The IBM i skills gap is now a bigger worry than security

For nine straight years, cybersecurity topped the list of things that kept IBM i shops up at night. That changed in Fortra’s 2026 IBM i Marketplace Survey: the IBM i skills shortage now outranks security as the community’s top concern. The AI adoption numbers buried in the same report explain a lot about why.

The numbers that flipped

Fortra surveyed 315 people in the IBM i community in late 2025 and published the results in February 2026. The survey asks respondents to name their top five concerns, and it’s been tracking the same questions for 12 years, which makes the trend lines worth taking seriously.

IBM i skills was named a top concern by 69% of respondents, up from 60% in 2025. That’s the highest it’s ever scored, and it capped a steady climb: 45% in 2020, 46% in 2021, 53% in 2022, 54% in 2023, 65% in 2024, then a dip to 60% in 2025 before jumping to 69% this year.

Cybersecurity, meanwhile, dropped to 64%, down from a peak of 79% in 2024 and 77% in 2025. Application modernization sits at 62%, high availability and disaster recovery at 47% (its lowest point since 2017), and regulation and compliance at 39%.

The same survey found that 73% of IBM i shops still run homegrown applications rather than a packaged ERP, which is worth holding next to that modernization number. Most shops are not modernizing a vendor’s software. They are modernizing their own.

Why the IBM i skills shortage overtook security

It’s tempting to read the security drop as “IBM i shops stopped caring about security.” That’s not what Fortra’s own team says happened. Tom Huntington, Fortra’s senior VP of technical services, framed it as shops feeling like they’ve addressed the basics: exit points, security logs, secure file transfer, multi-factor authentication. IBM built MFA directly into IBM i 7.6, and that investment shows up in the numbers.

Kris Whitney, IBM i’s chief engineer, was clear on the webinar that this isn’t a “problem solved” moment. He flagged post-quantum cryptography and air-gapped data recovery as the next wave of concerns shops need to start planning for. We’ve covered the AI side of that security picture separately, and it’s still worth locking down. Security didn’t get less important. It got less loud, because the emergency-level items got handled and something else took the top spot.

That something else is people. IBM i shops have known for years that the platform’s workforce skews older, and the retirement math hasn’t changed. The Baby Boomers who make up a disproportionate share of IBM i staff are now old enough that the youngest of them are eligible for Social Security. A generation of institutional knowledge is aging out faster than replacements are showing up.

The AI number nobody’s connecting to this

Here’s the part that gets lost when the skills story and the AI story get reported separately, which is how IT Jungle covered it, in two different articles two weeks apart.

AI usage among IBM i shops jumped from 43% to 55% in a single year, a 12-point swing. That’s not shops merely getting curious about AI. That’s more than half the IBM i community now reporting active use.

The breakdown matters more than the headline number. The single biggest driver of that jump was AI use in application and code development, which rose 13 percentage points on its own. Systems management and operations automation saw a smaller bump, and there was a noticeable uptick in AI used for training. Third-party application usage ticked up slightly too, though the survey’s own analysis flags that number as possibly too small to be statistically meaningful given the sample size.

This is not a coincidence sitting next to the skills numbers. It’s the same story from two angles. Shops are short on people who know RPG and CL, and they’re turning to AI code assistants to close the gap, not as a novelty but as an actual operational response.

IBM i chief architect Steve Will said as much directly when discussing the survey results: “It’s relatively easy to take a computer professional and teach them how to do things on IBM i… if what you’re looking for is a tool that can help anybody who’s smart and wants to learn it, to work with the platform, well, we’ll have those for you.” He was talking about Project Bob, IBM’s agentic AI code assistant for the platform, and the connection to the skills numbers wasn’t subtle. We’ve covered where Bob 2.0 actually stands for IBM i shops if you want the tool-level detail. Will has since retired from IBM after 41 years, and Kris Whitney now holds the chief architect role.

Where shops expect AI to help next

The survey also asked where respondents think IBM i and AI will provide the most value going forward, not restricted to what’s happening today. More than two-thirds pointed to code development as the area with the biggest future payoff, with systems management and operations automation as a distant second. Data integration for AI-driven decision-making and AI-assisted security both scored lower, which tracks: shops are looking for AI to help people who already maintain their own code and systems do more with less, not to hand over judgment calls.

IT Jungle president Timothy Prickett Morgan, who’s tracked this survey for years, predicted AI keeps climbing: “next year AI will be number three and it will be number two after that… I think we’re going to end up with a much better set of AI tools that can help us address the skill shortage and modernizing applications.” AI as a top-5 concern already jumped from 18% in 2024 to 30% in 2025 to 42% in 2026, a 24-point move in two years. If that trend holds, Morgan’s prediction isn’t a stretch.

A small data point that confirms a bigger shift

Buried in a separate part of the same survey is a detail that’s easy to miss but worth calling out: VS Code has passed RDi for IBM i development, 58% to 57%. It’s a one-point gap, close enough that it could flip back next year, but the direction matters more than the margin. IBM’s own Application Development Tool Set (ADTS) still leads both at 74%, so this isn’t RDi getting abandoned wholesale. But the shift from RDi toward VS Code that we’ve tracked on this site is now showing up in Fortra’s own numbers, not just anecdotally.

That matters for the skills conversation too. VS Code is a tool that developers coming from other platforms already know. Every shop that moves development onto a familiar editor lowers the bar for bringing in people who didn’t grow up on RPG.

What this means for your shop right now

If you run an IBM i shop, three things from this survey are worth acting on instead of just reading past.

First, 70% of respondents plan to upgrade hardware or software in 2026, according to IBM’s own numbers. If your shop is one of the 30% not planning an upgrade, you’re increasingly the outlier, and outliers tend to pay for it later in support costs and compatibility gaps.

Second, the skills gap isn’t a five-year-out problem anymore. It’s the single thing more IBM i professionals are worried about than anything else, ahead of security, ahead of modernization, ahead of compliance. If your shop doesn’t have a documented plan for what happens when your senior RPG developer retires, that plan is overdue.

Worth knowing on that second point: IBM’s 2026 modernization Redbook has a section titled Developer Productivity and Talent, and what that Redbook does and does not address about staffing is a useful reality check before you take a roadmap document to your CFO as a hiring plan.

Vendors are responding to this exact number, too. Rocket Software cited the same kind of skills-gap research when it added AI features to its DevOps and iCluster tooling in August 2026, on the theory that automating manual tasks is faster than hiring a way out of the shortage.

Third, the AI adoption data says the rest of the IBM i community isn’t waiting around for a perfect solution. More than half are already using AI in some form, and code development is where the bulk of that usage is concentrated. Waiting to see how it plays out means watching from further behind next year’s survey.

Bottom line

The 2026 IBM i Marketplace Survey confirms what a lot of shops already suspected: the people problem is now bigger than the security problem, and AI adoption isn’t a future trend, it’s already at 55% and climbing fast, concentrated almost entirely in code development. Shops that treat this as three separate stories, skills, security, AI, are missing that it’s really one story told from three angles. The shops making real progress are the ones connecting them: using AI tools to extend the developers they have while they figure out longer-term hiring and training.

If you’re staring down that exact gap and need a practical starting point rather than another survey to read, the IBM i AI Field Guide walks through the prompts and workflows shops are actually using to get AI tools productive on RPG and CL code.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the IBM i Marketplace Survey?

It’s Fortra’s annual survey of the IBM i community, now in its 12th year. The 2026 edition surveyed 315 people in late 2025 and asked them to rank their top concerns, along with questions about AI adoption, development tools, and upgrade plans.

Why did IBM i skills overtake security as the top concern?

Skills climbed to 69% of respondents citing it as a top-5 concern, up from 60% in 2025. Security dropped to 64% from a 2024 peak of 79%, not because it stopped mattering, but because shops have addressed the basics like MFA and secure file transfer and it stopped being the loudest fire.

How many IBM i shops are using AI now?

55% of shops reported using AI in some form, up from 43% the year before. The single biggest driver of that jump was AI use in application and code development, which rose 13 percentage points on its own.

Has VS Code overtaken RDi for IBM i development?

Yes, narrowly. The 2026 survey put VS Code at 58% usage versus RDi at 57%, the first time VS Code has passed RDi. IBM’s Application Development Tool Set (ADTS) still leads both at 74%.