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If you are like most enterprise leaders, you are managing a sprawling estate of hundreds—or even thousands—of disjointed legacy applications built on outdated frameworks, consuming an estimated 55% to 80% of your IT budget just to "keep the lights on." This legacy drag stifles innovation. Yet the traditional answer—"rip-and-replace"—often makes things worse. Multi-year, high-risk projects that rewrite everything from scratch can be catastrophic.

Appian’s latest updates deliver powerful new tools to consolidate legacy systems, automate complex knowledge work, and scale data integration. Modernization projects are notoriously high risk, but Composer derisks the start of your journey by ensuring total stakeholder alignment before development begins.

IT leaders today are in a high-stakes gridlock between the pressure to invest in new AI solutions and legacy systems that aren’t equipped to support them. With the pace of work today, long modernization projects are often untenable. They disrupt your workflows. They use up your team’s resources. And they sometimes fail to deliver results. So how do successful organizations move forward? They rethink their approach.

Intelligent document processing (IDP) promised a paperless future for businesses and organizations. But despite significant investment, a critical gap often persists between the technological capability to extract data and the organizational ability to actually drive meaningful business outcomes. 78% of enterprises are now operational with some form of AI-powered document processing, yet 52% of staff time remains consumed by manual document tasks.1 This paradox reveals the new IDP market reality.

We are living through a renaissance in software development. In February 2025, computer scientist Andrej Karpathy coined the term "vibe coding" to describe a new state of human-computer interaction. In this model, developers stop acting like bricklayers—manually laying every line of syntax—and start acting like architects. They design the outcome with natural language, and AI handles the construction, translating their vision into working software.

Reading emails, scanning contracts, manually processing invoices—the tedious tasks related to document processing can jam up your business operations. Document processing is a prime candidate for automation, but the technology is advancing so fast, it can be hard to know where to start or when it is time to modernize. OCR (Optical Character Recognition) and IDP (Intelligent Document Processing) are two approaches to tackling business documents.

If you’re an SAP customer, you’ve probably heard the same pitch more than once: just wait a little longer. Your migration to S/4HANA will unlock the agility you need. Your SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) investments will catch up soon. Your workflows will get faster. Your data will become more accessible. Just a little more time. But what if you can’t wait? What if your supply chain teams are buried under manual work?

If you’re an SAP customer, you’ve probably heard the same pitch more than once: just wait a little longer. Your migration to S/4HANA will unlock the agility you need. Your SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) investments will catch up soon. Your workflows will get faster. Your data will become more accessible. Just a little more time. But what if you can’t wait? What if your supply chain teams are buried under manual work?

Government organizations are under increasing pressure to act with agility, collaborate across departments, and make fast, data-driven decisions. In the defense sector, these challenges are heightened by the need to unify complex functions in support of national security. Internal processes must be as effective and responsive as the forces they serve.

Why “standalone AI” falls short AI works best when embedded in a process Guardrails are not a limitation—they’re an enabler Process-driven AI in action How leaders should be thinking about AI now Artificial intelligence is no longer optional in state and local government—it’s essential for meeting public expectations amid staffing shortages and budget constraints. AI is showing up across agencies and programs.