Across the IT sector, senior IBM specialists are retiring, documentation is thin, and critical business logic is buried inside older applications that newer staff do not yet understand. For years, organizations have relied on a small group of experienced people who understand their codebase. When those people leave, they do not just take technical knowledge with them. They take the operating memory of the business.

Bob may be a solution to this crisis.

The big benefit of Bob for IT leaders: Documentation

If you lead an IBM i team, Bob is not most valuable because it can generate code. Its biggest immediate value is that it can help your team understand what already exists.

Retirement is a problem for most organizations not only because new skilled employees are difficult to find, but because even if they find or train those employees, their essential business knowledge was never fully documented in the first place.

In many teams, documentation has not kept up with years of changes. (If it was even done properly at all.)

Bob can help developers and analysts:

• extract business logic from programs
• map relationships between applications and databases
• explain what a specific program does
• capture how things actually work, not how people assume they work
• produce ERDs and functional design material
• support modernization planning once that understanding is in place

If you’ve tried asking your subject matter experts to create this documentation, you know that it is a long and difficult process for a human expert to articulate all these relationships, even if they understand them intuitively after years of working in the system.

Bob can create this documentation in minutes.

That is powerful because it gives you something concrete to review with subject matter experts.

Instead of beginning with a blank page, you begin with a draft based on the code itself. Your experts can validate it, correct it, and enrich it. Once that happens, your organization starts building a real body of usable institutional knowledge.

That changes the conversation for IT leaders. Instead of asking, “How do I replace decades of undocumented knowledge?” you can start asking, “How fast can I capture, validate, and organize what we already know before my experts retire?”

Why Bob stands out for IBM i environments

Of course, the documentation Bob generates is only useful if it’s accurate. Luckily, Bob has an advantage over other AI tools when it comes to producing accurate results.

That advantage is context.

Context is one of the biggest weaknesses of generic AI tools. If the model does not understand the codebase, the database, or the surrounding project, the answers can be shallow or wrong.

Bob’s strength is how it gathers and uses context before it even sends a request to the underlying model. That makes a real difference for large enterprise environments, especially older IBM i estates where logic is spread across many programs and files.

Bob is also designed to use different models for different tasks. IBM has publicly positioned Bob as a partner that understands codebases, documentation, and workflows, rather than as a simple chatbot.

A practical way to use Bob

For IT leaders, the best approach is not to try to do everything at once.

A practical path looks like this:

1. Start with a proof of concept
   Choose one program set, business process, or application area that is poorly documented but important.
2. Use Bob to generate initial documentation
   Ask it to explain the code, relationships, and logic in a structured way.
3. Have subject matter experts validate the results
   Bob is still an AI system. It needs human review. The output should be checked, refined, and approved.
4. Repeat the formula
   Once you find the prompts and workflow that give you useful results, apply the same method to the next area.
5. Use that documentation to guide next decisions
   When the system is documented, you can make better choices about modernization, refactoring, onboarding, and long-term support.

Now is the time to act

The IBM i retirement wave is not a future issue. It is already here.

Bob can help teams move much faster on documentation than manual methods, but it still works best when knowledgeable people are available to confirm the results.

If your team still has experienced people who know the applications, now is the time to capture that knowledge while they can still validate what Bob produces.

Once your experts work with Bob to create accurate and useful documentation, everything improves.

• New developers can onboard faster.
• Analysts can understand dependencies more quickly.
• Architects can plan more confidently.
• Leadership can make smarter modernization decisions.

The bottom line: Use Bob now, while your experts are still in the building.

A strong option for IBM i leaders

If you are dealing with aging applications, thin documentation, and the risk of institutional knowledge walking out the door, Bob is a strong solution, especially as a documentation and discovery tool.

Now is the time to consider Bob. .