Real Vision Software President Monty Chicola recently made the trip to IBM Rochester at the invitation of IBM's own development team — not to sit in the audience, but to lead the conversation. Nearly 100 IBM developers, managers, and senior leaders turned out to hear how a 30+ year IBM i software vendor is thinking about production AI on Power Systems.
The visit was hosted by Dave Stanton of IBM, who later described it as exactly the kind of conversation that keeps IBM's development teams connected to how their platform gets used in the real world. Monty didn't just share where RVI has been — he walked the room through where the AI opportunity on IBM i and Power Systems is headed next, tying it directly to IBM's recently announced S1112 platform.
AI on IBM i Isn't Theoretical Anymore
One of the most notable numbers to come out of the visit: RVI is already delivering AI capabilities in production to hundreds of customers today, with well over a thousand more in line to roll it out. That's not a pilot program or a roadmap slide — it's document classification, intelligent search, and workflow automation running on real IBM i systems, for real IBM i shops, right now.
That distinction matters. A lot of "AI on IBM i" conversations are still hypothetical — vendors describing what AI could do for a Power Systems shop someday. RVI's visit to Rochester was the opposite: a vendor showing IBM's own engineers what customers are already doing with it in production, and pushing IBM's team with hard questions about where the platform needs to go to keep up.
Why IBM wanted this conversation: IBM Rochester builds the Power Systems platform, but the people writing the code aren't always the people running it in production every day. A session like this closes that gap — grounding platform development in what's actually happening on the systems it powers.
What This Means If You're Running IBM i Today
If your organization is still evaluating whether AI has a real place in an IBM i environment, the honest answer is: it already does, and the shops that move first are setting the pace for everyone else. Document classification that used to require manual review. Search that understands what a document actually says, not just its file name. Workflow automation that routes and prioritizes without someone manually triaging a queue.
These aren't Windows-only or cloud-only capabilities anymore. They run natively alongside your existing IBM i applications and DB2 data — which is exactly the case Monty made in Rochester.
Curious what AI on IBM i actually looks like in practice? Take a look at RVI's AI features to see the capabilities already running in production for organizations like yours.
Read the full recap, including comments from the IBM Rochester team, in Dave Stanton's original LinkedIn post.
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