The career stories enterprise IT pros actually read.
Volume 343, Issue 3 · 9 articles
Barracuda finds 56% of organizations have cut security staff due to AI, even as nearly all report skills gaps, especially in AI risk.
Barracuda's Cybersecurity Skills Gap Report found 56% of organizations have seen security workforce reductions linked to AI, split evenly between entry-level and senior roles.
Respondents expect AI to take on routine analysis, event correlation and response suggestions, leaving people to investigate harder attacks, check AI findings and make incident decisions.
Almost all reported skills gaps, most often in AI-related risks, followed by identity.
The report stresses judgment, communication and business understanding as security roles shift toward overseeing automated tools.
CIOs and MIT Sloan advisers share nine strategies for staying relevant as AI makes the CIO a required strategic partner.
Having a seat at the table is no longer an aspiration for CIOs but a requirement, says MIT Sloan's George Westerman, because AI is a transformative technology every C-suite member wants guidance on.
Future CIOs will set the vision for what is possible, advise peers on integrating agents into their teams and handle high-pressure situations.
Westerman, MIT's Keri Pearlson, WHU's Peter Kreutter and other IT leaders lay out nine strategies, including being visionary and adaptable, showing that visions deliver measurable value, taking calculated risks with the humility to pivot, and building strong teams.
A SANS job tracker finds 850+ open AI/ML security engineer roles, plus growing demand for AI red-teamers and AI GRC leads.
SANS analyzed public job postings from mid-September 2026 to count open AI security roles and median salaries.
It found more than 850 openings for AI and machine learning security engineers (median $140,000), nearly 100 for AI red-team specialists ($124,000) and about 430 for AI governance, risk and compliance leads ($146,000).
Employers included Amazon, Mastercard, Cloudflare and SpaceX.
SANS links the demand to attacks on AI applications, prompt-injection flaws and widespread unapproved employee AI use, and expects roles focused on deepfakes and post-quantum migration to emerge next.
Gartner says 40% of IT leaders plan to grow headcount in 2027, and IT leaders say AI will reshape roles more than eliminate them.
Gartner's 2027 CIO and Technology Executive Agenda survey found 40% of IT leaders plan to increase headcount in 2027, especially in cybersecurity, data and analytics.
Gartner's Alicia Mullery said most IT jobs will need significant reskilling, led by software engineering and data and analytics.
IT leaders interviewed by TechTarget said they worry more about driving business outcomes and developing their teams than about AI displacing people, though some acknowledged that "we don't have enough resources" excuses may disappear, which could mean fewer people or different roles.
Several stressed rethinking accountability and oversight as AI creates new roles while displacing others.
With CIO tenures averaging about four years, the author argues for developing CIOs internally instead of defaulting to outside hires.
More than 70% of CIOs have been with their organization for fewer than five years, and nearly 40% for fewer than two.
Simon Ratcliffe notes that a new CIO spends roughly six months learning the organization and often the last six months preparing to leave, leaving about three effective years for someone hired to set long-term strategy.
Boards often assume fresh thinking requires an outsider, but Ratcliffe argues that the most valuable CIO knowledge is undocumented, such as how decisions really get made, which stakeholders matter and which risks are tolerated, and internal candidates already have it.
He urges organizations to build CIO succession pipelines.
AI may automate status tracking, but the alignment and judgment work of engineering managers becomes more critical, not less.
Liz de Moll pushes back on claims that AI makes engineering managers unnecessary, though she agrees AI should absorb status updates and progress tracking.
Expectation-setting, coaching, prioritization and cross-team translation, however, are judgment-heavy work that does not disappear.
During her parental leaves, nothing broke but alignment slipped and coordination landed on engineers.
As AI speeds up code generation, product decisions, testing and rollout have not kept pace, so the cost of misalignment rises and someone still has to connect the work.
Employers are hiring more selectively but paying premiums for AI skills; more than half of active IT job listings now require AI skills.
Employers are hiring more precisely and would rather leave a role open than make the wrong hire, says ManpowerGroup's Ger Doyle, while Robert Half's 2027 salary guide found that 72% of employers are raising pay for relevant AI skills.
CompTIA counted 625,633 active IT listings in September, the most in over three years, and about 349,821 of them required AI skills.
Experis found AI literacy was the most in-demand technical skill, cited by 34% of US employers, followed by AI modeling and app development at 33%.
McKinsey's Michael Chui describes employers in a tug-of-war as workflows and job requirements change.
As AI agents take on work, HR shifts to designing the whole workforce, which makes the CHRO a strategic partner to the CIO.
In a Q&A, Novaworks CEO and former ServiceNow chief transformation officer Kelley Steven-Waiss explains how AI is changing HR, which was built around the employee lifecycle even as a growing share of work is now done by agents.
CHROs must therefore design and govern the whole workforce, meaning what work exists, who or what does it, and how it is measured, which puts them alongside CIOs.
She argues for moving from jobs to outcomes, since a job is a bundle of tasks that AI can unbundle.
Companies need to see their workforce's skills, then decide which tasks go to agents, which get automated and which get elevated for people.
A former developer reflects that the hardest parts of engineering management are the invisible people problems, not Jira and status updates.
Atila Ekimci describes arriving in engineering management thinking the job was mainly relaying updates, assigning tickets and running agile meetings.
He found the hardest work was what nobody else sees.
Poor communication creates rework, too much pressure lowers quality, and low psychological safety hides problems until they become incidents or resignations.
Using examples such as two senior engineers quietly avoiding each other and an over-relied-on dependable teammate, he urges managers to watch social signals as closely as delivery metrics.