tests improved future change confidence. A fragile operational dependency became a modernized asset that teams could deploy and extend with greater control.

Why this matters for transformation leaders

For leaders in healthcare, financial services and energy, the core modernization question has changed. It is no longer whether modernization is necessary. It is how to modernize critical systems without introducing new uncertainty.

Publicis Sapient’s approach with Sapient Slingshot helps answer that question by combining:
The result is more than faster code conversion. It is a more credible modernization path for organizations that cannot afford uncontrolled change.

Modernize critical systems without losing control

In regulated industries, modernization must protect the things the business cannot afford to get wrong: continuity, compliance, resilience and trust.

Sapient Slingshot helps Publicis Sapient clients move from opaque legacy environments to explainable, maintainable and audit-ready modern platforms. By surfacing buried logic, generating validated specifications, improving testing and preserving traceability with humans in control throughout delivery, we help organizations accelerate modernization without compromising governance.

That is what AI-assisted modernization should deliver in regulated industries: not speed at any cost, but faster progress with stronger control.