CBA is exploring whether AI agents can start modernising applications without human prompting and keep documentation of its cloud-based applications up to date.
The bank’s general manager of cloud acceleration and acting CIO of its India operations Ash Moollan revealed the work to be an evolution of Lumos, its multi-agent workflow for preparing tens of applications per quarter for modernisation and rehosting in the cloud.
Lumos only broke cover at an AWS financial services summit in September, but appears set to evolve in capability at a fairly rapid pace.
Speaking at AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas, Moollan said that “the next phases of Lumos” would see more of its analysis and design work to prepare applications for modernisation become “fully automated”.
“Rather than being human triggered to start your modernisation, how do we make the agent start first?
“So, building the agent that will scan your codebase, start the modernisation, and the agent then prompts the human and says, ‘Hey, I’m trying to migrate this application to cloud. I’m trying to modernise this. I don’t know enough, I need more information, go get that for me, please’,” Moollan said.
Moollan also suggested that post-modernisation an agent could also run permanently in the background, monitoring for changes and reflecting them in technical documentation.
“How do we get those agents to continuously run in the background?” he said.
“As your engineer then takes that application, continues to work on it, pushes new commits into the repository, how do you make the documentation self-updating, so you have agents that continuously monitor and update the documentation for you?”
There was also interest in Lumos agents being “self-improving” and able to deal with “more than just two-to-three” programming languages.
The bank characterised its goal as having “polyglot” agents to conduct modernisation work.
Outside of increased automation, Moollan said there are moves underway to make Lumos agents more aware of upstream and downstream impacts of application modernisation.
“[We plan to] build cross-repo analysis so that you can start to build a dependency map between multiple repos and work out, if I’m touching this function in this repo, what else upstream and downstream is impacted as part of my modernisation stream?” he said.
Moollan also demonstrated “modernisation pathways”, which he said were still under development but could act as “opinionated, orchestrated workflows”, guiding the end-to-end modernisation of an application.
These would be capable of stitching together various modernisation “accelerators” in Lumos into an “end-to-end value chain to modernise an application.”
“Full disclosure: this doesn’t work just yet, it’s a work-in-progress,” Moollan said.
Moollan said that application owners would be able to see a “wizard” that laid out all the steps required to modernise and transform their application, that is tailored to that specific codebase.
“So, a guided journey on how we do this modernisation,” he said.
Moollan said that the drive to build and evolve Lumos was not only to increase the pace of cloud modernisation, but also to “build solutions that are better, safer and faster for our customers.”
“We don’t want to run legacy applications in production because [they] come with vulnerabilities,” Moollan said.
“The Australian community places a lot of trust in CBA to run safely in production.
“That was super important in our modernisation journey: that we continue to keep the trust that our customers place in us, in our organisation.”