AI for the Systems You Inherited
AI CoLab Workshop Insights
2026-05-28 · Rishni Ratnam, Dimi Dimitrovski
This hands-on workshop examined what AI can and cannot do for the legacy systems public agencies have inherited — systems built decades ago, by people who have since moved on, with documentation that is thin or wrong. The session framed the territory between two unhelpful extremes: the hype that AI will translate your COBOL by Friday, and the dismissal that AI engineering is just slop.
1. The hard part is understanding, not translating
2. Translation alone reproduces the past
3. Think in three disciplines: design, architecture, development
4. AI raises the value of human skills