America's Premier Rodeo Organization Modernizes 40+ Years of Legacy Systems with AI-Powered Development

The Impact

About PRCA

The PRCA, headquartered in Colorado Springs, Colo., is recognized as the unsurpassed leader in sanctioning the sport of professional rodeo. The PRCA’s mission is to unify membership in providing an innovative fan experience, to grow the sport of professional rodeo and provide new expanded opportunities for our membership and sponsors. Since 1986, the PRCA has paid out more than $1 billion in prize money to its contestants. The PRCA offers the best cowboys and the best rodeos, delivering the best fan experience while positively impacting our communities and embracing the spirit of the West. A membership-based organization, the PRCA sanctioned 828 events in 2024, and paid out more than $76 million. 

The Challenge

For nearly nine decades, the PRCA has been the gold standard in professional rodeo, connecting millions of fans with the sport's greatest athletes and events. But behind the scenes, their technology team faced a formidable challenge—a technology infrastructure built on IBM AS/400 systems with more than 40 years of accumulated legacy code.

The challenge wasn't just age—it was the complexity of modernizing systems that had resisted previous transformation attempts. PRCA's backend infrastructure runs on IBM AS/400 servers, platforms known for reliability but notoriously difficult to modernize. Previous modernization initiatives had all stalled. The combination of aging server architecture, decades of rule changes, and deeply embedded business processes made meaningful progress nearly impossible, even for their skilled lean team.

PRCA's systems had evolved organically over four decades, with layers of business logic embedded in increasingly complex code. Event management, member databases, and business logic systems all ran on interconnected repositories built and rebuilt by different teams across different eras. The business rules and requirements had become increasingly difficult to understand—especially when locked in legacy environments.

Upgrading systems or adding functionality required substantial time investment. Developers would spend weeks or months deciphering existing code and reaching out to retired staff members. What business rules were embedded in that 1998 function? How would changing this module impact multiple other dependent systems? With a lean team and complex business processes evolved over decades, questions multiplied faster than answers.

Technical debt consumed valuable development time. New developers brought on to the team required months to ramp up and understand existing code. Business analysts, who should have been documenting requirements and validating business rules, were completely dependent on developers to interpret system functionality. Knowledge silos grew, and the team spent more time maintaining old code than building new capabilities.

Previous modernization attempts had failed not from lack of effort or expertise, but because traditional approaches couldn't crack the combination of legacy AS/400 architecture and deeply embedded business logic. PRCA's forward-thinking technology leaders needed a fundamentally different approach—one that could actually understand and interpret the complex business processes that had stymied earlier efforts.

Why Zencoder

PRCA's technology team was already exploring how AI could transform their development practices. After previous modernization attempts failed, they needed a platform that could fundamentally understand and interpret their specific business logic, learn their codebase patterns, and build custom agents for their exact needs.

Enter Zencoder, whose AI technology could fully understand and interpret the complex business processes embedded in PRCA's legacy AS/400 systems. This was the breakthrough PRCA had been searching for. Where traditional approaches had failed to penetrate decades of business logic, Zencoder's AI could analyze, comprehend, and translate those processes—turning an insurmountable challenge into a solvable problem.

With Zencoder we were able to generate system documentation within minutes. Previous attempts to generate this documentation took months and failed to generate the level of documentation we needed.

Zencoder's multi-repo intelligence was particularly compelling. Unlike traditional AI coding assistants working on individual files or repositories, Zencoder could analyze how multiple interconnected codebases worked together—critical for PRCA, where changes in one system could ripple across their entire four-decade technology stack.

What truly set Zencoder apart was its ability to build custom agents specifically trained on PRCA's business logic and codebase. Rather than generic AI models, Zencoder created agents that deeply understood rodeo event management, membership systems, and the unique business rules governing PRCA's operations. These AI agents, custom-built for PRCA's environment, could interpret business processes that had defeated previous modernization efforts.

Zencoder's powerful unit testing capabilities provided another critical advantage. As the platform generated new code and modernized legacy systems, it automatically created comprehensive unit tests preventing bugs before production. This meant PRCA could modernize with confidence, knowing each change was thoroughly validated against their complex business rules.

Zencoder's autonomous CI/CD agents could take on substantial coding tasks independently, learning from organizational patterns and continuously improving. For a lean but highly skilled team that had struggled with previous modernization attempts, AI agents handling the heavy lifting meant they could focus expertise on strategic initiatives rather than routine maintenance.

The Solution

PRCA's technology team deployed Zencoder strategically across their most challenging legacy systems, including the IBM AS/400 infrastructure that had resisted previous modernization attempts. Their technical sophistication allowed them to quickly leverage the platform's advanced capabilities.

Zencoder's multi-repo intelligence gave PRCA their first comprehensive view of their entire technology ecosystem. The platform analyzed decades-old business logic and translated it into clear, plain-English explanations. The team could finally see not just what code did, but why architectural decisions were made and how systems interconnected. Complex business processes that had stymied previous modernization efforts became transparent and understandable.

When developers needed to understand repository interactions, Zencoder mapped dependencies automatically. No more spending days tracing function calls across codebases. The platform showed exactly which systems would be impacted by changes, turning time-consuming investigation into confident decision-making.

Custom agents built for PRCA's environment became force multipliers. These agents understood PRCA's unique business logic—from rodeo event scoring to membership management rules—and generated code that naturally fit their architectural patterns. As new code was created, Zencoder's unit testing capabilities automatically generated comprehensive tests, preventing bugs before they could impact production. This combination of intelligent code generation and robust testing gave PRCA confidence that modernization wouldn't introduce new problems while solving old ones.

The agents took over routine coding tasks, refactoring, and system upgrades. The entire team found themselves doing less hands-to-keyboard coding as agents handled implementation work, freeing the team to apply deep expertise to architectural modernization, new feature development, and strategic technology initiatives.

We are a small team with limited resources. Using Zencoder to help generate our user interfaces and unit tests has helped us to create better looking dashboards and a full testing suite. Due to lack of resources, these are items that might have been ignored in the past.

Another key benefit came from empowering the broader organization. Business analysts began using Zencoder independently to explore legacy systems, ask questions about business logic, create documentation, and validate requirements—all without pulling developers away from coding. This democratization of technical knowledge accelerated project planning and eliminated costly miscommunications between business and technology teams.

As PRCA's team worked with Zencoder, custom agents continued learning. Every question, code review, and interaction made the system smarter about PRCA's specific environment. Zencoder learned their coding standards, understood their architectural patterns, and generated new code that naturally aligned with how PRCA built software. The platform became an extension of the team itself, trained specifically on their business logic and codebase.

System upgrades that took months began completing in weeks. Hundreds of hours of documentation work appeared automatically. Development time was cut in half as autonomous agents handled the heavy lifting. Technical debt that had consumed development time was being systematically addressed, freeing the team to innovate rather than maintain.

Where previous modernization attempts failed, Zencoder succeeded—not by replacing PRCA's skilled team, but by amplifying their capabilities with AI that could truly understand and interpret their complex business processes.

Today, PRCA's technology team—already a forward-thinking group—has accelerated even further ahead. They're no longer deciphering old code or struggling with failed modernization attempts. Instead, they're delivering better experiences, building new digital services for members, and creating modern event management tools. The systems that once consumed their time now propel them forward.

With custom AI agents built for their unique business logic and Zencoder as their development partner, PRCA has transformed their technology foundation from a maintenance burden into a competitive advantage—ready to support the next chapter of growth and innovation in professional rodeo.