How Enterprises in Europe Can Accelerate Application Modernization and Agentic AI Adoption on AWS

Across Europe, enterprise leaders are being asked to do several hard things at once: modernize legacy applications, reduce operational fragmentation, improve resilience, support multilingual customer and employee experiences, and turn AI ambition into measurable value. Many have already invested in cloud migration, data platforms and generative AI experimentation. The real challenge now is scaling that progress across countries, business units and governance models without creating more complexity.

That is why modernization in Europe cannot be treated as a narrow technology upgrade. It has to be part of a broader transformation agenda that connects infrastructure, software delivery, governance, customer experience and operational change. Publicis Sapient helps enterprises take that more connected path on AWS—combining secure cloud foundations, AI-assisted application modernization and production-ready AI platforms to move from isolated pilots to governed agentic AI at enterprise scale.

For many European enterprises, the goal is not simply to move workloads to the cloud. It is to modernize in a way that supports agility, traceability and long-term adaptability across a complex regional footprint. Legacy applications often sit at the center of that challenge. They are expensive to maintain, difficult to evolve and dependent on scarce skills that are increasingly hard to find. They also slow product delivery, limit operational resilience and make it harder to respond to changing business and market demands.

But applications rarely exist in isolation. Legacy complexity is usually tied to siloed infrastructure, fragmented release practices, uneven engineering maturity and inconsistent governance across countries or operating units. In that environment, application modernization works best when it is approached as part of a wider business transformation effort.

Publicis Sapient addresses that challenge through its SPEED model—Strategy, Product, Experience, Engineering and Data & AI—bringing business priorities and execution together in one transformation journey. On AWS, that means aligning modernization goals to practical delivery models that connect cloud strategy, secure architecture, migration, DevOps, testing, observability and AI enablement.

European enterprises need cloud environments that support continuous change without sacrificing control. A modern landing zone is only the starting point. What matters is creating AWS foundations that are secure, scalable and designed to support cloud-native delivery across diverse teams and operating models.

Publicis Sapient helps organizations establish those foundations through cloud transformation strategy, mobilization, build, migration and managed services. This includes foundation setup, database setup, infrastructure planning and FinOps management, alongside cloud-native architectures built for resilience and speed. Security is embedded throughout the journey through data security, cloud-native security, security mesh and network security activities, helping enterprises modernize with greater confidence while reducing operational risk.

This matters even more in European environments where complexity often comes from variation: different business units, multiple countries, localized customer needs and diverse delivery teams. A strong AWS foundation helps reduce architectural sprawl, improve collaboration and create a more consistent platform for modernization and AI adoption.

Application modernization is often where transformation slows down. Translating old code, understanding decades of business logic and rebuilding systems for modern architectures can be costly, slow and difficult to govern. Publicis Sapient uses AI-assisted modernization to make that process significantly faster and more practical.

Using large language models, contextual knowledge and pre-built prompt libraries—with human intervention built into the process—Publicis Sapient helps teams understand legacy code, generate target-state documentation, automate testing and transition applications toward modern architectures. The outputs are designed for real engineering use, including feature summaries, specifications, transformed architecture, test cases, unit tests and automation test scripts.

Sapient Slingshot plays a central role in this approach. Built off Bodhi, it modernizes legacy systems by turning existing code into verified specifications and generating modern software with full traceability. That traceability is especially important for enterprises that need stronger governance, clearer documentation and better quality as they modernize core systems.

In Publicis Sapient’s analysis of more than 100 end-to-end experiments using its generative AI modernization accelerators, organizations saw the potential for more than 50% reduction in modernization costs, 50% fewer defects with broader coverage of requirements and test cases, and a 50% increase in migration speed. Actual outcomes vary by context, but the direction is clear: AI can help enterprises modernize faster while improving quality and delivery confidence.

Many enterprises across Europe are past the point of asking whether AI matters. The more urgent question is how to move from disconnected pilots to enterprise-wide adoption that is secure, observable and useful in real workflows. That shift requires more than model access. It requires a platform, an operating model and governance that can support production at scale.

Bodhi is Publicis Sapient’s enterprise-ready AI platform built on AWS to help organizations deploy and scale generative AI and agentic AI use cases with the safeguards, data protections and responsible AI principles required in production environments. Designed for speed, scale and security, Bodhi supports capabilities across workflow automation, search, analytics, forecasting, personalization, compliance and real-time insights.

For European enterprises, this is where modernization and AI become mutually reinforcing. Modernized applications, secure AWS foundations and stronger engineering practices create the conditions for AI to operate effectively. In turn, a platform like Bodhi helps enterprises embed AI into business processes instead of confining it to isolated experiments.

Publicis Sapient’s AWS Agentic AI capabilities extend that further by helping organizations build autonomous systems that can reason, plan, collaborate, use tools, execute tasks and continuously improve inside real enterprise workflows. The goal is not simply to launch AI demos. It is to establish governed agentic capabilities that can scale across functions, markets and operating models.

In Europe, transformation is rarely successful if it improves the technology stack but leaves customer and employee experience fragmented. Modernization should make the business faster, more responsive and better able to personalize across channels, languages and markets.

That is why Publicis Sapient connects application and cloud modernization with customer-facing transformation on AWS. In marketing operations, for example, AI-powered solutions built on AWS services such as Amazon Bedrock, Amazon EKS and Amazon OpenSearch help organizations improve content planning, scale production and optimize activation and measurement. Bodhi AI Content Suite extends that model by automating the marketing lifecycle from brief to campaign deployment and producing ready-to-publish, personalized, compliant and scalable content.

This is especially relevant for European enterprises managing multiple markets and localized demands. It creates a path to deliver more consistent experiences without multiplying cost, process friction or operational overhead.

Transformation in Europe often demands localization without fragmentation. That requires a partner that can connect regional complexity with scalable global platforms and move from strategy to implementation without losing momentum.

Publicis Sapient brings together more than 30 years of digital business transformation experience with end-to-end capabilities across cloud, engineering, customer experience and AI. Its AWS relationship includes a five-year global strategic collaboration focused on accelerating enterprise IT modernization, access to AWS migration best practices and funding support, and a broad base of AWS-trained professionals, specializations and certifications.

What makes the difference is the ability to treat modernization, AI adoption and operating model change as one connected journey. Publicis Sapient helps enterprises build secure AWS foundations, modernize legacy systems with AI-assisted speed and traceability, improve software delivery practices and establish production-ready AI platforms that can scale with governance built in.

For enterprises in Europe, that means modernization becomes more than a technical program. It becomes a practical route to a more unified operating model—one that can reduce fragmentation, improve resilience, enable better customer experiences and create a clearer path from pilot activity to enterprise impact.

The opportunity is not just to modernize applications faster. It is to create the foundation for what comes next: cloud-native delivery, governed agentic AI and transformation that works across borders, teams and business functions.

Relevant Links

• Publicis Sapient + AWS Application Modernization with Generative AI
• Publicis Sapient + AWS Application Modernization with Generative AI
• The Operating Model Behind Successful AI-Assisted Modernization
• From Application Modernization to Cloud-Native Delivery on AWS
• AI-Driven Application Modernization for Regulated Industries on AWS
• Accélérer la modernisation applicative et l’IA agentique en Europe avec AWS (Europe)
• Modernización de aplicaciones con IA y AWS en América Latina: de la migración a la ventaja competitiva (LATAM)
• FAQ (FAQ)
• 12 Things Buyers Should Know About Publicis Sapient and AWS (LIST)