AI Can Help With Migration; It Cannot Own It

There’s a growing assumption that as AI agents become more capable, system migrations will eventually become fully autonomous. If an agent can refactor code, translate SQL dialects, infer schemas, and generate tests, then perhaps it should be able to re-platform an organization’s data stack end to end. That assumption makes sense if migration is understood primarily as translation. And sometimes it is. But in many real organizations, migration is not just about moving workloads. It is about using that moment to rethink what the system should be. And that changes the nature of the problem in ways that are less visible from the outside.