Artificial intelligence (AI) is the topic of the day, promising to improve user experiences and outcomes in everything from shopping to healthcare, not to mention all things IT. When it comes to the mainframe, AI not only offers new opportunities to automate and increase efficiency across the platform, it also advances the ability of organizations to create systems and solutions designed to fit their unique needs. Not only can tools be specialized, they can be fine-tuned using an organization’s own data to maximize efficiency and productivity.
With our January 2026 quarterly release, BMC makes significant strides in both of these areas, expanding our AI-powered chat assistant, empowering organizations to customize the chat experience with institutional knowledge, partnering with organizations to provide input that will shape future capabilities, and more.
Expanded BMC AMI Assistant
The Knowledge Expert Chat capability of BMC AMI Assistant is now embedded in more solutions across the BMC AMI DevX, BMC AMI Ops, and BMC AMI Security portfolios. Utilizing BMC documentation and subject matter expertise, Knowledge Expert Chat quickly provides mainframe professionals with clear, plain-language answers that help them understand system issues, troubleshoot pipeline and application failures, review security activities, and more.
Knowledge Expert Chat is now available in nine BMC AMI solutions, including BMC AMI DevX Code Pipeline, BMC AMI Ops Insight, BMC AMI Security Session Monitor, and BMC AMI Strobe.
Answers suited to your systems and situations
Now in beta, the new BMC AMI Assistant Knowledge Hub captures and ingests institutional knowledge through documentation and other intellectual capital, enabling Knowledge Expert Chat to provide relevant, organization-specific answers. With the ability to supplement BMC AMI Assistant’s large language model with their own data, organizations can provide their mainframe professionals with quick, readily available answers informed by organizational insight.
AI-driven IMS monitoring
BMC AMI Ops Insight observability has been extended to include support of IMS data for detection of issues. AI/ML-driven multivariate analysis helps teams find and fix issues more quickly by monitoring multiple environments, including IMS, to highlight anomalies and pinpoint likely root causes.
With IMS monitoring now included in BMC AMI Ops Insight’s single, integrated view, operations teams can identify potential issues and, with the help of integrated BMC AMI Assistant GenAI-powered chat, find plain-language explanations and suggested actions for quick resolution.
Partnering to meet your needs
At BMC, innovation happens when we build with our customers, not just for them. Our Customer Design Partnership (CDP) program invites you to collaborate directly with our product management, user experience, engineering, and data science teams to help shape the future of BMC AMI solutions.
Through the CDP, you can choose how deeply you’d like to participate, whether that means reviewing early concepts, exploring future capabilities, sharing your workflows and needs, joining technical discussions, or participating in beta cycles. You stay in control of your level of involvement.
The CDP is central to how we design and develop next‑generation capabilities across the BMC AMI portfolio and our use of AI, agentic, and automation technologies. With continuous customer involvement, we create solutions that are smart, intuitive, and genuinely valuable to your business.
For those researching how current BMC AMI solutions fit their needs, the BMC AMI Experience gives BMC partners the ability to build demos and gain access to the full capabilities of our solutions. The first solution available in this program is BMC AMI Cloud, giving interested customers a hands-on opportunity to see how cloud mainframe data management can benefit their specific use cases.
AI-powered application analysis, improved performance
Also included in the January release:
- New BMC AMI zAdviser Development Team Analysis uses activity metrics, productivity data, and failure patterns to create a comprehensive narrative report. Including metrics like time spent on development, testing duration, debugging frequency, and deployment patterns, these reports enable development managers to make faster decisions with a consolidated view of development reality, enabling them to make targeted improvements to application stability, minimize operational risk, and monitor usage of BMC AMI DevX tools across their teams.
- BMC AMI Cloud enhances performance with Cloud Datasets zIIP enablement that reduces General Central Processor usage and strengthens regulatory compliance with set precise retention periods for full-volume backups.
- BMC Application Restart Control in BMC AMI Data for IMS now supports Java applications in IMS environments for greater flexibility in managing COBOL-Java and pure Java workloads.
Building the future mainframe
In addition to the enhancements our customers have come to expect each quarter, the BMC AMI January release showcases our commitment to working with our clients to advance their digital transformations, partnering with them to address their needs, and building a resilient, continuously advancing mainframe.
Learn more about these features and others included in our January 2026 release on the What’s New in Mainframe Solutions webpage.
