alt Hacker NewsTranslating from one language/platform to another is something AI is very very good at, so this sounds like a good use of it, bonus points if they create a comprehensive test suite first.
Yes it will lead to new bugs, but the older code probably contains a ton of bugs already and is probably difficult to update (original writers long gone, docs out of date etc), so this is probably the best way out of that situation, as long as proper support is given afterwards so they don't end up in the same situation a year later (this is the hard bit).
The ra-ra commentary from the CEO is somewhat off-putting, but the idea is not all bad.
As good as it is, we saw a lot of problems with these translations as the code was rewritten without understanding. I remember a security issue where a runtime went from single threaded to multithreaded for example.
Testing is still the long pull, even if you have an engineer with good expertise.