Trying to innovate on top of outdated tech is like painting new walls over a collapsing foundation.
CIOs: Stop Renovating the Foyer While the Foundation Cracks ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott says data and process silos are “strangling” companies as they enter the era of agentic AI. He predicts the traditional application stack will collapse if leaders keep piling new agents on brittle systems. Survey data backs him up. Cloudera finds 96 % of enterprises will widen AI-agent use this year, yet 37 % say integrating those agents into existing workflows is very or extremely challenging. Another Tray.ai survey of more than 1,000 tech leaders reports that 86 % of enterprises must upgrade their current stack before they can deploy AI agents at scale; and 42 % need to connect eight or more data sources for a single agent to work. The message is clear: integration pain is everywhere. CIO Online labels those legacy platforms the “third rail” of the IT estate (risky to touch, impossible to ignore). McKinsey & Company calls it the GenAI paradox: horizontal copilots scale quickly, yet about 90 % of higher-value vertical use cases stay stuck in pilot mode because they lack deep process context. **The hard truth for CIOs:** if your new AI can’t peer into the core systems that run your business, it will never move the needle. Renewing big-ticket platform contracts without a modernization plan is just mortgaging the future. Rhino.ai extracts all your business logic (workflows, rules, roles and permissions, schemas, etc) from legacy monoliths, low-code and SaaS platforms, and some of the world's most common COTS products, then converts it into portable Universal Application Notation (UAN). Every AI agent gets a shared enterprise brain, not 50 sandbox memories, so pilots graduate from proof-of-concept purgatory to production value. **Modernization isn’t optional; it’s the mandate. If your innovation isn’t built on a modern foundation, it’s just spending. Let’s build something that lasts.** #CIO #EnterpriseAI #LegacyModernization #RhinoAI #AIagents #DigitalTransformation #UAN Jithin Bhasker Josh Kahn Paul Fipps Pat Casey Bill McDermott Brian Epley Dottie Romo David Gill Byron Knight Spencer Champlin Aldila Lobo Jeff Shilling Sue Pan Richard Crowe Richard Tarling Rob Frazzini Justin Fanelli Lance Jenkinson, PMP, ITIL SL Peter Nguyen Paul Chin Audi Rowe Stephen Chase Patrick Ryan Gary Plotkin Andrew Smyth Nuno Pereira Todd Lohr Teresa Carlson Tahera Z. Jones Elio Damaggio Jesse Guerra, Ph.D. Tanner Gonzalez