OPM is using AI to modernize its legacy COBOL-coded systems; DOD to award $50M to accelerate development of emerging tech projects

The Pentagon announced Saturday that it selected five small, non-traditional defense contractors to receive funding to help move their emerging technologies into production. Each company will receive $10 million under the Accelerate the Procurement and Fielding of Innovative Technologies (APFIT) pilot program overseen by Heidi Shyu, undersecretary of defense for research and engineering. The awards mark the first batch of APFIT funding distributed in fiscal 2025 and they’re being bankrolled through continuing resolution appropriations.

The Office of Personnel Management will lean heavily on artificial intelligence as it leverages a recent Technology Modernization award to update legacy mainframe programs for its retirement systems, according to an agency spokesperson. OPM’s award is meant to help the agency deliver a new online system for retirees, the spokesperson said in an email to FedScoop, and will serve as one step in a larger modernization roadmap to reduce costs and modernize critical systems. For this specific project, OPM is planning to use TMF funding to rehost legacy systems in the cloud and use AI to rewrite the existing Common Business Oriented Language (COBOL). The project is expected to take about two years, and the agency will award a contract to a vendor for most of the work. However, the spokesperson said in-house staff will be “heavily involved in reviewing and validating the outcomes of the redeveloped code.”

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