The hype of ChatGPT has shown the world the magic of artificial intelligence — but AI has long been in the mix at companies such as Amazon Web Services Inc.

AI is generating opportunities to step-function areas, one of them being the migration of mainframes or Common Business Oriented Language that still power a lot of IT, needing to be upgraded but not necessarily replaced. That is something that AWS has been pursuing with its partner Unqork Inc., with a new dynamic emerging around AI. There have been more than 9,000 different programming languages created to talk to machines, which don’t understand language, according to Gary Hoberman (pictured, left), founder and chief executive officer of Unqork.

“Codeless, to us, is a simple concept,” he said. “We removed all aspects of grammar, syntax. All the things that make a language look like ancient Greek to someone, we made it look like a democratized, simple data definition, which is timeless. That’s the beauty of what Unqork is running on AWS and this idea of generative AI being able to now take and tackle all of these 9,000 different languages into a unified data definition.”

Hoberman and Chris Casey (pictured), director and general manager of industry and technology partnerships with AWS, spoke with industry analyst John Furrier during a CUBE Conversation from SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed Unqork’s AI-powered approach and how AWS views its partnerships in harnessing the potential of generative AI. (* Disclosure below.)

The benefits of a unified data definition

A unified data definition enables many benefits, including a reduction in costs and speed to market, according to Hoberman. But what would the company’s approach actually look like in practice?

“COBOL was an abstraction of Assembler. You could think about Java and all these abstraction layers we’ve been going on,” Hoberman said. “The best abstraction we all know is the cloud. It’s what AWS did. The reality is, what cloud did was say, ‘Hey, there’s a software-defined infrastructure.’ That’s what cloud is. But it stops at the infrastructure.”

Cloud didn’t address the actual apps that were being built, according to Hoberman.

“When you take it up to the next level, as we did with Unqork, and with this utility that sits above the cloud, what you start to see is you could actually understand the meaning of these applications and describe them in terms of readable data, democratized data,” he said. “An example … is you could take an onboarding application at a bank or maybe an insurance application or underwriting application. Or you walk in a hospital. The federal government’s a new customer.”

Unqork recently refactored into Unqork the entire COBOL system for New York City for marriage licenses, becoming the books and marrying 38,000 people during the past couple of years, according to Hoberman.

“When you’re creating software today, it’s about 20% of your budget; and 80% is running it after,” he said. “Everyone thinks the finish line is ‘We’re live.’ The reality is that’s when the hell starts; that’s the pain, the suffering, and we’re trying to end that with AWS.”

Democratizing technology

All of the potential capabilities that AI can bring are still not fully understood, but the technology is potentially changing the definition of a developer, according to Casey. With Amazon Bedrock, AWS has sought to democratize access to technology to any developer trying to build on behalf of customers on the AWS cloud.

“The business can now get much more involved in iterating on different potential user experiences, which is really exciting. But that means the different permutations of where a solution might end up, in terms of its state and the user experience, is excitingly variable,” he said.

But in referencing Hoberman’s earlier point, companies are looking further beyond now, according to Casey.

“We’ve got a different user experience that we’re putting into production,” he said. “How are we then thinking about maintaining that solution, to Gary’s point, long-term? It’s going to pay dividends into the future, if they’re thinking that far in advance.”

When it comes to democratizing technology, it’s Unqork’s goal to do so without compromising enterprise, according to Hoberman.

“It’s through codeless, which is another way of saying we convert a programming language to data or data-driven software and that the future is data-driven software,” he said. “Data is the best asset in the world. We make it the biggest asset in your company.”

Here’s the complete video interview with Gary Hoberman and Chris Casey:

(* Disclosure: Amazon Web Services Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither AWS nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE