14 technology winners and losers, post-COVID-19

As opposed to, say, the travel or restaurant industries, the tech sector has weathered the most disruptive effects of the COVID-19 pandemic relatively well. But that doesn’t mean that business has gone smoothly as if nothing happened — or that trends haven’t accelerated or been disrupted by the crisis. While it’s a bit early to…

At T-Mobile, AI plays supporting role for customer service reps

Artificial intelligence (AI) as intermediary is among the most popular tools in customer support, with businesses frequently dispatching software bots instead of humans to serve customers. You’ve likely experienced this trend firsthand when you’ve called a customer service number and an interactive voice response (IVR) system routed you to the right information funnel (if you’re…

Reskilling IT for the cloud

Paul Ryan stepped into the CTO post at OpenX in 2017 and found an IT department in need of an overhaul. OpenX, a technology company that makes a programmatic advertising platform, was still 100 percent on-prem. It had five data centers holding 45,000 servers and an IT team organized around the legacy skills needed to…