For years, legacy technology posed a costly, complex challenge companies struggled to tackle. But rising customer expectations and AI's impact on software economics are shifting that calculation. Bupa's modernization of its My Bupa mobile app demonstrates what's possible when legacy migration becomes business transformation rather than a technology rewrite. Bupa CIO of health insurance Asifa Sherazi warns that "end-of-life technology is a risk that compounds quietly, and then arrives all at once." Moving from Xamarin to native Swift and Kotlin improved the app rating from 3.7 to 4.7, while user-perceived crash rates fell nearly 24 percentage points on Android and eight points on iOS.

Sanjeev Tripathi, senior vice president and region head of BFSI, healthcare, and public sector for Australia, New Zealand, and Southeast Asia at Infosys, contends AI is fundamentally shifting modernization economics by reducing effort, risk, and time. At Bupa, combining AI-assisted reverse engineering with forward engineering delivered transformation in approximately 60% less time than pre-AI methods.

Both experts emphasize the human dimension: preserving institutional knowledge, giving teams capacity to adapt, and creating environments where employees surface problems early. Modernized platforms now serve as foundations for personalized, predictive, AI-driven experiences. As Tripathi notes, modern platforms will become the base for intelligent AI-driven ecosystems where AI is built into everything from design to operations. For Sherazi, the shift changes organizational questions from "can our platform support that?" to "is that the right thing to do for our customers?"