Making the AI-powered case for legacy modernization

For years, legacy technology has been a problem companies knew they needed to solve, but one they often struggled to tackle. The cost, complexity, and risk of replacing business-critical systems could make modernization feel like a disruption to manage instead of an opportunity to pursue. But with the rise in customer expectations and the changes AI brought to the economics of software development, that calculation is changing. Bupa’s modernization of its My Bupa mobile application offers a case study in what becomes possible when a legacy migration is treated as a business transformation rather than a technology rewrite.

Bupa CIO of health insurance Asifa Sherazi describes the risks of waiting for legacy systems to become an emergency: “The end-of-life technology is a risk that compounds quietly, and then arrives all at once.” For Bupa, moving its application from Xamarin to native Swift and Kotlin improved the app rating from 3.7 to 4.7, while the user-perceived crash rate fell by nearly 24 percentage points on Android and eight points on iOS. “What they’ll notice is that when they need us, often at a stressful moment, it just simply works,” Sherazi says.

Sanjeev Tripathi, senior vice president and region head of BFSI, healthcare, and public sector for Australia, New Zealand, and Southeast Asia at Infosys, contends that AI is helping change the equation. “The emergence of AI is fundamentally shifting the economics of modernization,” he says, reducing the effort, risk, and time traditionally associated with these programs. At Bupa, combining AI-assisted reverse engineering with forward engineering helped deliver the transformation in approximately 60% less time than would have been possible in the pre-AI era.

Sherazi and Tripathi also highlight the human dimension of modernization: preserving institutional knowledge, giving teams capacity to adapt, and creating an environment where employees can surface problems early.

Looking ahead, both experts see modernized platforms as foundations for more personalized, predictive and AI-driven experiences. The payoff of modernization may be less about replacing aging technology and more about building the flexibility needed for whatever comes next. 

“Modern platforms will become the base for far more intelligent AI-driven ecosystems, where AI is not just an add-on, but it is built into everything from design to operations. That’s how the modern platforms will evolve, and the customer experiences will become far more personalized and predictive,” says Tripathi. For Sherazi, that shift is already changing the questions organizations can ask: “It used to be, can our platform support that? Now, it’s: is that the right thing to do for our customers?”

This episode of Business Lab is produced in partnership with Infosys.

Full Transcript:

Megan Tatum: From MIT Technology Review, I’m Megan Tatum, and this is Business Lab, the show that helps business leaders make sense of new technologies coming out of the lab and into the marketplace.Our topic today is legacy modernization. Companies across industries continue to struggle to bring AI modernization to legacy technology stacks, increasing the risk of losing vendor support, degraded customer experience, and limited capacity for innovation.

Two words for you: future-ready foundation.

My guests are Asifa Sherazi, who is CIO of health insurance at Bupa, and Sanjeev Tripathi, who is senior vice president, region head of BFSI, healthcare, and public sector for Australia, New Zealand, and Southeast Asia at Infosys.

This podcast is produced in association with Infosys.

Welcome, Asifa and Sanjeev.

Asifa Sherazi: Thank you, Megan. Delighted to be here.

Sanjeev Tripathi: Thanks, Megan. Wonderful to be here. And good talking to you again, Asifa.

Megan: Thank you both so much for being here. Asifa, if I could start with you just to set the context for our conversation. There are seven million healthcare customers across the Asia-Pacific. Could you tell us a bit more about Bupa and the challenges it’s faced in its modernization plan?

Asifa: Yes, absolutely. Let me start with something about Bupa that shapes everything we do. We are a global healthcare organization. Think hospitals, clinics, dental, age care, digital health, alongside our insurance business. We reinvest back into the organization, so into our services, our capability, our teams, and our outcomes that we deliver for our customers. In Asia-Pacific, we serve around, as you said, seven million customers across health insurance and health services, individuals, families, corporate clients, patients. Our purpose, helping people live longer, healthier, happier lives is more than just a statement. It actually shapes our strategy, guides our investment decisions, and influences the choices our teams make every day.

Now, for most of our health insurance members, the day-to-day digital relationship with Bupa begi