Pegasystems Archives

Fewer Graveyards, Please: Legacy, AI, and the Debt You Cannot See

by Thomas Wieberneit | Jul 22, 2026 | Blog, CRMKonvos |

Every so often a vendor conversation earns the word “useful,” and this one flirts with it. On CRMKonvo #309, Pega‘s Matt Healy walked into a room of skeptics and, refreshingly, did not try to sell AI as pixie dust. He sold governance. Let me explain why that is the interesting part, and where the pitch still needs a second look. First, the setup, because it is absurd. According to Matt, ninety-five percent of Fortune 500s still run a mainframe in some capacity. Roughly thirty thousand organizations are still on Lotus Notes. Healy mentions a government claims system running on hardware funded by a grant from the JFK administration, and a separate agency contracting retirees back out of retirement homes to keep the thing alive. This is the installed base that every “AI-native transformation” slide ignores. TL;DR If you want to watch the full CRMKonvo, please go ahead here (optimized for smartphones) or here (optimized for tablets/computers). Else, be my guest and continue to read. Or do both … The graveyard problem, now with agents Modernization has been on the CIO agenda since CIOs were invented. What changed, is that frontier AI does not mix with data and processes trapped inside sixty-year-old systems. But even worse: if AI lets you build faster, it also lets you fill Alan Trefler’s famous “application graveyard” faster than ever. The Lotus Notes graveyard of the 2000s simply reopens as an agent graveyard, or a Claude graveyard; take your pick of tombstone. Healy does not dodge this. He cites the now-familiar numbers on AI-generated code: roughly eight times more duplicated blocks, double the code churn,...

Pega’s fix for runaway AI costs: stop the agents from thinking at runtime

by Thomas Wieberneit | Jun 13, 2026 | Analysis, Blog |

The news At its PegaWorld conference in Las Vegas on June 8, 2026, Pegasystems announced Pega Infinity 26, which it says will be available in Q3 2026. The principal change is commercial: Pega is moving away from per-token pricing for its AI agents toward a flat charge per completed “case,” which it defines as a task carried out from start to finish, such as a customer changing an order, a loan approval, or a claim. Pega frames the move as removing what it calls the “AI token tax“. The pricing change rests on an architecture Pega calls Predictable AI. Reasoning-heavy AI work is concentrated at design time, when workflows are authored in Pega Blueprint and the new Infinity Studio. At runtime, a lighter-weight model identifies the user’s intent, selects a pre-approved workflow, and executes it step by step; where an individual step requires a language model, for example to parse a document or summarize a prior interaction, that step is given bounded instructions rather than open-ended latitude. Pega gives two reasons: more consistent outcomes, because agents follow approved workflows rather than re-reasoning each request, and more predictable cost, because the heavier processing happens only once during design rather than on every transaction. The architecture is not new to this release. Pega introduced Predictable AI Agents in May 2025 and integrated them into Pega Infinity ’25, which reached general availability in December 2025. Infinity 26 primarily adds the outcomes-based pricing model, alongside a companion announcement that exposes Pega processes as Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers, allowing third-party agents from Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, and AWS to call them under Pega’s governance...