AI-assisted modernization can reduce the time and complexity of transforming legacy systems while creating a foundation for faster innovation, says Asifa Sherazi, CIO of health insurance at Bupa and Sanjeev Tripathi, senior VP, region head of BFSI, healthcare, and public sector at Infosys.
For years, legacy technology has been a problem companies knew they needed to solve, but one they often struggled to tackle. The cost, complexity, and risk of replacing business-critical systems could make modernization feel like a disruption to manage instead of an opportunity to pursue. But with the rise in customer expectations and the changes AI brought to the economics of software development, that calculation is changing. Bupa’s modernizati…
Bupa CIO of health insurance Asifa Sherazi describes the risks of waiting for legacy systems to become an emergency: “The end-of-life technology is a risk that compounds quietly, and then arrives all at once.” For Bupa, moving its application from Xamarin to native Swift and Kotlin improved the app rating from 3.7 to 4.7, while the user-perceived crash rate fell by nearly 24 percentage points on Android and eight points on iOS. “What they’ll noti…
Sanjeev Tripathi, senior vice president and region head of BFSI, healthcare, and public sector for Australia, New Zealand, and Southeast Asia at Infosys, contends that AI is helping change the equation. “The emergence of AI is fundamentally shifting the economics of modernization,” he says, reducing the effort, risk, and time traditionally associated with these programs. At Bupa, combining AI-assisted reverse engineering with forward engineering …
Sherazi and Tripathi also highlight the human dimension of modernization: preserving institutional knowledge, giving teams capacity to adapt, and creating an environment where employees can surface problems early.
Looking ahead, both experts see modernized platforms as foundations for more personalized, predictive and AI-driven experiences. The payoff of modernization may be less about replacing aging technology and more about building the flexibility needed for whatever comes next.
“Modern platforms will become the base for far more intelligent AI-driven ecosystems, where AI is not just an add-on, but it is built into everything from design to operations. That’s how the modern platforms will evolve, and the customer experiences will become far more personalized and predictive,” says Tripathi. For Sherazi, that shift is already changing the questions organizations can ask: “It used to be, can our platform support that? Now, …
Megan Tatum:From MIT Technology Review, I’m Megan Tatum, and this is Business Lab, the show that helps business leaders make sense of new technologies coming out of the lab and into the marketplace.Our topic today is legacy modernization. Companies across industries continue to struggle to bring AI modernization to legacy technology stacks, increasing the risk of losing vendor support, degraded customer experience, and limited capacity for innova…
My guests are Asifa Sherazi, who is CIO of health insurance at Bupa, and Sanjeev Tripathi, who is senior vice president, region head of BFSI, healthcare, and public sector for Australia, New Zealand, and Southeast Asia at Infosys.
Sanjeev Tripathi:Thanks, Megan. Wonderful to be here. And good talking to you again, Asifa.
Megan:Thank you both so much for being here. Asifa, if I could start with you just to set the context for our conversation. There are seven million healthcare customers across the Asia-Pacific. Could you tell us a bit more about Bupa and the challenges it’s faced in its modernization plan?
Asifa:Yes, absolutely. Let me start with something about Bupa that shapes everything we do. We are a global healthcare organization. Think hospitals, clinics, dental, age care, digital health, alongside our insurance business. We reinvest back into the organization, so into our services, our capability, our teams, and our outcomes that we deliver for our customers. In Asia-Pacific, we serve around, as you said, seven million customers across heal…
Now, for most of our health insurance members, the day-to-day digital relationship with Bupa begins through My Bupa, our self-service platform. It’s the front door for managing cover, updating policy details, submitting claims, checking entitlements. Alongside of it, Blua plays a complimentary role. Where My Bupa helps members manage their cover, Blua helps them manage their health, digital healthcare services, clinical support, preventative heal…
Here was our challenge. Our mobile app, My Bupa, was built on Xamarin, and Microsoft support for it ended sometime in 2024. We had extended support in place, so our customers remained protected throughout, but we were clear-eyed that this was a bridge, not a destination. The runway was finite, and it was shortening for us. We made the decision to modernize from a position of stability proactively for the long-term safety and experiences of our cu…
Megan:Right. So you decided to act really proactively in that sense. And so, Asifa, what are some of the risks then of sticking with end-of-life technologies, and how will moving away from legacy technologies help you improve the customer experience?
Asifa:Yeah. Look, the end-of-life technology is a risk that compounds quietly, and then arrives all at once. We saw it in three ways. The first is security and compliance. Once a technology is out of vendor support, the flow of security updates and fixes changes fundamentally. In our case, we put extended support in place as a bridge so our customers stayed protected. But extended support buys you time, it doesn’t buy you a future. In healthcare,…
The second is losing control of your own roadmap. How I’d explain that is iOS and Android don’t stand still. Every operating system release, every change to app store requirements becomes something that you react to rather than plan for. As each one slows you down a little further, over time, that opens a widening gap between what customers expect and what you can actually give them. We’re all customers. We don’t benchmark a health insurer agains…
And the third way was, and this is one red flag for peers, is the shrinking talent pool. Xamarin is legacy technology, and the engineering expertise available for it is limited. You end up with a critical customer platform supported by a narrowing group of specialists. That’s a workforce risk wearing a technology costume. We partnered with Infosys and we migrated the entire application estate from Xamarin to fully native Swift and Kotlin, and the…
The team achieved 100% feature parity in a single release, and 90% of our active customer base moved to a new version, and they’ve, I think, downloaded nearly 1.8 million unique downloads. From our customers’ perspective, customers will never think about any of this as a technology change, and they shouldn’t have to either. What they’ll notice is that when they need us, often at a stressful moment, it just simply works, and that’s the outcome we …
Megan:Those are some really striking results and statistics that you’ve shared there on the success of the migration. I mean, Sanjeev, could you talk a bit about why modernizing legacy technologies is so critical at this time, and how Infosys has approached that transformation journey with Bupa?
Sanjeev:Sure, Megan. To be honest, legacy modernization initiatives are not new, and there has always been a strong desire to drive modernization across the entire technology landscape. And Asifa covered all the points that I was going to cover about the risks that have been there. But I’ll reiterate, the reality is the industry has been held back by the cost complexity, and also the risks that have been associated with any legacy modernization i…
So what has changed? What has changed is that we now have new tools that are available to us to address these challenges. The emergence of AI is fundamentally shifting the economics of modernization, and it’s doing that by helping organizations to reduce the effort, risk, and also the time that is traditionally taken for programs like these, and that is why we believe that the time is now for legacy modernization. In fact, in Infosys, we have six…
With Bupa in particular, we approached the journey as a business transformation rather than simply a technology rewrite, and our approach had two key phases. One is reverse engineering, and then forward engineering. Let me just quickly cover what these two are.Reverse engineering, what we did is we extracted and we understood the rules, the processes, and the logic within the legacy environment, and that’s a standard approach we took, we take in …
The second aspect is forward engineering, where we re-architected the solution to enable a reimagined customer experience. The objective is not just a feature-by-feature migration or ensuring feature parity, which is important, but it is even more important that since we’re investing this kind of money to create a modern platform that is scalable, maintainable, and is also capable for future innovation, and that’s what Asifa mentioned about you n…
Finally, just one more point before I close this question is the time to market. I spoke about the time is now, and because we’ve got the power of the tools that are available now. What AI allowed us is to accelerate the transformation dramatically. What would have traditionally been a long and complex modernization, was delivered in approximately 60% less time than what would have happened in pre-AI era, and that is the real story.
Megan:So AI in this context is a real enabler in terms of the economics and the speed and all of those things you’re talking about. If I could come back to you, Asifa, as much as modernization is a technology challenge, there is the human component as well, and I wondered if you could talk about how you prepared employees for these new technologies, and what challenges and solutions you faced on that front as well?
Asifa:The human side of it is what I’m really passionate about. Technology was only half the challenge. The real work was helping people move from what they knew to what was possible. Modernization isn’t just about replacing systems, it’s about giving teams the confidence, the capability, the clarity to embrace a different future, and that’s what determines whether change actually succeeds.
From that experience, there were three human challenges that stood out for us. The first one was scarcity of expertise on both sides of the transition, and like we said before, Xamarin is a legacy app. We were moving away from a legacy technology, supported by a rapidly shrinking specialist talent pool, and modernizing onto two native platforms. Documentation of that existing environment was limited. Much of the operational knowledge sat in indiv…
What changed the dynamic was using AI to dothe archeology. As Sanjeev mentioned, Infosys applied AI-assisted reverse engineering to harvest the legacy Xamarin code and extract the flows, the rules, the business logic, and generate native-ready user stories and acceptance criteria from it. The team did a lot of work. They mapped hundreds, I think nearly 1,500 regression scenarios to native epics, and that way, parity critical journeys were preserv…
The second challenge, Megan, was capacity and not willingness. Our business analysts were fully committed to ongoing feature delivery. And this is a live customer-facing app, and you cannot pause improving the customer experience while you rebuild underneath it. AI-driven discovery and documentation removed almost an estimated of 400 hours of manual BA effort, and that’s not a headcount story, that’s actually people not being asked to do two full…
The third challenge that stood out was space. Our original internal estimate was around 18 months, and thanks to Sanjeev and the team, almost like a one-team approach of how do we tackle this, the team delivered it in seven, and that’s exhilarating.
t’s also demanding, and both things need saying out loud. We mobilized cross-functional squads across engineering, architecture, testing, release, because managing parallel environments while protecting BAU commitments is such an emotional load as well as a logistical one. We leaned in hard alongside the team, being present rather than reporting from a distance, regular check-ins, genuinely listening to concerns, unblocking things quickly so peop…
But the thing that made the biggest difference was surprisingly simple, actually. We built a visual depiction of the transformation journey, and we updated it every month so the team could actually see how far they’ve come. Because when you deepen migration of this scale, it’s really easy to only see what’s left to be done, and being able to look back at the ground that’s already been covered gave people real intent and real momentum. And genuine…
Megan:I love that idea of it being exhilarating, but exhausting. I think that’s a great description.
Asifa:Yeah. And the leadership lesson for all of us was just simpler than any of it. Programs like this have hard weeks, there’s going to be incidents, delay, difficult conversations. And Sanjeev, you and I have had those conversations many times. The job of leadership in those moments is to absorb the ambiguity rather than transmit anxiety, because if people feel safe telling you bad news early, there’s almost nothing you can’t fix. I say this p…
Megan:It sounds like you did an incredible job focusing on that people element just as much as the technology, which is so important. And Sanjeev, we’ve heard some of the incredible results Bupa has had with this, but more broadly, I suppose, looking across modernization use cases, where do you find that companies see the most ROI, and what advice do you have for leaders who need to focus on transformation at that legacy level?
Sanjeev:Thanks, Megan. That’s a very important and actually a very good question, because what we see is modernization ROI is sometimes viewed too narrowly through just a technology lens, and as Asifa mentioned, it is broader than just technology. Legacy modernization has aspects associated with business implications as well, so I’ll just cover that very quickly.
There are two dimensions, as I mentioned. One is technical ROI or technology-related ROI, and second is business ROI. On the technical side, and as you heard from Asifa as well, the biggest benefits come from faster time to market, platform stability and resilience, of course, and a lot of times, in fact, almost in all the cases, lower operating costs, and that is one of the aspects associated with some of the legacy modernization programs.
Besides this, access to broader, more readily available talent pool, and security management, and ensuring that the platforms are secure and free from, as much as possible, free from vulnerabilities in the current environment. At the same time, making it easier to innovate, releases become faster so that the feature delivery into the market becomes faster, and also able to respond to any new technology innovation that comes into play. But this is…
On the business side, however, the returns are often reflected in customer outcomes, and what we typically see are improvements in measures such as net promoter score, and in this case, for example, application ratings that you see on the app store. Both of which are actually very strong indicators of customer satisfaction and digital experience quality. I think it is important for us to cover, look at the ROI from both technology, but more impor…
Megan:I love the idea that this is not just about migration. This a chance, as you say, to reimagine what you can deliver and what’s possible. Fantastic. Let’s close with a forward look. Asifa, what innovation are you looking forward to that wouldn’t have been possible before this, and what do you see on the horizon?
Asifa:There’s definitely lots of things on the horizon. But what excites us most isn’t specific technology, it’s that the question in our conversations has changed. It used to be, can our platform support that? Now, it’s is that the right thing to do for our customers? And that’s a profound shift.There’s three things, Megan, that generally weren’t possible before, and we’ve touched on this a little bit, and Sanjeev’s touched on it as well. This f…
And Megan, you mentioned on the horizon. It’ll be remiss of me not to take the name of agentic AI. The shift from AI that supports a task to AI that completes an outcome end-to-end with proper governance, human oversight at the key decision points. What this program showed us is that the constraint is no longer the models. It’s whether your platforms, data, processes are more than enough to let AI act safely, which is precisely why this work matt…
Megan:Absolutely. And now you have those foundations in place, like you say, all of these opportunities open up. Fantastic. And Sanjeev, just finally, as companies complete these migrations, what kinds of innovations and benefits are you seeing, and what do you expect in the next five years?
Sanjeev:Sure. Again, good question, Megan. The reason is there is no uniformity on how these migrations are being done even today. As I mentioned earlier, so where there is simple lift and shift of existing code base onto a new platform, a like-to-like replacement, the benefits generally tend to be limited. Where we apply first principles, thinking about re-imagining, re-architecting, and refactoring the system to establish foundations for a far …
Now, if I look ahead over the next, you mentioned about next five years, I don’t know about five years, four years, but over the next few years at least, I think it is going to get very interesting, because modern platforms will become the base for far more intelligent AI-driven ecosystems, where AI is not just an add-on, but it is built into everything from design to operations. That’s how the modern platforms will evolve, and the customer exper…
Megan:Fantastic. Really exciting changes on the horizon then. Thank you both so much.
That was Asifa Sherazi, who is the CIO of health insurance at Bupa, and Sanjeev Tripathi, senior vice president, region head of BFSI, healthcare, and public Sector for Australia, New Zealand, and Southeast Asia at Infosys, whom I spoke with from Brighton in England.That’s it for this episode of Business Lab. I’m your host, Megan Tatum. I’m a contributing editor at Insights, the custom publishing division of MIT Technology Review. We were founded …
This content was produced by Insights, MIT Technology Review’s custom content arm, not its editorial staff. It was researched and written by humans, with any AI tools that may have been used limited to production processes under human oversight.
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