BMC’s purpose-built AI bridges the mainframe skills gap and surfaces insights at the moment of need

HOUSTON, April 8, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — BMC Software, the automation company for the AI era, today announced new innovations with purpose-built AI embedded in the mainframe tools that operators and developers use daily. As experienced mainframe professionals retire and expertise becomes harder to access, BMC offers application intelligence and institutional knowledge built into the workflow – surfacing insights at the moment of need. Enterprises come to BMC first for trusted execution with AI that bridges the mainframe skills gap and delivers insight when it matters.

These new capabilities advance BMC’s long-term vision for the future of AI in mainframe transformation—evolving from AI that delivers insight to AI that enables coordinated, governed execution across development and operations workflows.

New mainframe AI capabilities and innovations include:

Giving Every Developer Context into Application Performance
Developers who understand critical mainframe applications are retiring, with 66% of the workforce now identifying as Gen Z or millennial, according to BMC’s 2025 State of the Mainframe report. While AI can help younger developers interpret code, organizations still lack a consolidated view of application risk, complexity, and institutional knowledge concentration — the kind of visibility leaders need to manage application modernization investments and succession planning with confidence.

Building on BMC AMI zAdviser Enterprise, an AI-powered mainframe development productivity insights platform, zAdviser Enterprise Application Analysis is a new capability that combines source code analysis, BMC AMI DevX telemetry, and development productivity data into a single AI-generated narrative intelligence report. Built on mainframe-native data sources that distributed tools cannot access, it surfaces production stability patterns, code complexity, and modernization recommendations — consolidating what previously required manual effort across multiple disconnected systems. Leaders can assess which applications carry the highest risk, and where to prioritize modernization efforts, ensuring applications can be confidently maintained.

Putting Institutional Knowledge to Work
As the mainframe skills gap widens and experienced professionals retire, organizations risk losing the institutional knowledge required to operate critical applications and systems. BMC AMI Assistant—now pervasive across the BMC AMI portfolio—brings Knowledge Hub and Knowledge Expert Chat into the workflow, making institutional knowledge accessible from sources such as runbooks, tickets, log files, and prior resolutions. This enables teams to close skills gaps and act with confidence.

“The mainframe industry is at a crossroads where decades of institutional knowledge is walking out the door even as CIOs are pushing greater use of AI to move modernization agendas forward,” said John McKenny, senior vice president and general manager of Intelligent Z Optimization and Transformation at BMC. “Organizations can no longer afford to spend days manually correlating data or digging through old runbooks to solve a single incident. By embedding purpose-built AI directly into the tools these teams use every day, BMC is removing the mystery of how mission-critical applications work and empowering mainframe professionals – regardless of their experience level – to react faster and make changes with confidence.”

A new mainframe security solution was also introduced, supporting customers as the IT industry prepares for SSL/TLS certificate lifespans to drop from 398 days to just 47 days by 2029. The new BMC AMI Digital Certificate Management solution is the industry’s first automated certificate management purpose-built for mainframe environments and designed to support multiple vendors. It provides a unified integration layer across enterprise certificate platforms to help prevent outages and compliance risks when manual management is no longer a viable option. This solution integrates with leading enterprise certificate management platforms, such as Venafi® and Keyfactor®, to automate the full certificate lifecycle without requiring infrastructure changes.

“BMC’s latest innovations demonstrate a profound understanding of the mainframe’s evolving role by embedding purpose-built AI that captures and scales decades of institutional knowledge,” said Steve Dickens, CEO and principal analyst at HyperFRAME Research. “By focusing on bridging the critical skills gap through intelligent, context-aware automation, BMC is ensuring the mainframe remains a modern, resilient cornerstone of the AI-driven enterprise.”

New BMC solutions for orchestration
The company today also expanded upon recently introduced agentic AI innovations for the Control-M solution that help orchestrate business processes across hybrid environments and diverse technologies in the AI era with a new solution for Control-M. Announced today, the new Control-M Archive Service automatically archives job logs and output data to provide a cloud-native, long-term repository for auditing, regulatory compliance, and post-execution analysis.

Additional Resources

Find additional details on new mainframe features and capabilities here.
Read more about how AI is changing mainframe application development and management in this blog
Learn more about recently introduced Control-M innovations here.
Read about how Control-M provides the foundation for agentic orchestration here.
Hear from real-world customers about the value of BMC AMI and Control-M, as the company was recently awarded 2026 Buyer’s Choice status on TrustRadius.

About BMC
BMC is the automation company for the AI era. 80% of the Forbes Global 100 trust BMC to automate and orchestrate the systems on which their businesses depend. Across cloud, mainframe, and hybrid environments, BMC enables enterprises to operate with AI‑driven speed, resilience, and governance at scale. When businesses run what cannot fail, they start with BMC first.

BMC, BMC Software, the BMC logo, and other BMC marks are the exclusive properties of BMC Software, Inc. and are registered or may be registered with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office or in other countries.

Editorial Contact:
Sheila Watson
BMC
[email protected]

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