Revolutionize software development with generative AI from Publicis Sapient and Google Cloud.
Today’s consumers rely on apps for daily tasks such as booking a hotel room, making a doctor’s appointment, paying an electric bill, or assembling an expense report. They want to complete a task from anywhere, quickly and easily, and they expect highly personalized digital experiences.
For organizations providing these apps, meeting user expectations is vital for remaining competitive. But many software development teams are falling short due to excessive technical debt. Other urgent business requests have forced them to defer application maintenance and postpone updates. As a result, organizations are stuck with outdated applications that traditionally would take a lot of time and manual effort to modernize.
With the help of generative AI (GenAI), development teams can overcome their technical debt. They can use GenAI to automate routine, repetitive tasks and assist them throughout the software development lifecycle (SDLC). AI-based approaches will be key to freeing developers to refocus on innovation and deliver the experiences that app users demand.
Application modernization should be an imperative for all organizations that rely on software to generate revenue, boost employee productivity, or support critical operational processes. But what happens when organizations are slow to modernize or fail to update legacy apps?
Legacy applications often fail to meet customer and employee expectations for fast, responsive experiences. Their inefficient code can produce sluggish performance. These applications might be delivered from distant data centers, resulting in frustrating latency. Meanwhile, complicated authentication, incompatibility with new devices, lack of personalization, difficult navigation, and other issues may drive users away. When customers have a choice, they will head toward competitors that deliver better experiences.
Legacy applications are expensive to maintain. Because these applications are built on older technology, specific domain expertise is typically required to maintain them. Finding, hiring, and retaining personnel with the proper knowledge and skills can cut into budgets that might otherwise be focused on innovation.
Modern applications use application programming interfaces (APIs) to integrate various services and data sources. APIs allow developers to quickly augment their software without reinventing the wheel. Because many legacy applications were not designed with APIs, access to new features and functions requires more time-consuming coding.
Cybercriminals continue to uncover software vulnerabilities that let them disrupt business operations and access sensitive data. When development teams put off maintaining and updating legacy applications, they leave those applications at serious risk. Successful attacks exploiting these vulnerabilities can lead to service disruptions or data breaches. Attackers may even burrow deeper into enterprise systems. As a result, organizations risk significant financial losses, reputational damage, and regulatory fines.
The need for application modernization is clear, yet many organizations struggle with it. According to one report, nearly 80% of application modernization projects fail. When teams fall behind on regular maintenance and updates, they have a much larger hill to climb when it comes to modernizing their applications.
In some cases, the lack of the right resources keeps organizations from moving forward. Application modernization can require substantial team resources, including coders and members with skills in modern architectures, cloud services, data migration, testing, security, and more. In one survey, 88% of security and IT leaders reported talent challenges with skills and hiring. Without properly trained personnel, organizations cannot overcome technical debt and modernize applications.
Moreover, modernizing legacy applications can be costly. Teams already burdened with the high cost of maintaining outdated software are unlikely to have the budget for modernization. And deep technical debt can hinder their ability to assemble an adequate budget to move forward.
Reimagining application modernization through GenAI opens the door to faster, smarter, more secure development. Imagine a future where technical debt doesn’t slow the business down, but fuels its evolution. Where legacy systems aren’t obstacles, but raw material for transformation. With GenAI, that future is here.
Development and DevOps teams no longer have to choose between innovation and maintenance. GenAI unlocks a new model of software development: one that is faster, smarter, and continuously adaptive. By combining deep code understanding with natural language interfaces, AI can accelerate delivery, improve software quality, and strengthen security from the ground up.
Modernization becomes not just a one-time initiative, but a continuous capability—enabling businesses to respond to market shifts, launch new features rapidly, and create truly personalized user experiences.
By minimizing complexity and human tedium, GenAI empowers development teams to start erasing technical debt and transforming legacy software into modern applications. In particular, large language models (LLMs), a type of GenAI, can help developers refactor code, test modernized applications, and generate technical documentation.
GenAI can speed the repetitive, manual process of refactoring legacy code for modern architecture. After inputting existing code into an LLM, developers can provide contextual knowledge to help it understand the goals of refactoring. The LLM will analyze the code and suggest improvements. It can also generate code snippets. Developers then use pre-built prompts to fine-tune the results.
DevOps teams are using LLMs to accelerate the testing process and improve quality engineering (QE). LLMs can generate test cases, write unit tests, and produce automation test scripts. The models can also identify potential defects and recommend code fixes. These uses of AI are especially valuable for speeding the testing of modern applications with intricate integrations and interdependencies.
Developers are using GenAI to create technical documentation for target-state applications. By analyzing code and incorporating developer-provided context, LLMs can produce text that describes application functionality, provides code explanations, and identifies API endpoints. The text can serve as a user guide, facilitating knowledge transfer to new developers and reducing the time required to publish key information for users. LLMs have the potential to ensure that documentation is automatically updated alongside code changes.
Development and DevOps teams benefit from using GenAI for these tasks in several ways:
AI-powered tools can empower organizations to overcome their technical debt and accelerate their application modernization projects. Google Cloud offers GenAI tools and platforms that help organizations improve developer productivity, increase technology agility, address security risks, and reduce costs.
Vertex AI is a fully managed, unified machine learning (ML) and AI platform for building and using GenAI in development processes. The platform provides a scalable, serverless infrastructure, reducing the burden of managing hardware and allowing teams to focus on building value. Vertex AI tools and capabilities include:
Vertex AI helps streamline code optimization, automated debugging, data modernization, cloud migration, AI-assisted coding, and more. For example, developers can use Vertex AI to analyze codebases for performance bottlenecks and security vulnerabilities. AI models can then suggest refactoring options to optimize the code.
Google experienced firsthand the productivity gains that AI can deliver. Google researchers combined semantic engines and ML in a hybrid code completion tool and measured how it affected developer productivity.
Google found that internal developers accepted ML-enhanced code completion suggestions 25% to 34% of the time, which accounted for 3% of new code added. At the same time, ML reduced coding iteration time by 6%. The researchers anticipate that by adding new features powered by ML, they can deepen the impact of AI on productivity.
Learn more about this study.
Developers have a strong appetite for the right AI-based code assistant. According to a survey by IDC, 90% of developers have already used a coding assistant to develop production-grade digital solutions.
Built on the Vertex AI platform, Gemini Code Assist offers powerful GenAI-driven assistance to help developers build, deploy, and operate modern applications throughout the SDLC. Developers can use Gemini Code Assist to analyze existing code and suggest modernizations like migrating to a different language, updating a current framework, or refactoring to a microservices-based architecture. The tool can also pinpoint performance bottlenecks, such as redundant code or excessive memory usage, and recommend optimizations.
Moreover, developers can use Gemini Code Assist for AI-powered testing and debugging. It can generate comprehensive test suites, find bugs, identify security issues, and suggest code fixes and refactoring options.
Google Cloud also provides a comprehensive portfolio of other tools and services that can help streamline application modernization:
These and other application development tools simplify previously time-consuming tasks, allowing teams to repay technical debt and move ahead with modernization.
AI is already playing a crucial role in application modernization. Developers are eager to use these tools to accelerate their work. According to Gartner®, “By 2028, 75% of enterprise software engineers will use AI code assistants, up from less than 10% in early 2023.”
Still, in our view, many teams recognize that they lack the expertise to integrate GenAI into their own workflows. For example, according to Google Cloud research, “only 14% of organizations are satisfied or very satisfied with their legacy databases’ support for AI, indicating there is a lot of room for improvement.”
As a Premier Google Cloud Partner, Publicis Sapient helps organizations plan, deploy, and manage their GenAI projects on Google Cloud to accelerate application modernization. With deep expertise in Google Cloud’s AI capabilities, our team offers best-in-class assistance for moving forward with AI. We have built a dedicated Google Cloud business unit to address the fast-rising demand for Google’s AI technology.
We created the Sapient AI for Applications suite of integrated solutions to tackle software development challenges faster with AI. Sapient AI for Applications helps organizations use AI to modernize applications through several key strategies:
Sapient AI for Applications uses Google Cloud technologies to improve scalability, security, and efficiency. Our collaboration with Google Cloud allows us to integrate advanced AI and ML models into our solutions, providing robust, innovative applications for our clients.
In addition, Sapient AI for Applications leverages our proprietary AI-powered platform Sapient Slingshot. This platform supports every stage of the SDLC with advanced code generation, agentic AI, and an enterprise-level code library. Our agile system engineers use these features of Sapient Slingshot to create high-impact modernization solutions. The blend of human expertise and AI-assisted collaboration leads to faster, more reliable transitions to modern architectures.
Sapient Slingshot also works with Bodhi, an enterprise-scale agentic AI platform designed by Publicis Sapient to help organizations develop, deploy, and scale AI solutions with speed, efficiency, and security. Together, Bodhi and Sapient Slingshot provide a comprehensive AI-powered platform that enhances application modernization by offering:
At Publicis Sapient, human experts collaborate with these AI systems to enhance decision-making processes. The experts ensure AI outputs are accurate, reliable, and aligned with business goals. Our team also helps organizations develop a complete roadmap and delivery plan for modernization. Leveraging Google Cloud’s AI tools and services, we enable organizations to efficiently modernize applications with minimal disruption while reducing technical debt.
Mounting technical debt can prevent development teams from delivering the innovative modern applications that organizations require and users demand. By incorporating GenAI into the development process, teams can streamline the transition from legacy systems to modern architectures. GenAI helps overcome technical debt by automating code migration, documentation, and testing, which reduces the time and resources needed to update outdated systems.
Organizations can combine Google Cloud’s AI capabilities with Publicis Sapient’s AI-driven solutions and human expertise to modernize applications effectively. This partnership enables organizations to rapidly address technical debt, freeing up resources to focus on strategic innovation and growth.
Publicis Sapient is a digital transformation partner helping established organizations get to their future, digitally enabled state, both in the way they work and the way they serve their customers. We help unlock value through a start-up mindset and modern methods, fusing strategy, consulting, and customer experience with agile engineering and problem-solving creativity. As digital pioneers with 20,000 people and 53 offices around the globe, our experience spanning technology, data sciences, consulting, and customer obsession—combined with our culture of curiosity and relentlessness—enables us to accelerate our clients’ businesses through designing the products and services their customers truly value. Publicis Sapient is the digital business transformation hub of Publicis Groupe. For more information, visit publicissapient.com.
Google Cloud is the new way to the cloud, providing AI, infrastructure, developer, data, security, and collaboration tools built for today and tomorrow. Google Cloud offers a powerful, fully integrated and optimized AI stack with its own planet-scale infrastructure, custom-built chips, generative AI models and development platform, as well as AI-powered applications, to help organizations transform. Customers in more than 200 countries and territories turn to Google Cloud as their trusted technology partner. For more information, visit cloud.google.com.