Amdocs Studio encompasses a comprehensive suite of cloud services, platforms, and expertise designed to help large enterprises across telecom, financial services, and other verticals navigate, adopt, and optimize their operations within cloud environments. With embedded GenAI and Agentic AI expertise, it enables smarter, scalable transformations that deliver measurable value at every stage of an enterprise’s cloud journey. Pulse 2.0 interviewed Amdoc Studios’ Global Go To Market Leader, Deborah Koens, to gain a deeper understanding of the company.
Deborah Koens’ Background
What is Deborah Koens’ background? Koens said:
“I’ve spent most of my career at the intersection of enterprise technology and business transformation. Before joining Amdocs in 2021, I held leadership roles at DXC Technology and Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Earlier in my career, I worked in strategic sales management for Oracle and IBM Canada Ltd., where I helped clients drive innovation through technology.”
“These roles have been varied, but my passion for helping large organizations unlock value with technology is a constant thread. Whether bringing cloud capabilities to life or navigating complexities of modernization, I love connecting strategy with execution to make things better than they were before.”
Role At The Company
What are your primary responsibilities today? Koens shared:
“At Amdocs Cloud, I help organizations in highly regulated industries modernize IT and accelerate the digital agenda. We use a blend of cloud consultancy, expert-led platform engineering, and cloud-native services to satisfy performance, compliance, and scalability needs.”
“Amdocs Cloud is one of four strategic studios, working alongside dedicated studios for Data & GenAI, Quality Engineering, and Customer Experience. This studio-led model fosters deep domain expertise while enabling cross-functional collaboration. So, our teams are highly specialized but they also draw on diverse perspectives to solve complex problems.”
“What excites me is that we’re not just modernizing technology, we’re enabling real business change in sectors like financial services. It’s very fulfilling to help these organizations evolve how they serve customers, launch new products, and create experiences in ways that weren’t possible just a few years ago. That’s the impact we strive for every day.”
Stay Competitive As An FSI
Is there one thing financial services institutions (FSIs) should focus on to remain competitive? Koens noted:
“Financial services is a rapidly evolving industry. Customer expectations are high and fintech disruptors are setting new benchmarks. Regulatory upheaval and complexity bring further challenges.”
“In this environment, staying competitive demands continuous multi-channel innovation, superior customer experiences, and rapid adoption of the right emerging technologies.”
“The one thing that underpins all these capabilities is modernization.”
“However, many FSIs are tethered to decades-old technology systems and approaches, such as mainframes and monolithic architectures. This drives up costs and slows down progress when they need to act fast, embracing opportunities for real-time personalization, AI integration, and omnichannel experiences.”
“Cloud modernization is not optional anymore. It’s the very foundation of agility, resilience, and data-driven growth. What’s more, the pool of legacy tech talent is shrinking rapidly. As the engineers who built mainframes and other aging technologies reach retirement age, maintaining these systems becomes wholly unsustainable.”
“FSIs need modern, cloud-first strategies so they can reduce time to market, optimize costs, and introduce new digital capabilities faster than their peers. In a market where speed and experience define success, modernization is the must-have enabler of growth.”
Cloud Modernization
We’ve been talking about cloud modernization for years. What’s changed? Koens noted:
“Modernization isn’t a new topic. But three game-changing shifts have converged, altering the landscape:
— From cost savings to added value: FSIs are under increasing pressure to demonstrate material value from cloud adoption. Cloud spend faces growing scrutiny, and CIOs are being challenged to deliver business change, not just cost savings. This is driving a shift from fragmented migrations to more strategic, outcome-driven modernization.
— From manual to AI-enabled transformation: Empowering engineers with GenAI and intelligent automation tools slashes the cost, complexity, and risk once associated with modernization. Large application portfolios can be assessed, optimized, and transformed in a matter of weeks. Projects of this size previously required months of manual work and often failed to meet expectations. AI turns this around with faster roadmap creation, automated analysis of technical debt, and better alignment with business outcomes. It also improves accuracy and reduces risk.
— From technology to business focus: Modernization is no longer regarded solely as an IT initiative. It’s recognized as a catalyst for digital product innovation, real-time analytics, embedded AI, and better customer experiences. As FSIs strive to become more agile, data-driven, and competitive, modernization is mission-critical.”
“In short, we’re at an inflection point. The technologies are ready. The business needs are clear. And the market is demanding measurable outcomes. That’s what makes this moment different.”
One-Size-Fits-All Solution
Is there a one-size-fits-all solution for modernization? Koens pointed out:
“Modernization looks different for every organization, and it’s an ongoing journey. Many FSIs need to reframe their approach, positioning modernization as a continuous discipline where agile capabilities support evolving business needs. It’s not about a one-off migration event. It’s about embedding a new mindset where development is flexible and aligned to business priorities.”
“Eliminating technical debt is just one part of modernization; it is also a launchpad for innovation. Initiatives should be chosen based on their ability to deliver business value, whether that’s through time to market acceleration, digital product enablement, or personalization enhancements.”
“This means taking a strategic, data-informed path. For example, AI can be used to assess application portfolios, segmenting them by business value and technical feasibility. This informs decisions about which assets to transform, optimize, retire, or re-architect to unlock maximum value with minimal disruption.”
Ensuring Modernization Delivers Value
How can FSIs ensure modernization delivers value? Koens emphasized:
“It all begins with business intent. I always advise FSIs to start out by identifying the capabilities they want to unlock: faster product launches, better digital experiences, improved compliance, or cost optimization. Once this is determined, AI-powered assessment tools can analyze large portfolios to identify which applications are most critical to those outcomes.”
“Leading with business insight helps set investment priorities, reduce risk, and deliver value faster. Going for high-impact wins first allows FSIs to earn buy-in, building momentum and confidence for broader modernization at scale. It also avoids the pitfalls associated with doing too much too soon, like unrealistic timelines, underestimation of complexity, and capability gaps. These are common issues that stall many modernization projects.”
GenAI And Agentic AI In Cloud Modernization
What role do GenAI and agentic AI play in cloud modernization? Koens replied:
“GenAI and agentic AI are game-changers. GenAI allows us to generate code, test cases, and propose architecture patterns automatically. Agentic AI goes further, combining human expertise with machine speed to guide the modernization journey with purpose.”
“These technologies reduce the burden on human teams while increasing transformation velocity, consistency, and accuracy. For example, agentic AI can identify high-priority applications using business KPIs, then generate a roadmap that maximizes IT and commercial impact. This is the start of efficient, intelligent modernization at scale.”
Utilizing AI To Help FSIs With Modernization
How does Amdocs leverage AI to help FSIs with modernization? Koens revealed:
“At Amdocs, our approach to modernization is consulting-led, i.e., firstly, we engage deeply with business and IT stakeholders to understand organizational goals, regulatory constraints, and digital ambitions. This ensures the strategy is tied to clear business outcomes like faster product delivery, enhanced compliance, or improved customer experiences.
Once objectives are established, Amdocs Studios integrates AI as appropriate across the entire modernization lifecycle, from discovery to deployment. We target areas where AI can reduce complexity, minimize risk, and accelerate time to value. It changes modernization from a high-risk, manual effort into a strategic, scalable process with five key stages:
1.) AI-Driven Discovery and Assessment: Intelligent agents are used to scan, analyze, and map legacy application portfolios, prioritizing modernization efforts based on business impact and technical fit. This underpins a clear, data-backed transformation roadmap.
2.) Automated Code Analysis and Transformation: AI accelerates application refactoring and re-platforming by automating code review, restructuring, and conversion. This releases human engineers from tedious tasks while increasing accuracy and consistency.
3.) Infrastructure-as-Code Generation and Deployment Automation: GenAI is used in the creation of infrastructure templates and deployment pipelines, reducing time to cloud and enabling consistent, secure environments.
4.) Testing and Optimization: Continuous testing powered by AI ensures all performance, compliance, and security standards are satisfied. AI is also used to detect bottlenecks and proactively recommend optimizations.
5.) Feedback Loops for Continuous Improvement: AI enables self-learning, feeding performance data and user behavior insights back into the system so applications are continuously fine-tuned.
In short, Amdocs uses AI to accelerate and de-risk IT transformation, empowering FSIs to stay competitive, resilient, and innovation-ready.”
Positive Business Impacts
Are you seeing positive business impacts? Koens commented:
“Absolutely. Our clients experience wide-ranging benefits, from improved efficiency and agility to new opportunities for growth and innovation.
A major Asia-Pacific bank benefited from a 90% operational cost reduction when Amdocs automated financial data analysis processes using AI-powered solutions. It also saw significant productivity gains, with tasks that previously required hours of work taking seconds to perform after they were modernized (full story here). We also harnessed AI to help a top-five Canadian bank move hundreds of workloads to the cloud and enable weekly releases of new features, accelerating time to market (full story here).
Outcomes like these underscore the transformative power of AI to modernize financial services, drive efficiency, and foster innovation.”
Acting Now
Why should FSIs act now? What’s the risk of delay? Koens concluded:
“Every moment of delay increases the technical debt, operating costs, and compliance risks tied to legacy infrastructure. The talent drain alone will make maintenance of these systems unsustainable within a decade.”
“Meanwhile, the competitive gap is widening. Fintechs and cloud-native banks are redefining what customers expect from digital experiences.”
“Today, AI makes large-scale modernization viable and achievable for FSIs. Companies that act now won’t just keep pace, they’ll set the pace.”
