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State of Modernization Report 2026

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“AI is creating new possibilities and raising expectations for the business outcomes technology should deliver. Modernization is about preparing for what comes next, and the leaders making the most progress are investing across their technology environments — strengthening resilience and putting those investments to work where they deliver the greatest value.”

- Martin Schroeter, Chairman and CEO, Kyndryl

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People Readiness Report 2026

Kyndryl Cloud Uplift (formerly Skytap)

The Kyndryl Institute

Assessment: Modernization strategy

Sustainability

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Voice-activated transactions for mobile banking with agentic AI

Alpitour World

People Readiness Report 2026

Kyndryl Cloud Uplift (formerly Skytap)

The Kyndryl Institute

Assessment: Modernization strategy

Sustainability

Our values

Voice-activated transactions for mobile banking with agentic AI

Alpitour World

Media kit

Leadership quote

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Figure 2: Why modernize? The need for agility, performance and control now ranks ahead of cost and legacy escape.

Figure 3: Modernization’s value still skews operational, not transformative. Here’s where organizations say the majority of their value from modernization comes from.

Figure 4: 49% of organizations are modernizing network architecture to scale AI and to better integrate security and connectivity.

Figure 5: 36% say that the main change in their modernization strategy over the past year is a new focus on AI availability on the mainframe.

Figure 6: Sovereignty or governance requirements are the leading reason why companies have repatriated workloads onto the mainframe over the past 12 months.

Figure 7: Regional differences in approaches to sovereignty.

Figure 8: A minority of businesses have fully embedded continuous modernization into delivery teams.

Figure 9: When modernization efforts are postponed, companies notice a measurable negative impact.

Figure 10: Continuous modernizers are more confident about their knowledge of application dependencies and report improved end-to-end visibility.

Figure 11: Over half of businesses admit that pre-modernization, they have a partial or limited understanding of application dependencies.

Figure 12: The average enterprise runs 383 business-critical applications.

Figure 13: When agentic AI is used in modernization projects, its most common tasks are automated testing and legacy-estate discovery and assessment.

Figure 14: A third of early adopters of agentic AI have seen a clear return on investment.