HCLTech and Pegasystems have expanded their collaboration to help large enterprises replace ageing technology estates with AI-powered, cloud-native applications, as companies intensify efforts to cut technical debt, automate workflow redesign and strengthen governance across critical business systems.
The initiative combines HCLTech’s AI Force capability with Pega Blueprint, Pegasystems’ design and application blueprinting tool, to analyse legacy systems, extract business logic, generate requirements and support migration into modern Pega applications. The companies are positioning the offering as a way for clients to move beyond piecemeal upgrades and towards full retirement of outdated platforms that remain deeply embedded in banking, insurance, healthcare, telecom, manufacturing and public-sector operations.
Legacy modernisation has become a strategic priority as enterprises try to deploy generative AI across workflows that still depend on mainframes, Java, C++,. NET and other older technology stacks. Many such systems carry undocumented code, fragmented data structures and limited specialist support, making transformation costly and risky. The new HCLTech-Pega approach seeks to reduce manual discovery work by using AI to map code, dependencies and workflows before converting them into structured business requirement documents.
Pega Blueprint then turns those requirements into low-code application designs that can be developed on the Pega Platform. The intended outcome is a faster route from legacy assessment to deployment, with automated workflows, migration-ready data structures and clearer traceability between old system behaviour and new application design.
HCLTech said the expanded collaboration would support AI-infused and agentic automation, enabling enterprises to discover, document and transform legacy systems with less disruption. The company has also highlighted governance, compliance, DevSecOps checks and responsible AI controls as part of its wider AI-led modernisation framework, reflecting growing caution among corporate technology chiefs over uncontrolled AI deployment in regulated environments.
Pegasystems brings its strength in workflow automation, case management, decisioning and customer engagement, while HCLTech adds large-scale systems integration, engineering and cloud migration capabilities. The partnership has been active for more than 15 years, with the latest expansion aimed at clients trying to modernise business process management and case-handling platforms rather than simply shifting old applications to new infrastructure.
Technical debt remains one of the biggest barriers to enterprise AI adoption. Ageing systems often consume large portions of IT budgets, slow product launches, restrict data access and limit the ability to introduce automated decisioning. For chief information officers, the pressure is no longer only to reduce cost, but also to make technology estates suitable for AI-driven operations.
The offering also reflects a wider industry shift in which technology services firms are packaging AI tools around legacy transformation. Modernisation programmes that once relied heavily on manual code review, process interviews and migration planning are increasingly using generative AI to produce documentation, refactor code, test applications and assess business impact. That trend is drawing interest from enterprises seeking faster transformation cycles, but it also raises questions around auditability, hallucination risk, data security and accountability when AI-generated artefacts guide core system redesign.
HCLTech’s AI-led modernisation framework claims productivity improvements of 40% to 60% during legacy transformation work and faster modernisation through automated analysis, refactoring, testing and deployment. Those benefits depend on the complexity of the client estate, quality of existing documentation, integration requirements and regulatory constraints. Enterprises with highly customised platforms or fragmented data may still face lengthy remediation before full migration can proceed.
For Pegasystems, the alliance strengthens its position in the competitive market for enterprise automation platforms at a time when low-code and AI-assisted development are converging. Pega Blueprint has become central to its pitch that businesses can design applications more quickly by turning process requirements into structured blueprints. Integrating HCLTech’s AI Force expands that proposition into the earlier stage of legacy discovery, where many transformation projects stall.
The collaboration is likely to appeal to large organisations that cannot afford abrupt system replacement but need to modernise workflows tied to customer service, claims, payments, compliance, procurement and internal operations. Cloud migration remains a core part of the strategy, but the emphasis is on rebuilding processes for AI-ready operations rather than treating cloud as a hosting destination.
