Westfield Insurance, a leading US-based property and casualty insurance company, relies on advanced technology to help it balance its business needs against industry challenges such as cost and competitive pressures, ever-changing regulations, economic uncertainties and its consumers’ heightened customer service expectations. To keep up with the changing demands, Westfield sought to integrate generative AI capabilities to support application development and onboarding of new talent for its COBOL/Assembler/JCL on its IBM® System z® environment and improve developer productivity while mitigating potential misreporting to the Insurance Services Office, Inc. (ISO), an industry policy and rating organization. The company sought guidance and expertise from its trusted advisor, IBM Consulting®.

The pilot project demonstrated how watsonx solutions and especially watsonx Code Assistant for Z could improve overall developer productivity using IBM’s generative AI capabilities. During the pilot, the Westfield developer team saved 150 hours, a 30% decrease in time, while sifting through 47,000 lines of code. An additional 20 hours saved in application discovery analysis equated to an 80% time reduction. The team recognized cost savings in its change management processes. An assistant helping the developer to more quickly understand the application and its dependencies as well as streamline documentation could lead to faster onboarding of new developers needing an understanding of business-critical mainframe application. Additionally, the updated change management and process documentation help mitigate misreporting to ISO. With the IBM generative AI solution’s more efficient, time-saving capabilities, Westfield can continue to invest in its customer-centric focus while reducing costs and other competitive pressures.