watsonx Code Assistant for i, IBM i 7.6 and AI—Steve Will’s Thoughts From POWERUp 2025
The IBM i CTO covers the topics that had COMMON’s conference abuzz, makes a request for old (very old) RPG code and gets ready for Star Wars night
As I write this post, I have spent the past few days with hundreds of IBM i enthusiasts in Anaheim at the COMMON POWERUp 2025 conference, and there has been tremendous energy here, driven by a community who are excited to talk about technology that can help their business. This conference has been full of such technology, particularly the IBM watsonx Code Assistant for i (WCA for i), the IBM i 7.6 release—with the new integrated multifactor authentication (MFA) capability—and AI in many forms.
Today, I thought I’d give you some of my thoughts after having many discussions with clients, partners, educators, students—all parts of the IBM i community.
WCA for i at POWERUp
I wrote about WCA for i just a few days ago. At POWERUp, I was honored to be on stage at the opening session, telling the audience how far we’ve come in our journey to create the code assistant I envisioned last year. I was joined by Jasmine Kaczmarek, VP of Technology for MR Williams. Jasmine wears many hats in the IBM i community—she’s an IBM Champion, she’s a member of the COMMON Americas Advisory Council, and of course she’s in charge of technology at an IBM i client.
In this case, the role that brought her on stage was her participation in the development and evaluation of WCA for i. Jasmine contributed a large set of RPG code for us to use as part of the training material for the LLM, and she has spent the past several weeks as one of a couple dozen people who tested WCA for i in our “private preview” (what many people would call an “alpha.”)
Jasmine told a couple of short stories about her experience in the private preview, admitting that at one point, she thought she had caught the LLM “hallucinating”—telling her inaccurate information about code she had written. However, when she did some further investigation, she determined it was correct, and she had been mistaken about the standard her code was implementing.
She also gave us an insight into how WCA for i can help productivity in ways people might not expect. In her company, an issue came up with an error in how a customer order was being processed. Here’s how she summarized what happened next:
“I only had 20 minutes to spare, and with WCA for i, I was able to investigate a report, trace how the field was populated, understand the calculation and fix the issue. A senior developer had spent six hours on it the day before without finding a solution. It was super easy.”
She made a fix, and voila! WCA for i has already helped a customer debug a program!
I’ve delivered presentations about WCA for i, as has Edmund Reinhardt, the lead developer of the product, and we’ve had many discussions with many people about the first uses of the product—the types of “explanations” WCA for i will give—as well as next steps. It’s been invigorating.
7.6 & MFA
Another topic that has been hot as we talk to community members is the large amount of security function we delivered in IBM i 7.6, and MFA specifically. It’s clear many clients want this function, or need this function, so much that they are willing to speed up their move to 7.6.
In a way, we shouldn’t be surprised. When we asked our early program participants—the people who got early access to 7.6 so they could help us test it while they evaluated it—when they plan to adopt it, 50% of them said “within three months” and another 25% said “within six months.” This is much faster than typical new releases, and when we asked them why, most of the participants mentioned MFA, with another few also mentioning the encryption of SYSBAS.
The pedestal in the Expo booth for IBM i Security was basically as busy as the booth for Db2 for i, which is a perennial gathering point for people who want to talk to Scott Forstie, Kent Milligan and other Db2 for i luminaries.
So Much AI to Learn!
And I could not write about POWERUp 2025 without mentioning AI. Sessions about it seemed to be everywhere. I spoke about the future of AI in IBM i, and I expect I’ll probably deliver a webcast about it sometime soon. But AI is definitely not limited to IBM alone! Far from it! Most vendors had some AI to talk about, and the number of sessions which explained various kinds of AI, and how it is being used by clients and partners, was astounding.
I was so busy, I could not attend many sessions, and I really feel like I missed out on the chance to learn even more than I typically would at a POWERUp event. The strength of the knowledge and speaking ability in the IBM i community is remarkable.
One More Thing—We Need Your Code—Still!
Oh, before I end this, I have one more WCA for i topic: we need more training material. In particular, we need old, old RPG. We need every flavor of RPG before ILE RPG. So, S/36 RPG, S/38 RPG and OPM (Old Program Model) RPG from the early days of the AS/400. We simply haven’t yet received enough of it to train the model as well as we’d like. We’re confident many clients have old RPG—and our code assistant will need to be able to explain it, and ultimately help clients as they move it forward.
Similarly, we’re preparing to be able to help with COBOL for i, CL and SQL.
If you have any of that—old RPG or those other languages—and you would be willing to contribute them to the training effort, please send an email to AIforIBMi@ibm.com and tell us what you want to contribute. We’ll get the legal business out of the way—having you sign a document saying you know we are just using this to train the model—and then we’ll tell you how to contribute it. It’s a simple process. Oh, and if you decide you’re going to contribute COBOL code, you will probably end up on the list of people we’ll invite to discuss the needs of the COBOL for i community. From the people I’ve talked to so far, their needs are not quite the same as the needs of the RPG folks. We’ll talk.
So, contribute if you can. And, as for the future of WCA for i, keep an eye on the product page, pay attention to articles and blogs and follow us on social media to hear about further developments. There’s plenty more coming!
WCA for i Guided Tour in June
One last bit of WCA for i information: I will be taking everything we presented at POWERUp, and then at COMMON Europe, and distilling the most important information and presenting it on an IBM i Guided Tour on June 11. If you want to hear & see some of what you missed, and want fresh information too, register here.
In a Galaxy Far, Far Away
And now, it’s time for me to get my new Star Wars shirt on and join a large number of POWERUp people as we head to Galaxy’s Edge—the Star Wars-themed part of the Disney parks complex here in Anaheim. I am a pretty big Star Wars fan. Last fall I even got to (pay a nice chunk of money to) build my own lightsaber! (It’s displayed prominently in my home office.) There have been many COMMON Closing Events throughout the years. I don’t think I’ve looked forward to any of them more than I’m looking forward to this.
I love being a part of the IBM i community! See you out there, somewhere. Maybe in a galaxy far, far away!