Toyota accelerates mainframe migration with AWS generative AI

“To put that in perspective, that same year we launched the Supra. At the time, both were innovations, but ultimately the Supra held up whereas the mainframe…not so much. The work that we did with AWS is going to be game-changing for Toyota,” said Brian Kursar, Group Vice President – Head of Artificial Intelligence, Toyota.

Toyota has invested the last 45 years in maintaining a mainframe system that is responsible for its entire supply chain, and today 90% of that supply chain still runs on the mainframe. The mainframe presents a single point of failure and if it goes down, Toyota is unable to sell vehicles. Making a single change required having to reverse-engineer code, which is very time consuming. “In the past when we tried to migrate from the mainframe, we were always told it would take years and billions of dollars. We reached out to AWS and we asked them, ‘Would you be open to helping us migrate from our mainframe? What would it take for us to figure out how we can get generative AI to be able to do that reverse-engineering for us?’” asked Kursar. “AWS said, ‘We're all in.’”

Mainframe modernization demands tailored solutions and must align with unique business needs. AWS supports flexible modernization patterns tailored to each workload—refactor legacy code, replatform existing applications, reimagine them as cloud-native services, or take a multi-pattern approach that combines strategies across your application portfolio. AI agents in AWS Transform enable customers to modernize faster and cut costs by automating the process of analyzing legacy code, documenting code and preserving business logic, transforming monolithic applications to modern languages and architectures, generating migration plans, and conducting testing to ensure functional equivalence.