COBOL in the Age of AI: Meet Rocket^® Visual COBOL^® 12.0   

Event description

Rocket Visual COBOL 12.0 brings AI-assisted development to COBOL workflows by combining application context, modern COBOL guidance, code generation, refactoring, and unit testing. In this on-demand webinar, Rocket Software demonstrates how developers can use AI to understand complex applications, generate more relevant COBOL code, validate changes, and modernize mission-critical systems while keeping human expertise in the loop.

AI can generate code, but effective COBOL modernization requires more than a prompt. Large, interconnected applications create dependencies that AI may not see. Rocket’s approach focuses on an agentic workflow built around three practical stages: plan, act, and check. The goal is to give AI the context and tools it needs to support developers without losing sight of application behavior and business requirements.
 

What you’ll learn

• Plan with application context. See how COBOL Analyzer and Enterprise Analyzer can create deterministic application knowledge, map dependencies, and enrich application understanding with AI. Developers can ask questions in natural language, explore unfamiliar code, and uncover relationships that might otherwise be missed.
• Act with modern COBOL guidance. Watch GitHub Copilot work with Rocket COBOL documentation, MCP tooling, and customizable skills in Visual Studio Code. The demonstration shows how AI can generate and refactor code using modern Rocket COBOL syntax, replace magic numbers, introduce parameterized sections, and follow preferred coding standards.
• Check with AI-assisted unit testing. Learn how the unit testing assistant can create a test plan, rank critical sections, generate test cases, run tests, identify potential concerns, and suggest changes that improve testability. The webinar also shows how complexity and change-frequency analysis can help teams prioritize testing across larger COBOL portfolios.

Key takeaways

The webinar presents a practical vision for agentic COBOL development in which developers increasingly focus on prompting, reviewing, and validating while AI assists with coding tasks. Rather than treating AI as a shortcut for replacing proven systems, Rocket Software shows how it can help teams sustain, understand, extend, and test the applications their organizations depend on.

This approach can also make COBOL environments more accessible to newer developers by connecting familiar AI-assisted workflows with trusted application knowledge and modern development tooling.

Watch the full webinar to see Rocket Visual COBOL 12.0 in action and explore how AI can support your next step in COBOL modernization with context, confidence, developer productivity, stronger testing, and control across mission-critical applications at scale.