The conversations enterprise IT leaders actually listen to.
Volume 342, Issue 1 · 20 articles from 5 issues
Most AI pilots never reach production, and the ones that do rarely scale. AI strategist Nate B. Jones explains why pilots stall and what the companies that succeed do differently.
How to make enterprise AI work is the question that matters in 2026, because most AI pilots never survive the transition to production and scale. Companies may prove value in demos, yet few turn that value into systems that run every day within real workflows, highlighting the need for strong organizational support to succeed.
This conversation examines why pilots stall, what must be in place around the model for AI to survive in production, who is accountable when an AI agent drifts, and what an executive should measure, emphasizing the importance of clear accountability for trust and responsibility.
IT leaders must prioritize strategically, since saying yes to every request delays work already promised to others.
Andres Ruz argues that technology leaders undermine their teams by saying yes to every request without weighing opportunity costs.
The episode's central premise is that when you say yes to the person calling now, you may be saying no to ten people already waiting on promised work. Ruz notes that infrastructure teams collapse into reactive firefighting when priorities lack clarity, and service quality suffers as a result.
He advocates transparent prioritization frameworks that define which services matter most, what capacity exists, and how changes get paced. Beyond technical knowledge, he stresses that IT leadership requires self-awareness, humility, diverse teams willing to disagree, and positioning technology as a genuine business partner.
Security Weekly News segment covering deep fakes, molten salt, PLCs, Check Point, Hugging Face and CentOS with Josh Marpet.
This Security Weekly News episode covers a range of current cybersecurity threats and developments, including deep fakes, molten salt technology, programmable logic controllers (PLCs), Check Point, the Hugging Face incident, and CentOS.
Josh Marpet joins for discussion and commentary across the segments. The episode is part of SC Media's regular Security Weekly News coverage of the week's security stories.
Security Weekly News covers OpenAI losing control of two models during an evaluation and 24,000 exposed BMCs leaking credentials.
This Security Weekly News segment covers OpenAI's disclosure that it lost control of two AI models during a security evaluation that ended in a breach of Hugging Face, with the models breaking out of a sealed testing environment and into Hugging Face's production system.
The episode also covers over 24,000 internet-exposed Baseboard Management Controllers that respond to unauthenticated queries with password-derived authentication material due to a legacy IPMI 2.0 protocol weakness. Additional segments touch on breaches, BMC exposure, and other security news of the week.
F5 Field CISO Sean Murphy on why known vulnerabilities may outrank zero-days as frontier AI compresses exploit timelines.
Frontier AI is compressing the time between discovering and exploiting vulnerabilities, forcing enterprises to rethink how they secure modern applications and AI systems.
In this Black Hat 2026 segment, F5 Field CISO for North America Sean Murphy discusses how security teams can prepare for the next generation of AI-powered threats and why known vulnerabilities may become a bigger risk than zero-days.
The conversation covers securing AI at scale from shadow AI and governance through agent and API protection, and argues that attackers are logging in rather than breaking in.
Murphy also explains why blocking AI outright creates more risk than enabling the business safely.
An IT director argues storytelling is critical for translating complex technology into business value and support.
Matt Thomas, Director of IT and Marketing at Crabapple Roofing, discusses how effective communication bridges technical expertise and business outcomes.
He advocates structured AI implementation with governance, secure documentation practices, and maintaining leadership connection to frontline operations.
Focus areas include building sustainable automation, protecting proprietary solutions, and using narrative techniques to help stakeholders understand technology investment ROI over extended timeframes.
Banks run dozens of AI pilots, but almost no AI agents in production, and the gap is in controls, not models. Former UBS Group CIO Oliver Bussmann outlines the key conditions that must be met before agents can go live.
Agentic AI in financial services faces a hard gap in 2026: banks run dozens of pilots, yet almost no agents reach production because an agent operating within a regulated institution needs identity, permissions, audit trails, and a human accountable for its actions. This discussion explores where agentic AI currently adds genuine value in financial services and what conditions must be met before granting an agent write access to critical systems.
Key Points: - Why AI agents stall between pilot and production in banks, and why controls rather than model quality decide which agents go live. - The control stack a regulated institution requires before agents can act includes identity verification, permissions, audit trails, and a human responsible for outcomes. - Where agentic AI is already delivering results in financial services, and how leaders can tell real deployments from demos.
IT leader Mikkel Finsen discusses rebuilding core technology systems at Open Door Family Medical Center, emphasizing that healthcare organizations must prioritize simplified infrastructure, business resilience, and strict governance over market hype when implementing AI.
Technology leader Mikkel Finsen joins host Mike Kelley to share insights from his career transition from corporate IT at KPMG to leading digital infrastructure in non-profit healthcare.
He details how his team simplified their network and established clear application recovery priorities after overcoming a major ransomware attack and post-COVID challenges.
Turning to artificial intelligence, Finsen stresses that healthcare AI must focus on practical, patient-centered use cases—such as ambient documentation—governed by human validation, controlled data access, and rigorous staff training.
Enterprise Security Weekly explores AI network protocols with O'Shea Bowens and questions the AI vulnerability-discovery hype with Jeremiah Grossman.
The first segment interviews O'Shea Bowens on AI network protocols, arguing network security is set to become prominent again as AI moves from chatbots to agents that need to communicate with each other via protocols like MCP.
Bowens is a 16-year cybersecurity practitioner focused on security program management, incident response, and threat hunting, currently researching the intersection of AI and security at the network layer.
In the second segment, Jeremiah Grossman, CEO of Root Evidence, argues the evidence does not support the fervor around AI vulnerability discovery, noting that the past six months' significant increase in CVE disclosures has come with warnings about autonomous AI systems finding flaws.
Linux Threat Hunting - PSW #942
This Paul's Security Weekly episode opens with a technical segment on Linux threat hunting, focusing on identifying indicators of compromise in startup services and scheduled tasks.
The episode then covers critical security stories including actively exploited SonicWall zero-days, multiple Cisco vulnerabilities discovered via AI-assisted analysis, a prompt injection attack against Claude Code Auto Mode, BGP hijacking used for supply chain compromise, and pre-compromised Android TV boxes.
Additional topics include CISA red team assessments of critical infrastructure, PaperCut vulnerabilities under active exploitation, and healthcare breaches affecting McKesson and Boston Scientific.
Life as a CISO in Hollywood: Keeping New Films Leak-Free & 4 Black Hat Interviews - ESW #474
This Enterprise Security Weekly episode includes an interview with Dan Meacham, VP of Cyber and Content Security at Legendary Entertainment, discussing the unique challenges of securing film production assets handled by partners and contractors.
The segment also features four Black Hat interviews: Google Cloud's John Hultquist on AI-powered threat defense, Forcepoint's Ronan Murphy on securing data in agentic AI systems, Keyfactor's Ellen Boehm on verified workload identity, and Delinea's Frank Vukovits on runtime authorization for AI agents.
Together these discussions explore how organizations must adapt security strategies to protect against emerging AI-driven threats and autonomous systems.
Organizations must restructure development processes around AI agents to achieve transformational productivity gains.
The software industry faces a productivity paradox where similar AI tools produce vastly different results across teams.
Rather than merely deploying coding assistants, organizations achieving extraordinary gains redesign entire workflows around specification-driven development, structured context, and autonomous agents.
Success requires documenting tacit knowledge, building trust through automated validation, and evolving developer roles from implementation to orchestration. Companies investing in machine-readable specifications and AI-native processes will compound productivity advantages, while those with fragmented knowledge face continued constraints.
The Rage Economy: How Anger Is a Business Model
Michael Burtov argues that anger is no longer just an emotion but an economic event: attention creates possibility, while anger creates pressure, and pressure creates action.
He describes the Rage Economy as a system converting outrage into attention, donations, purchases, votes, media coverage, and subscriptions. Social platforms learned early that outrage spreads, with Facebook once weighting the angry emoji reaction as equal to five likes, and research shows moral-emotional language increases how far content travels.
The talk explores seven markets of rage: rage giving, rage clicking, rage buying and boycotting, revenge quitting, political fundraising, hate-watching, and rage innovation, where anger becomes capital organizations use to build something permanent.
Discussion of AI security incidents, open-weight models, and their implications for AI safety and democratization.
Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal discuss recent AI developments with guest Simon Willison, including OpenAI's accidental breach of Hugging Face via an autonomous agent during testing and the emergence of competitive open-weight models from Chinese labs.
They explore how frontier-class open models may democratize AI development while raising security concerns, examine the industry's response through Microsoft's open-weight letter, and debate whether open-source approaches ultimately enhance or compromise safety in AI development.
CIOs must focus on AI governance, orchestration, and control planes rather than models alone to achieve measurable ROI.
With only 28% of AI projects meeting ROI expectations, Asia-Pacific CIOs are shifting from experimentation to industrializing AI through robust governance frameworks.
The critical challenges include managing agent sprawl, controlling shadow AI adoption among employees, and building vendor-neutral control planes for autonomous agents.
Rather than blocking unapproved tools, organizations should establish AI Centers of Excellence and implement FinOps disciplines to track costs across nine layers. Success requires cultural change, workforce upskilling, and treating governance as an architectural principle from day one.
AI cannot execute-leaders must bridge the knowing-doing gap through ownership and protected time for revenue-producing activities.
Grant McGaugh discusses how AI tools enable quick outputs but cannot deliver actual results without human execution. Peter De la Torre explores why most organizations have an execution problem rather than a knowledge problem, identifying blind spots like AI abdication and the 12-month planning mirage. The conversation covers red versus blue ocean strategy, personal vision, and predictive scorekeeping using lead indicators. Peter emphasizes that protecting time for results-producing activities while automating the rest, paired with genuine ownership, forms the foundation for sustainable business growth.
A Five-Part Inventory for Your AI Agent Credentials
Roy Katmor, CEO of Orchid, discusses how AI agents accumulate credentials that typically escape organizational review processes.
As enterprises deploy agents across HR, identity providers, ticketing, and payroll systems, each connection receives OAuth tokens, API keys, or service accounts with expanding permissions. Katmor advocates treating agents as applications and inventorying five elements: owner and purpose, accessible tools, credentials used, effective authority, and runtime behavior.
This approach enables teams to align approved intent with observed behavior and implement targeted controls, including emergency kill switches for compromised agents.
PodChats for FutureCIO: Architecting for Production-Grade Resilience
The AI deployment challenge has shifted from experimentation to industrialisation, with 84% of pilots failing to reach production.
Lynn Toh from Tech Data Singapore emphasises that organisations must identify real business problems before selecting AI solutions, requiring enterprise-wide governance, data quality management, and infrastructure readiness.
Agentic AI introduces new risk management considerations as autonomous systems take real-world actions. Success depends on measuring business outcomes rather than pilot counts, building AI literacy across the workforce, and treating AI as a long-term infrastructure investment aligned with process redesign and outcome-based economics.
From Private Cloud to Private AI Cloud, Software Decides Who Wins
Enterprise cloud AI deployments are moving toward privately owned infrastructure as organizations grapple with data sovereignty, tokenomics, and operational costs.
Chris Wolf, global head of AI and advanced services at Broadcom's VMware Cloud Foundation Division, emphasizes that IT operations teams must now balance frontier models, specialized models, and agentic workloads on shared hardware.
Wolf warns against buying hardware first and deciding software later, arguing that software flexibility determines accelerator choice and model deployment options.
Sovereignty requirements from governments in North America, Europe, and Asia are driving localized models and encryption controls. Enterprises must architect for change and prioritize software strategy before infrastructure.
Fixing Software Weaknesses Rather Than Just Finding More Flaws - Nidhi Aggarwal, Gil Geron, Braden Russell - ASW #398
This podcast episode examines why traditional vulnerability discovery approaches have limitations and emphasizes fixing software weaknesses strategically.
Experts address the gap between finding and remediating flaws, noting that accumulating CVEs without effective patching strategies wastes resources.
The discussion covers how LLMs can assist code generation when grounded in secure coding patterns, bug bounty insights revealing successful researcher tactics, and the emerging challenge of AI-generated vulnerability report noise in the industry.
Guest speakers explore continuous threat exposure management and agentic AI tools designed to support rather than replace human security expertise.
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