Feature Focus: Application Summaries
Overview
Software Intelligence already gives you deep visibility into the inner workings of your applications: software composition, health, cloud maturity, etc. Now, with application summaries, CAST Highlight goes one step further by interpreting this data for you.
This new feature provides three powerful AI-driven capabilities available directly from CAST Highlight dashboards:
- Application Summary
- AI Service Recommendations
- Next Steps for Improvement
Look for the indigo robot icon 🤖 next to your application name to launch the experience. It’s available from multiple locations in CAST Highlight, including:
- The APPLICATION RESULTS view
- Various Portfolio Advisor screens
- And other strategic analysis views where applications are listed
This new AI-driven layer transforms CAST Highlight from a powerful analytics platform into an intelligent advisor, one that not only analyzes your applications, but also helps you understand, enhance, and evolve them faster.
With application summaries, teams can now:
- Quickly grasp application context without reading lengthy reports
- Discover how AI services can amplify business capabilities
- Get clear, role-specific next steps to improve application health
Application Summary
Understanding an application’s purpose, structure, and technical makeup can be challenging—especially in large portfolios.
The Application Summary generates a tailored, natural-language description of your application, automatically adapting its focus to your role. For instance:
- CIOs and business leaders will typically get a concise overview of the application’s business function, value, and dependencies.
- CISOs and Open Source Governance roles will see a summary focused on security risks, open source exposure, and compliance posture.
- Cloud Architects receive a technical breakdown of application architecture, core components, and cloud maturity indicators.
- Software Engineers will rather get insight into technical debt, OSS component to upgrade, and key areas to refactor.
By combining CAST Highlight’s quantitative metrics with application summaries, you gain a quick, human-readable understanding of each application’s profile.
AI Service Recommendations
Leverage AI to do more with your applications. Based on CAST Highlight’s Software Intelligence insights (code insights, cloud maturity blockers, language mix, third-party dependencies, etc.), and the above generated application summary, the feature suggests relevant AI services and large language models (LLMs) you can integrate to increase the value of your application, to boost productivity or innovation.
For example:
- Suggesting natural language processing APIs for text-heavy apps
- Recommending computer vision services for image analysis components
- Identifying where LLMs could accelerate support, documentation, or development tasks
Each recommendation is context-aware, designed to help teams explore how AI capabilities can bring tangible business value to existing applications.
Next Steps for Application Health
AI-Powered Insights doesn’t just describe your application—it helps you improve it.
The Next Steps section provides actionable recommendations derived from your CAST Highlight analysis. It highlights opportunities to:
- Fix Cloud Maturity blockers to speed up migration or optimization
- Upgrade outdated open source components with known vulnerabilities
- Address software health and resiliency issues
- Prioritize modernization efforts for the biggest impact
Each suggestion is explained in clear terms, personalized for your user role.
How to enable Application Summaries
By default, this feature is not enabled for your CAST Highlight instance. To get it enabled, reach out to your preferred CAST person or contact our support team.