Closing the AI-readiness gap with agentic modernization

Legacy debt is widening the AI-readiness gap

Legacy systems and mounting tech debt aren't just slowing your AI agenda — they're quietly stealing its potential. Aging architectures, and complex, decades-old applications, databases, and infrastructure weren't designed for high performance, complex, dynamically scaling agentic workloads. The longer legacy lasts, the wider the gap between AI ambition and AI-readiness.

This year at Microsoft Build 2026, we're taking our biggest step yet toward closing it.

In a recent Forrester study, 94% of IT leaders ranked modernization as a top priority for their AI strategy, yet only 43% of their portfolios have been modernized on average, and only 32% are AI-ready.¹ Ambition for AI adoption is at a high, yet most are held back by the underlying legacy code, technical debt, and modernization backlog. Forrester’s data underscores it: on average, 35% of modernization projects stall due to legacy constraints, 65% cite security and compliance as the top challenge, 58% are held back by the complexity of monolithic applications, and 59% struggle with finding skilled talent to execute.¹

The result: AI initiatives that stall before they ever reach production. Modernization is a key step to move towards AI production; and it’s typically easier said than done. The growing problem is how to execute at the pace and scale that AI now demands.

That’s why IT operators, architects, application owners, and developers are turning to agents to eliminate legacy toil, connect workstreams across teams, and scale their modernization efforts while customizing how they modernize.

The first agentic end-to-end modernization solution that unifies IT and developer workflows

Azure Copilot migration agent and GitHub Copilot modernization agent create the first agentic, end-to-end modernization solution that unifies IT and developer workflows— helping organizations close the AI-readiness gap by connecting discovery, assessment, planning, code transformation, governance, deployment, and observability into one continuous system. Built into the tools IT teams and developers already use, the solution combines estate-scale planning with GitHub-native execution, application-aware migration, broad workload coverage across apps, infrastructure, and data, and enterprise-grade privacy, security, and flexibility— so modernization becomes a governed, scalable, portfolio-level capability across teams, rather than a series of one-off projects.

Building the estate-wide modernization plan

Azure Copilot migration agent (public preview) brings AI to every step of estate modernization planning - from discovery and assessment to dependency mapping, ROI analysis, and wave planning - reducing months of manual analysis to minutes.

For organizations with a clear picture of their estate, the migration agent accelerates the path from inventory to wave plan. For organizations that don’t, the migration agent helps them build that picture from scratch: what is running, what depends on what, what to move, what to modernize, what to retire, and in what order.

By creating business-goal oriented estate plans, generating ROI analysis in minutes, and aligning IT and development teams through connected workflows, it helps enterprises move mission critical applications, databases, and infrastructure onto Azure faster and more confidently, with a continuous, data-driven view of what to modernizing next.

Freeing teams from the legacy tax

GitHub Copilot modernization agent, now generally available, empowers application owners, architects, and developers to scale modernization across their entire application portfolio.

Operated from the CLI, the modernization agent acts as an orchestrator that simultaneously:

• Assesses readiness across multiple applications at once
• Plans application-specific modernization journeys and executes the identified migration tasks
• Surfaces deep code and dependency-level insights and recommendations
• Automates upgrades for Java and .NET applications
• Recommends Azure services aligned to organizational standards

With its native design into GitHub Copilot, the modernization agent creates issues, pull requests, and shareable assessment reports for each application as it works. Architects and application owners retain visibility and governance from a single view, while developers receive clear, prioritized work they can execute from the agent or finish directly in their preferred editor. Behind the scenes, the modernization agent coordinates with GitHub Copilot's coding agent to complete tasks asynchronously across repositories, with a full monitoring and audit trail in GitHub's Agent HQ.

The result is a connected planning-to-execution flow that finally makes modernization at scale possible, without sacrificing oversight or control. In just a few months, the modernization agent has already accelerated modernization up to 4x faster across hundreds of thousands of legacy .NET and Java applications at hundreds of customers.

Enterprise level customization

Every application is built and operated as uniquely as the business it serves. The path to modernization must be equally unique: tailored to each application's architecture, dependencies, and intent. At Build, we're excited to announce the general availability of custom skills for the modernization agent.

Custom skills (GA) let developers teach the modernization agent how their organization works by encoding proprietary patterns, libraries, Azure best practices, and migration approaches once, then reusing them across every run.  Each skill is authored as a skill.md file with build instructions, sample usage, reference APIs, and more, and is built on open-standard agent skills so teams aren't locked into a proprietary format.

With custom skills, developers can equip the modernization agent with:

• Business-specific context, knowledge, intent, and migration approaches for application-aware guidance
• Centralized skills library to reuse and repeat tasks across the portfolio
• Full traceability for every skill used in generating the modernization plan

The result is portfolio-scale execution with application-level specificity, in the same agentic workflow. And because skills live in a shared library, teams can reuse and repeat for faster, more consistent modernization outcomes aligned with the application's goals.

Innovating while closing the AI-readiness gap

GitHub Copilot is already dramatically reducing technical debt in real world environments, helping to close the AI readiness gap and, more importantly, innovate faster with AI. Organizations that adopt agentic modernization can not only close their AI-readiness gap, they can also make modernization a continuous process, allowing them to more readily integrate AI into existing business applications and services

Ready to reimagine your applications? Join us at Microsoft Build this year, online or in person, to see our product teams reimagine applications live with GitHub Copilot modernization, share customer success, and empower you to modernize with confidence in days, not months.

• Join online or in person for Build session BRK220 on Wednesday 9AM PST
• Learn more about GitHub Copilot modernization: aka.ms/ghcp-modernization
• Dive deeper at the virtual .NET Agentic Modernization Day on June 16^th: aka.ms/dotnetday/rsvp

¹ Forrester’s Q1 2026 Cloud and AI Application Modernization Survey [E-66670]