The loudest conversation in business right now is about how much value AI actually generates. Over the last year, AI has moved from a side experiment to a strategic priority. It has its own budget line, its own place on the board’s agenda and its own pressure to show results. Every leader is asking a…
The mainframe remains the system of record for many of the world’s largest organizations and some of their most critical data. As of 2025, 71% of Fortune 500 companies still use mainframes, and nearly 97% of banks worldwide rely on IBM mainframe products. Yet many security programs continue to treat the mainframe differently from the rest…
Most enterprises are rushing toward autonomous AI. They shouldn’t. Autonomy you haven’t earned doesn’t speed you up. In fact, it slows you down. Here’s what I’ve moved our organization toward: a five-stage set of AI adoption maturity benchmarks. It’s a practical framework for understanding where employee development, decision-making and business value intersect. Each stage provides…
Over the past decade, I have worked through multiple technology transitions, from virtualization and cloud adoption to containers and large-scale automation. Each changed how enterprise IT operated, but they all shared one characteristic: production systems still behaved in broadly predictable ways. AI is the first shift I have seen that changes the behavior of production…
Generative AI is notoriously eager to help, to the point that if it can’t find something matching what you ask for, it’ll create it. So the problem with relying on guardrails is that all too often, a model will be wrong, showing a high confidence score for an incorrect answer because it’s relying on stale…
Astute leaders recognize that many times, automation and technology failures aren’t really about the technology itself. Rather, failures occur because the necessary underlying infrastructure linking people, processes, and technology isn’t in place. For example, consider organizations that try to partner together but don’t take the time to align their tech implementations in a way that…
A crude tanker slows off a chokepoint and its AIS transponder, the automatic signal ships broadcast to identify themselves and their position at sea, goes dark for eleven hours. To a generic AI model, that’s a gap in a data stream. To anyone with money or compliance exposure on the line, it’s a question: whose…
A likely US administration ban on Chinese optical transceivers for AI data centers may have an unintended consequence: IT will rush to buy as many of the components as possible before restrictions kick in. Reuters on Tuesday reported that the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) “is working on the measure to bar imports of new…
AI agents are performing roughly 1 in 3 actions in enterprise IT workflows (but that share is rising quickly), while human analysts are rejecting about one-quarter of AI-proposed actions (but that rate is falling), according to a new study of tens of thousands of human-AI interactions. Operational data, rather than underlying AI infrastructures, is often…
In “Micro and macro agents: The emerging architecture of the agentic enterprise,” I proposed a three-layer architecture for enterprise AI. Micro agents execute specialized tasks. Macro agents orchestrate end-to-end business processes. Meta agents provide governance through monitoring, compliance, security, and human oversight. As enterprises begin deploying thousands — and eventually tens of thousands — of…