A Crucial Ingredient of the Modernisation Journey? Trust

There are a lot of reasons why large organisations avoid modernising their legacy systems. But one of the most underrated ones is simple: a lack of trust.

Imagine a large multinational bank with plenty of capital to invest in a modernisation project. And yet, it has still not made any commitments to change its tech stack or processes.

Decision-makers in this hypothetical organisation are hesitant to embark on the journey while also keeping its core consumer-facing operations going. Consumers have been using its app for years and have grown to trust it. They fear that any disruption, change, or fault may have a huge impact on their customers. More broadly, they fear that the transformed system may not accurately reflect their internal business logic, which has been honed over many years.

In this situation, the stumbling block is not willingness, the ability to invest, or even an outdated mindset — it’s a lack of trust. They know their business is being held back by technical limitations, but they don’t trust that they can achieve modernisation without upsetting the balance.

This is surprisingly common. As the benefits of modernisation become increasingly hard to ignore, CI&T is finding that fewer people need convincing of its merits. Instead, they need convincing that modernisation is possible without a huge amount of pain and friction, or affecting the bottom line. This is especially true in organisations with deeply-embedded legacy systems where operational knowledge is limited to a handful of individuals.

But there is good news: With AI, businesses can massively reduce the risk in modernisation by understanding existing systems before they start implementing change. In this way, companies can reverse engineer what needs to be done, and get proof of concept before they make meaningful changes. All while keeping the human power of discernment central to the process.

Take the example of one of our clients, a leading Brazilian bank that serves more than 71 million customers across 5,000 branches and manages over $520 billion in assets. Despite its scale and resources, the bank hesitated to modernise its core systems. With so many clients relying on its services daily, leaders feared even minor disruptions could damage the deep trust customers had in the institution.

The challenge was complex. Legacy systems underpinned critical areas, including wealth management, business banking, and open banking. Processes were slow and fragmented, but the risks of change seemed even greater. Executives needed reassurance that modernisation could be achieved without destabilising core operations or eroding customer confidence.

CI&T stepped in with an AI-led approach. By scanning and reverse-engineering the bank’s systems, AI could identify dependencies, validate changes, and provide proof of concept before any updates went live. All without requiring the bank SME 100% participation, we can leverage the SME for validation of outputs, not generation. With AI doing most of the heavy lifting, we reduced the risk of disruption while giving leaders confidence in the process. The results were significant: delivery times across major business areas improved by up to 50%, while service quality and stability increased.

What began as hesitation turned into trust, trust not just in the technology, but in the modernisation journey itself. And that trust is gained, an amazing thing tends to happen: The door to innovation opens up. Using AI to assist in the modernisation journey means that top talent within an organisation isn’t totally consumed by the project. Instead, they are freed up for innovation elsewhere in the business.

But trust only happens if companies take the first step. And if they stop seeing AI as a black box that will take over their business logic, but rather as a tool they can leverage to free up their top talent and solve business problems at the same time.

That’s where a tool like CI&T FLOW comes in. FLOW combines AI with human insight and supervision to unlock the hidden logic inside legacy systems, giving organisations the clarity to modernise without fear.

But it also does more than reduce risk: by freeing teams from the weight of legacy, FLOW opens the door to new ideas, faster innovation, and fresh opportunities for growth—transforming trust into a foundation for what comes next.

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