Mumbai, February 24 (IANS). IBM’s shares recorded their biggest one-day fall in more than 25 years amid fears that Artificial Intelligence (AI) could impact the company’s once stable business.
The company’s shares fell 13.2 percent to close at $223.35. This is the biggest one-day fall since October 18, 2000.
IBM shares have fallen nearly 25 percent so far this year as investors rethink how quickly AI could change business models for enterprise software and IT services.
The decline came after a blog post by AI startup Anthropic. The company claimed that its AI tool ‘Cloud Code’ can understand and modernize the COBOL language. COBOL is a programming language, which was created in the 1950s and even today many of the world’s most important computer systems run on it.
COBOL is still widely used today in banks, airlines, insurance companies and government departments. It also plays an important role in IBM’s mainframe business.
For decades, updating COBOL systems has been slow, expensive, and dependent on large consultant teams.
This work has continued to generate income for IBM, as many companies struggle to maintain or upgrade legacy systems that are now fully understood by very few engineers.
Anthropic says AI can change this situation, as it makes it much easier to analyze and update old code.
In a blog post, Anthropic said that even today there are hundreds of billions of lines of COBOL code running in live systems, while the number of people knowing this language is continuously decreasing.
The company also said that AI can better handle complex and time-consuming tasks that previously made modernizing COBOL systems too expensive.
According to Anthropic estimates, about 95 percent of ATM transactions in the US today still rely on COBOL, which shows how deeply embedded the language is in the financial infrastructure.
The company claims its AI can scan large codebases, understand dependencies between different pieces of software, create clear documentation for systems that are no longer well understood, and identify potential risks that would normally take months to detect.
“Modernization has been stuck for years because the cost of deciphering old code is often higher than rewriting it. AI changes that equation,” Anthropic said.
–IANS
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