Migration & Modernization

Application Agentic Transformation – Launching AI Acceleration Insights in CAST Highlight for Portfolio-Scale Agentic Readiness Assessment

This post has been co-written by Damien Santé from CAST

Introduction

Enterprise organizations exploring agentic AI face a common challenge: with hundreds or thousands of applications in their portfolio, how do you determine which systems are ready for autonomous AI agent interaction, and which need modernization first?

In our previous post we described agentic readiness in depth and today we are announcing AI Acceleration Insights in CAST Highlight, a new portfolio-level capability that helps enterprises identify where AI and agentic technologies can deliver the greatest value across tens to hundreds of existing applications. The same rapid, local, enterprise-safe code scan also generates migration, modernization and technical debt insights in applications composed of any mix of tens of languages. Combined with CAST Imaging and AWS Transform, organizational leaders now have a comprehensive pipeline from portfolio-scale discovery, through prioritization in waves, and guided remediation and modernization execution.

What Are AI Acceleration Insights?

CAST Highlight is a SaaS software intelligence technology that rapidly analyzes application portfolios to help organizations prioritize cloud modernization, accelerate AI adoption, reduce technical debt, and manage open source risk.

AI Acceleration Insights is a new capability within CAST Highlight that combines automated source code analysis, application context, and portfolio-level scoring to help CIOs and technology leaders move beyond isolated AI pilots and build a prioritized, evidence-based roadmap for AI adoption at scale.

The capability evaluates two complementary dimensions:

AI Opportunity

AI Opportunity identifies applications that are strong candidates for AI augmentation: intelligent automation, natural language interfaces, predictive capabilities, or generative features. It analyzes code patterns, data flows, and application characteristics to surface where AI would deliver the most value, and recommends specific AI agents, services, or LLMs accordingly.

Agentic Readiness

Agentic Readiness evaluates whether applications have the architectural, data, API, security, observability, and operational foundations needed to support autonomous AI agents. Not “can we add AI features?” but “can autonomous agents safely use this application as a tool?”

The Agentic Readiness dimension evaluates factors including:

  • API maturity: Well-documented, versioned APIs with machine-readable schemas
  • Security posture: Machine-to-machine authentication, fine-grained authorization, agent-specific identity patterns
  • Observability: Structured logging, distributed tracing, audit trail implementations
  • Resilience patterns: Circuit breakers, rate limiting, idempotent operations, graceful degradation
  • Data governance: Data classification, schema management, and access control patterns

Agentic Readiness is then cross-factored with Business Impact (collected through a short survey), giving organizational leaders a view across hundreds of applications to identify opportunities, segment, prioritize, and determine transformation waves.

This dashboard within CAST Highlight automatically segments applications across a portfolio, enabling users to instantly see where agent deployment is both technically viable and strategically safe.

How It Works: From Code Scan to Actionable Insights

AI Acceleration Insights are generated from the same CAST Highlight scan that already delivers cloud migration, modernization, technical debt, and open source risk insights. No additional scanning effort is required. Organizations get agentic readiness evaluation as part of analysis they may already be performing for other portfolio management purposes.

Portfolio-Scale Analysis

For enterprises managing large, complex application portfolios, CAST Highlight can analyze tens, hundreds, or thousands of applications in a single operation. Teams can then segment and triage the portfolio toward optimal transformation next steps, including the appropriate AWS Transform path for each application to immediately deliver rapid, AI-assisted migration/modernization execution.

Deep Dives into Most Complex Systems with CAST Imaging

Portfolio scanning identifies which applications need attention. Your most complex systems, often the most business-critical, need more. These are the applications built over decades, accumulating millions of lines of code across multiple technology stacks. Their inner workings have become opaque, even to the teams that maintain them. They may not have the structure or APIs for integration into agentic architecture.

Enterprises can leverage CAST Imaging to rapidly regain understanding of such systems, made of any of 450+ technologies covered: discover the business logic, the structure, how transactions flow throughout the layers and application components. These insights enable the system to also determine how to expose the right capabilities to AI, how to decompose identified monoliths into AI-based microservices, and how to rewrite the application, or part of the application where it is necessary.

Integration with AWS Transform and Kiro

CAST Highlight and CAST Imaging are already integrated with AWS Transform and Kiro, creating a seamless handoff from portfolio-level discovery to application-level assessment and modernization execution. See this blog post for the first integration for .NET applications, to be followed by more CAST integration with other AWS Transform capabilities.

The workflow connects as follows:

Stage Tool What Happens
1. Discover CAST Highlight, CAST Imaging Scan your application portfolio to identify AI opportunities and assess agentic readiness at scale. Prioritize which applications to focus on first. Dive deep into the most complex application-database systems to regain understanding and accelerate integrating them with AI.
2. Analyze AWS Transform (ARA / MODA) For prioritized applications, run Agentic Readiness Analysis (ARA) and Modernization Analysis (MODA) to get detailed, criterion-level assessment and remediation guidance.
3. Modernize AWS Transform and Kiro Execute modernization actions using AWS services, resolving readiness gaps and advancing cloud maturity in parallel.
4. Activate Agent Deployment Deploy AI agents against remediated systems with confidence that the environment supports safe, observable, autonomous operations.
5. Continuously enhance CAST Highlight and CAST Imaging Throughout their lifecycles, for small day-to-day changes and large transformations alike, maintain a knowledge base of your applications and drive more enhancements.

Each stage feeds the next. CAST Highlight tells you which applications to focus on. AWS Transform tells you what specifically to fix and then helps you fix it. No assessment fatigue. No redundant scanning. One pipeline from strategy to execution.

Value for Enterprise Leaders

AI Acceleration Insights in CAST Highlight addresses several challenges that CIOs and technology leaders face as they scale AI adoption:

  • Moving beyond pilots: Portfolio-level visibility enables organizations to identify the highest-value AI opportunities across their entire landscape, not just the applications that happen to have an enthusiastic team.
  • Evidence-based prioritization: Automated code analysis provides objective, repeatable assessments rather than relying on tribal knowledge or self-reported readiness.
  • Reduced assessment fatigue: A single scan delivers migration, modernization, technical debt, open source risk, AI opportunity, and agentic readiness insights. No need for separate assessment exercises.
  • Clear next steps: Results map directly to specific AWS Transform modernization pathways and services.

Learn more about AI Acceleration Insights in CAST Highlight: castsoftware.com/ai-adoption

Getting Started

To begin assessing your portfolio for agentic readiness with CAST Highlight:

  1. Contact your AWS account team or CAST representative to set up CAST Highlight for your portfolio.
  2. Run the CAST Highlight scan across your application portfolio (the same scan that supports migration, modernization, technical debt, and open source risk insights).
  3. Review AI Acceleration Insights to identify top AI opportunities and agentic readiness scores.
  4. Hand off prioritized applications to AWS Transform for detailed ARA and MODA assessment.
  5. Execute modernization and begin deploying AI agents with confidence.

Related Resources

Damien Santé

Damien Santé

Damien Santé is SVP of Tech Partnerships at CAST, the leader of software intelligence technology. CAST helps businesses understand and transform their software through source code analysis that delivers actionable insights for executives, technologists, and AI. At CAST, Damien shapes and grows partnerships with leading cloud & AI players. Previously, he forged major partnerships at IBM and Nokia Networks.