Rakesh Ravuri is helping enterprises modernize legacy systems with AI while preserving the context, governance, and explainability that complex organizations require. As CTO of Publicis Sapient, he leads technology for a digital transformation company helping clients evolve through each major technology shift. Publicis Sapient's Slingshot platform recently won an AI Excellence Award for its work accelerating software development and legacy modernization.
In this episode, Russ and Rakesh explore how Slingshot began as an internal AI tool after the rise of ChatGPT, then evolved into a platform for AI-assisted engineering, modernization, and enterprise transformation. They dive into the legacy technical debt problem, especially large COBOL systems that still power critical business functions in finance, healthcare, and telecom. Rakesh explains how Slingshot breaks large codebases into intelligent chunks, extracts business rules, creates specifications, generates new code, and supports modernization without relying on armies of retired COBOL experts.
The conversation also covers why context is the key to useful enterprise AI. Rakesh explains Publicis Sapient's enterprise context graph, which connects strategy, product, engineering, experience, data, code, tests, prompts, and decisions so AI can understand not just what to build, but why it matters.