Daily Tech Digest by Kannan Subbiah: tech talk

Showing posts with label tech talk. Show all posts

Daily Tech Digest - May 07, 2026

Quote for the day:

"You learn more from failure than from success. Don't let it stop you. Failure builds character." -- Unknown

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Designing front-end systems for cloud failure

In the InfoWorld article "Designing front-end systems for cloud failure," Niharika Pujari argues that frontend resilience is a critical yet often overlooked aspect of engineering. Since cloud infrastructure depends on numerous moving parts, failures are frequently partial rather than absolute, manifesting as temporary network instability or slow downstream services. To maintain a usable and calm user experience during these hiccups, developers should adopt a strategy of . This begins with distinguishing between critical features, which are essential for core tasks, and non-critical components that provide extra richness. When non-essential features fail, the interface should isolate these issues—perhaps by hiding sections or displaying cached data—to prevent a total system outage. Technical implementation involves employing controlled retries with exponential backoff and jitter to manage transient errors without overwhelming the backend. Additionally, protecting user work in form-heavy workflows is vital for maintaining trust. Effective failure handling also requires a shift in communication; specific, reassuring error messages that explain what still works and provide a clear recovery path are far superior to generic "something went wrong" alerts. Ultimately, resilient frontend design focuses on isolating failures, rendering partial content, and ensuring that the interface remains functional and informative even when underlying cloud dependencies falter.

Scaling AI into production is forcing a rethink of enterprise infrastructure

The article "Scaling AI into production is forcing a rethink of enterprise infrastructure" explores the critical shift from AI experimentation to large-scale deployment across real business environments. As organizations move beyond proofs of concept, executives Tarkan Maner and Thomas Cornely argue that the emergence of is a primary driver of this transformation. Agentic systems introduce complex, autonomous, multi-step workflows that traditional infrastructures are often unequipped to handle efficiently. These sophisticated agents require real-time orchestration and secure, on-premises data access to protect sensitive enterprise information. While many organizations initially utilized the public cloud for rapid experimentation, the transition to production highlights serious concerns regarding ongoing cost, strict governance, and data control, prompting a significant shift toward private or hybrid environments. The article emphasizes that AI is designed to augment human capability rather than replace it, seeking a harmonious integration between human decision-making and automated agentic workflows. Practical applications are already emerging across various sectors, from retail’s cashier-less checkouts and targeted marketing to healthcare’s remote diagnostic tools. Ultimately, scaling AI successfully necessitates a foundational rethink of how modern enterprises coordinate their underlying infrastructure, data, and security protocols to support unpredictable workloads while maintaining overall operational stability and long-term cost efficiency.

Why ransomware attacks succeed even when backups exist

The BleepingComputer article "Why ransomware attacks succeed even when backups exist" explains that modern ransomware operations have evolved into sophisticated campaigns that systematically target and destroy an organization's backup infrastructure before deploying encryption. Rather than just locking files, attackers follow a predictable sequence: gaining initial access, stealing administrative credentials, moving laterally across the network, and then identifying and deleting backups. This includes wiping , hypervisor snapshots, and cloud repositories to ensure no easy recovery path remains. Several common organizational failures contribute to this vulnerability, such as the lack of network isolation between production and backup environments, weak access controls like shared admin credentials or missing multi-factor authentication, and the absence of . Furthermore, many organizations suffer from untested recovery processes or siloed security tools that fail to detect attacks on backup systems. To combat these threats, the article emphasizes the necessity of integrated cyber protection, featuring immutable backups with enforced retention locks, dedicated credentials, and continuous monitoring. By neutralizing the traditional "safety net" of backups, ransomware gangs effectively force victims into paying ransoms. This strategic shift highlights that basic, unprotected backups are no longer sufficient in the face of modern, targeted ransomware tactics.

Document as Evidence vs. Data Source: Industrial AI Governance

In the article "Document as Evidence vs. Data Source: Industrial AI Governance," Anthony Vigliotti highlights a critical distinction in how organizations manage information for . Most current programs utilize a "data source" model, where documents are treated as raw material; data is extracted, and the original document is archived or orphaned. This terminal approach severs the link between data and its context, creating significant governance risks, particularly in brownfield manufacturing where legacy records carry decades of operational history. Conversely, the "evidence" model treats documents as permanent artifacts with ongoing legal and operational standing. This framework ensures documents are preserved with high fidelity, validated before downstream use, and permanently linked to any derived data through a navigable citation trail. By adopting an evidence-based posture, organizations can build a robust "Accuracy and Trust Layer" that makes AI-driven decisions defensible and auditable. This is essential for safety-critical operations and regulatory compliance, where being able to prove the provenance of data is as vital as the accuracy of the AI output itself. Transitioning from a throughput-focused extraction mindset to one centered on trust allows industrial enterprises to scale AI safely while mitigating the long-term governance debt associated with disconnected data silos.

Method for stress-testing cloud computing algorithms helps avoid network failures

Researchers at MIT have developed a groundbreaking method called to stress-test cloud computing algorithms, helping prevent large-scale network failures and service outages that impact millions of users. In massive cloud environments, engineers often rely on ""—simplified shortcut algorithms that route data quickly but can unexpectedly break down under unusual traffic patterns or sudden demand spikes. Traditionally, stress-testing these heuristics involved manual, time-consuming simulations using human-designed test cases, which frequently missed critical "blind spots" where the algorithm might fail. MetaEase revolutionizes this evaluation process by utilizing to analyze an algorithm’s source code directly. By mapping out every decision point within the code, the tool automatically searches for and identifies worst-case scenarios where performance gaps and underperformance are most significant. This automated approach allows engineers to proactively catch potential failure modes before deployment without requiring complex mathematical reformulations or extensive manual labor. Beyond standard networking tasks, the researchers highlight MetaEase’s potential for auditing risks associated with AI-generated code, ensuring these systems remain resilient under unpredictable real-world conditions. In comparative experiments, this technique identified more severe performance failures more efficiently than existing state-of-the-art methods. Moving forward, the team aims to enhance MetaEase’s scalability and versatility to process more complex data types and applications.

Hacker Conversations: Joey Melo on Hacking AI

In the SecurityWeek article "Hacker Conversations: Joey Melo on Hacking AI," Principal Security Researcher Joey Melo shares his journey and methodology within the evolving field of artificial intelligence red teaming. Melo, who developed a passion for manipulating software environments through childhood gaming, now applies that curiosity to "" and "data poisoning" AI models. Unlike traditional penetration testing, focuses on bypassing sophisticated guardrails without altering source code. Melo describes jailbreaking as a process of "liberating" bots via complex context manipulation—such as tricking an LLM into believing it is operating in a future where current restrictions no longer apply. Furthermore, he explores data poisoning, where researchers test if models can be influenced by malicious prompt ingestion or untrustworthy web scraping. Despite possessing the skills to exploit these vulnerabilities for personal gain, Melo emphasizes a commitment to ethical, responsible disclosure. He views his work as a vital contribution to an ongoing "cat-and-mouse game" aimed at hardening machine learning defenses against increasingly creative threats. Ultimately, Melo believes that while AI security will continue to improve, the constant evolution of technology ensures that red teaming will remain a necessary, creative endeavor to identify and mitigate emerging risks.

Global Push for Digital KYC Faces a Trust Problem

The global movement toward digital Know Your Customer (KYC) frameworks is gaining significant momentum, as evidenced by the United Arab Emirates’ recent launch of a standardized national platform designed to streamline onboarding and bolster anti-money laundering efforts. While domestic systems are becoming increasingly sophisticated, the concept of portable, cross-border KYC remains largely elusive due to a fundamental lack of trust between international regulators. Governments and financial institutions are eager to reduce duplication and speed up compliance processes to match the rapid growth of instant payments and digital banking. However, significant hurdles persist because KYC extends beyond simple identity verification to include complex assessments of ownership structures and risk profiles, which are heavily influenced by local market contexts and legal frameworks. National regulators often prioritize sovereign control and data protection, making them hesitant to rely on third-party verification performed in different jurisdictions. Consequently, even when countries share broad anti-money laundering goals, their divergent definitions of adequate due diligence and monitoring requirements create a fragmented landscape. Ultimately, the transition to a unified digital identity ecosystem depends less on technological innovation and more on establishing mutual recognition and trust among global supervisory bodies, ensuring that sensitive identity data can be securely and reliably shared across borders.

How To Ensure Business Continuity in the Midst of IT Disaster Recovery

The content provided by the Disaster Recovery Journal (DRJ) at the specified URL serves as a foundational guide for professionals navigating the complexities of organizational stability through the lens of business continuity (BC) and disaster recovery (DR) planning. The material emphasizes that while these two disciplines are closely interconnected, they serve distinct roles in safeguarding an organization. Business continuity is presented as a holistic, high-level strategy focused on maintaining essential operations across all departments during a crisis, ensuring that personnel, facilities, and processes remain functional. In contrast, disaster recovery is defined as a specialized technical subset of BC, primarily concerned with the restoration of information technology systems, critical data, and infrastructure following a disruptive event. A primary theme of the planning process is the requirement for a structured lifecycle, which begins with a rigorous Business Impact Analysis (BIA) and Risk Assessment to identify vulnerabilities and prioritize critical functions. By defining clear Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) and Recovery Point Objectives (RPO), organizations can create targeted response strategies that minimize operational downtime. Furthermore, the resource highlights that modern planning must evolve to address contemporary challenges, such as cyber threats, hybrid work environments, and artificial intelligence integration. Regular testing, cross-functional collaboration, and plan maintenance are essential to transform static documentation into a dynamic, resilient framework capable of withstanding diverse disasters.

The Agentic AI Challenge: Solve for Both Efficiency and Trust

According to the article from The Financial Brand, agentic artificial intelligence represents the next inevitable evolution in banking, marking a fundamental shift from reactive generative AI chatbots to autonomous, proactive systems. While nearly all financial institutions are currently exploring agentic technology, a significant "execution gap" persists; most organizations remain stuck in the pilot phase due to legacy infrastructure, fragmented data silos, and outdated governance frameworks. Unlike traditional AI that merely offers recommendations, agentic systems are designed to act—executing complex workflows, coordinating multi-step transactions, and managing customer financial health in real time with minimal human intervention. The report emphasizes that while banks have historically prioritized low-value applications like back-office automation and fraud prevention, the true potential of agentic AI lies in fulfilling broader ambitions for hyper-personalization and revenue growth. As fintech competitors increasingly rebuild their transaction stacks for real-time execution and autonomous validation, traditional banks face a critical strategic choice. They must modernize their leadership mindset and core technical architecture to support the "self-driving bank" model or risk being permanently outpaced. Ultimately, embracing agentic AI is not merely a technological upgrade but a necessary structural evolution required for banks to remain competitive in an increasingly automated financial ecosystem.

Multi-model AI is creating a routing headache for enterprises

According to F5’s 2026 State of Application Strategy Report, enterprises are rapidly transitioning AI inference into core production environments, with 78% of organizations now operating their own inference services. As 77% of firms identify inference as their primary AI activity, the focus has shifted from experimentation to operational integration within hybrid multicloud infrastructures. Organizations currently manage or evaluate an average of seven distinct AI models, reflecting a diverse landscape where no single model fits every use case. This multi-model approach creates significant architectural complexities, turning AI delivery into a sophisticated traffic management challenge and AI security into a rigorous governance priority. Companies are increasingly adopting identity-aware infrastructure and centralized control planes to manage the routing, observability, and protection of inference workloads. To mitigate operational strain and rising costs, enterprises are integrating shared protection systems and cross-model observability tools. Furthermore, the convergence of AI delivery and security around inference highlights the necessity of managing multiple services to ensure availability and compliance. Ultimately, the report emphasizes that successful AI adoption depends on treating inference as a managed workload subject to the same delivery and resilience requirements as traditional enterprise applications, ensuring faster and safer operational execution.

Daily Tech Digest - November 07, 2025

Quote for the day:

"The best teachers are those who don't tell you how to get there but show the way." -- @Pilotspeaker

AI spending may slow down as ROI remains elusive

Some AI experts agree with Forrester that an AI market correction is on the way. Microsoft founder Bill Gates recently talked about the existence of an AI bubble, and industry observers have noted that some AI excitement is dimming. Many don’t see an AI bubble that will burst in the near future, but it’s deflating a bit. Still others don’t see much of a slowdown in the near term. ... Some organizations are not achieving the accuracy they need from AI tools, and others are not finding their data to be easily accessible or properly structured, says Sam Ferrise, CTO of IT consulting firm Trinetix. “Many organizations are realizing that their expectations for AI accuracy and performance don’t always align with the level of investment they’re willing — or able — to make,” he says. “The key is calibrating expectations relative to both the investment and the use case.” In other cases, enterprises deploying AI are running into privacy or security problems, he adds. “Many teams successfully prove a use case with clear ROI, only to realize later that they must harden the solution before it can safely move into production,” Ferrise says. “When that alignment isn’t there, it’s natural for organizations to pause or delay spending until they can justify the value.” The prospect of a bubble bursting may be an overly dramatic scenario, although not impossible, he adds. It’s been easy for organizations to overlook intangible costs such as training, compliance, and governance.

Why can’t enterprises get a handle on the cloud misconfiguration problem?

“Microsoft, Google, and Amazon have handed us a problem,” says Andrew Wilder, CSO at Vetcor, a national network of more than 900 veterinary hospitals. “By default, everything is insecure, and you have to put security on top of it. It would be much better if they just gave us out-of-the-box secure stuff. Would you buy a car that doesn’t have locks? They wouldn’t even sell that car.” This security gap is what allows third-party vendors to exist, he says. “You should be building products — and I’m talking to you, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon — that are secure by design, so you don’t have to get a third-party tool. They should be out of the box secure.” ... When administrators or users make changes to cloud configurations in the cloud management consoles, it’s difficult to track those changes and to revert them if something goes wrong. Plus, humans can easily make mistakes. The solution experts advise is to adopt the principle of “infrastructure as code” and use configuration management tools so that all changes are checked against policies, tracked and audited, and can easily be rolled back. ... Companies will often have monitoring for major cloud services, but shadow IT deployments are left in the dark. This is less a technology problem than a management one and can be addressed by better communications with business units and a more disciplined approach to deploying technology on an enterprise-wide level.

The Supply Chain Blind Spot: Protecting Data in Expanding IT Ecosystems

Data growth is no longer linear, it is exponential. The rise of AI, automation, and digital platforms has transformed how information is created, stored, and shared. In India, this acceleration is particularly visible. The country’s data centre industry has grown from 590 MW in 2019 to 1.4 GW in 2024, a 139% jump, and is projected to reach 3 GW by 2030, driven by cloud adoption, AI demand, and data localisation initiatives. This infrastructure boom, while positive, brings new operational realities. Most enterprises now operate across hybrid environments, combining on-premises, public cloud and SaaS-based data stores. Without unified oversight, these fragmented environments risk becoming silos. True resilience depends not just on protecting data but understanding where it lives, how it moves, and who controls it. ... Globally, enterprises are reframing resilience as a core business capability. This approach requires integrating resilience principles into decision-making: from procurement and architecture design to crisis response. Simulated attacks, failover testing and dependency audits are becoming part of daily operational culture, not annual exercises. For Indian organizations, this mindset shift is vital. RBI’s ICT risk management directives and the DPDP Act establish the baseline; the differentiator lies in how proactively organizations operationalize these expectations.

The power of low-tech in a high-tech world

Our high-tech society is impressive in the collective. But it robs individuals of skills. Most kids now can’t write cursive. And they can’t read it, either. They can’t read an analog clock or a paper map. The acceleration of technological innovation also accelerates the rate at which we lose skills. Videogames, smartphones, and dating apps — aided and abetted by the trauma of the COVID-19 lockdowns a few years ago — have left many young people alone without the skills to meet and connect with anyone, leading to a loneliness epidemic among the young. But losing old-fashioned skills and old-school tech knowledge is a choice we don’t have to make. ... Thousands of scientific reports all lead us to the same conclusion: Over-reliance on advanced technologies dulls critical thinking, weakens memory, reduces problem-solving skills, limits creativity, erodes attention spans, and fosters passive dependence on automated systems. ... What all these old-school approaches have in common is that they’re harder and take longer — and they leave you smarter and better connected. In other words, if you strategically cultivate the skills, habits, discipline and practice of older tech, you’ll be much more successful in your career and your life. And here’s one final point: The more high-tech our culture becomes, the more impactful old-school tech will be. So yes, by all means become brilliantly skilled at AI chatbot prompt engineering.

Why Leaders Cannot Outsource Communication

When communication is delegated to a proxy, that signal weakens. Employees notice the gap between what the leader says or doesn’t say, and what the organization does. This is why communication has an outsized impact on engagement. Gallup finds that 70% of the variance in employee engagement is explained by managers and leaders, not perks or policies. When leaders own the message, they create psychological safety: the sense that it’s safe to commit, speak up and take risks. When they don’t, that safety erodes. ... Delegating communication is tempting. Leaders are busy. They hire communications officers and agencies to manage the message. These roles are valuable, but they can’t substitute for the leader’s voice. A speechwriter can shape phrasing and a PR team can guide timing, but only the leader can deliver authenticity. As Murphy has written, “Leaders are accountable to employees: Candor about bad news as well as the good, and feedback that aligns with expectations.” Authenticity requires candor, even when the message is difficult. When communication comes from anyone else, it’s interpreted as institutional rather than personal. And people follow people, not institutions. ... The Operator Economy demands a new kind of scale, one built not on capital or code, but on human alignment. Communication is infrastructure. The CEO becomes the signal source around which all systems calibrate. When leaders “scale themselves” through clarity and consistency, they convert trust into throughput.

Breaking the Burnout Cycle: How Smart Automation and ASPM Can Restore Developer Joy

Smart automation can rescue developers from repetitive drudgery by using AI to handle routine tasks like test writing, bug fixing, and documentation. Modern application security posture management (ASPM) platforms exemplify this approach by providing contextualized risk assessments rather than overwhelming vulnerability dumps, helping security teams first understand which issues actually matter and then giving developers actionable info on the risk and how it should be fixed. These platforms excel at managing the volume and unpredictability of AI-generated code, turning what was once a blind spot into manageable, prioritized work. ... Technology alone isn't enough. Organizations must also prioritize developer growth by creating opportunities for experimentation, architectural decisions, and end-to-end project ownership while automation handles routine tasks. This means shifting from measuring output volume to focusing on meaningful metrics like code quality and developer satisfaction. AI represents an opportunity for developers to gain expertise in an emerging technology. ... The developer talent crisis is solvable. While AI has introduced new complexities to the software development and security landscape, it also presents unprecedented opportunities for organizations willing to rethink how they support their development teams.

The CIO’s Role In Data Democracy: Empowering Teams Without Losing Control

The modern CIO is at a point where they can choose between innovation and control. In the past, IT departments were thought of as people who took care of infrastructure and enforced strict regulations about who could access data. The CIO needs to reassess this way of doing things today. They shouldn’t prohibit access; instead, they should make it safe by building frameworks. The job has changed from saying “no” to making sure that when the company says “yes,” it does it smartly. The CIO is now both an architect and a guardian. They create systems that make data easy to get to, understand, and act on, all while keeping security and compliance in mind. ... The CIO is no longer a gatekeeper; they are instead a designer of trust. The goal is to make governance a part of systems such that it is seamless, automatic, and easy to use. This change lets companies keep an eye on things and stay in control without making decisions take longer. Unified data taxonomies are the first step in building this framework. This means that all departments use the same naming standards and definitions. When everyone uses the same “data language,” there is less confusion and more cooperation. ... Effective governance demands collaboration between IT, compliance, and business leaders. The CIO must champion cross-functional alignment where all parties share responsibility for data integrity and use.

What keeps phishing training from fading over time

Employees who want to be helpful or appear responsive can become easier targets than those reacting to fear or haste. For CISOs, this reinforces the need to teach users about manipulation through trust and cooperation, not just the warning signs of urgent or threatening messages. ... Dubniczky said maintaining employee engagement over time is a major challenge for most organizations. “In contrast with other research in the area, a key contribution of ours was a mandatory training after each failed phishing attack,” he explained. “This strikes a good balance between not needlessly bothering careful employees with monthly or quarterly trainings while making sure that the highest risk individuals are constantly trained.” He recommended that organizations vary their phishing simulations to keep users alert. “We’d recommend performing monthly penetration tests on smaller groups of people in diverse departments of the organization with a seemingly random pattern, and making re-training mandatory in case of successful attacks,” he said. “It’s also difficult to generalize on this, but this approach seems much more effective than periodic presentation-style trainings.” ... One of the most striking findings involves the timing of feedback. When employees clicked a phishing link and then received an immediate explanation and training prompt, they were far less likely to repeat the behavior. Around seven in ten employees who failed once did not do so again.

The new QA playbook: Leveraging AI to amplify expertise, not replace it

Many quality teams have been part of the AI journey from the very beginning, contributing from concept to implementation and helping evaluate large language models to ensure quality and reliability. However, many AI features are not developed by QA practitioners, so it is essential to evaluate them through a QA lens. First, ensure the system can produce what your teams actually use, whether that is step lists, BDD-style scenarios, or free text that fits your templates and automation. Next, map the full data journey. Know whether prompts or results are kept, how encryption and minimization are applied, and where any content is stored. Finally, require fine-grained controls so you can limit usage by environment, project, and role. Regulated teams require an audit trail and clear accountability, which means governance must keep pace with adoption, or speed will outpace safety. Once review-first habits are in place, build on them. True oversight requires more than simply checking AI outputs; it demands deeper knowledge and understanding than the AI itself to spot gaps, inaccuracies, or misleading information. That’s what separates a passive reviewer from an effective human in the loop. ... Real gains from AI will not come from automation alone but from people who know how to guide it with clarity, context, and care. The future of testing depends on professionals who can combine technical fluency with critical thinking, ethical judgment, and a sense of ownership over quality.

Your outage costs more than you think – so design with resilience in mind

Service providers are under strain to deliver the rapid speeds and constant network uptime that modern life demands, with areas like remote working, financial transactions, cloud access and streaming services expected to work seamlessly as part of the daily lives of many end users. For many enterprises, their business depends on this connectivity. Even a single hour of network disruption can cost an organisation more than $300,000, and the long-term damage to customer trust often exceeds any immediate financial loss. Despite this, many organisations still rely on outdated infrastructure that cannot support the requirements of today’s end users. Legacy environments struggle with explosive data growth, the soaring demands of AI, and the complexity of distributed, cloud-first applications. At the same time, power limitations, infrastructure strain and inconsistent service levels put businesses at risk of falling behind. The gap between what service providers and enterprises need, and what their infrastructure can deliver, is widening. ... For service providers, investing in robust colocation and high-performance networking is not just about upgrading infrastructure, but enabling customers and partners worldwide to thrive in today’s fast-paced digital landscape. By offering resilient and scalable connectivity, providers can differentiate their service offering, attract high-value enterprise clients, and create new revenue streams based on reliability and performance.

Daily Tech Digest - September 18, 2025

Quote for the day:

"When your life flashes before your eyes, make sure you’ve got plenty to watch.” -- Anonymous

The new IT operating model: cloud-managed networking as a strategic lever

Enterprises are navigating an environment where the complexity of IT is increasing exponentially. Hybrid work requires consistent connectivity across homes, offices, and campuses. Edge computing and IoT generate massive volumes of data at distributed sites. Security risks escalate as the attack surface grows. Traditional, hardware-centric approaches leave IT teams struggling to keep up. Managing dozens or hundreds of controllers, patching firmware manually, and troubleshooting issues site by site is not sustainable. Cloud-managed networking changes that equation. By centralizing management, applying AI-driven intelligence, and extending visibility across distributed environments, it enables IT to shift from reactive firefighting to proactive strategy. ... Enterprises adopting cloud-managed networking are making a decisive shift from complexity to clarity. Success requires more than technology alone. It demands a partner that understands how to translate advanced capabilities into measurable business outcomes. ... Cloud-managed networking is not just another IT trend. It is the operating model that will define enterprise technology for the next decade. By elevating the network from infrastructure to strategy, it enables organizations to move faster, stay secure, and innovate with confidence.

Why Shadow AI Is the Next Big Governance Challenge for CISOs

In many respects, shadow AI is a subset of a broader shadow IT problem. Shadow IT is an issue that emerged more than a decade ago, largely emanating from employee use of unauthorized cloud apps, including SaaS. Lohrmann noted that cloud access security broker (CASB) solutions were developed to deal with the shadow IT issue. These tools are designed to provide organizations with full visibility of what employees are doing on the network and on protected devices, while only allowing access to authorized instances. However, shadow AI presents distinct challenges that CASB tools are unable to adequately address. “Organizations still need to address other questions related to licensing, application sprawl, security and privacy policies, procedures and more ..,” Lohrmann noted. A key difference between IT and AI is the nature of data, the speed of adoption and the complexity of the underlying technology. In addition, AI is often integrated into existing IT systems, including cloud applications, making these tools more difficult to identify. Chuvakin added, “With shadow IT, unauthorized tools often leave recognizable traces – unapproved applications on devices, unusual network traffic or access attempts to restricted services. Shadow AI interactions, however, often occur entirely within a web browser or personal device, blending seamlessly with regular online activity or not leaving any trace on any corporate system at all.”

Cisco strengthens integrated IT/OT network and security controls

Melding IT and OT networking and security is not a new idea, but it’s one that has seen growing attention from Cisco. ... Cisco also added a new technology called AI-powered asset clustering to its Cyber Vision OT management suite. Cyber Vison keeps track of devices connected to an industrial network, builds a real-time map of how these devices talk to each other and to IT systems, and can detect abnormal behavior, vulnerabilities, or policy violations that could signal malware, misconfigurations, or insider threats, Cisco says. ... Another significant move that will help IT/OT integration is the planned integration of the management console for Cisco’s Catalyst and Meraki networks. That combination will allow IT and OT teams to see the same dashboard for industrial OT and IT enterprise/campus networks. Cyber Vision will feeds into the dashboard along with other Cisco management offerings such as ThousandEyes, which gives customers a shared inventory of assets, traffic flows and security. “What we are focusing on is helping our customers have the secure networking foundation and architecture that lets IT teams and operational teams kind of have one fabric, one architecture, that goes from the carpeted spaces all the way to the far reaches of their OT network,” Butaney said.

Global hiring risks: What you need to know about identity fraud and screening trends

Most organizations globally include criminal record checks in their pre-employment screening. Employment and education verifications are also common, especially in EMEA and APAC. ... “Employers that fail to strengthen their identity verification processes or overlook recurring discrepancy patterns could face costly consequences, from compliance failures to reputational harm,” said Euan Menzies, President and CEO of HireRight. ... More than three-quarters of businesses globally found at least one discrepancy in a candidate’s background over the past year. Thirteen percent reported finding one discrepancy for every five candidates screened. Employment verification remains the area where most inconsistencies are discovered, especially in APAC and EMEA. These discrepancies range from minor errors like incorrect dates to more serious issues such as fabricated job histories. ... Companies are increasingly adopting post-hire screening to address risks that emerge after someone is hired. In North America, only 38 percent of companies now say they do no post-hire screening, a sharp drop from 57 percent last year. Common post-hire checks include driver monitoring and periodic rescreening for regulated roles. These efforts help companies catch new issues such as undisclosed criminal activity, changes in legal eligibility to work, or evolving insider threats.

Doomprompting: Endless tinkering with AI outputs can cripple IT results

Some LLMs appear to be designed to encourage long-lasting conversation loops, with answers often spurring another prompt. ... “When an individual engineer is prompting an AI, they get a pretty good response pretty quick,” he says. “It gets in your head, ‘That’s pretty good; surely, I could get to perfect.’ And you get to the point where it’s the classic sunk-cost fallacy, where the engineer is like, ‘I’ve spent all this time prompting, surely I can prompt myself out of this hole.’” The problem often happens when the project lacks definitions of what a good result looks like, he adds. “Employees who don’t really understand the goal they’re after will spin in circles not knowing when they should just call it done or step away,” Farmer says. “The enemy of good is perfect, and LLMs make us feel like if we just tweak that last prompt a little bit, we’ll get there.” ... Govindarajan has seen some IT teams get stuck in “doom loops” as they add more and more instructions to agents to refine the outputs. As organizations deploy multiple agents, constant tinkering with outputs can slow down deployments and burn through staff time, he says. “The whole idea of doomprompting is basically putting that instruction down and hoping that it works as you set more and more instructions, some of them contradicting with each other,” he adds. “It comes at the sacrifice of system intelligence.”

Vanishing Public Record Makes Enterprise Data a Strategic Asset

“We are rapidly running out of public data that is credible and usable. More and more enterprises will start to assign value to their data and go beyond partnerships to monetize it. For example, wind measurements captured by a wind turbine company could be helpful to many businesses that are not competitors,” said Olga Kupriyanova, principal consultant of AI and data engineering at ISG. ... "We’re entering a defining moment in AI where access to reliable, scalable, and ethical data is quickly becoming the central bottleneck, and also the most valuable asset. As legal and regulatory pressure tightens access to public data, due to copyright lawsuits, privacy concerns, or manipulation of open data repositories, enterprises are being forced to rethink where their AI advantage will come from,” said Farshid Sabet, CEO and co-founder at Corvic AI, developer of a GenAI management platform. ... The economic consequences of such data loss are already visible. Analysts estimate that U.S. public data underpinned nearly $750 billion of business activity as recently as 2022, according to the Department of Commerce. The loss of such data blinds companies that build models for everything from supply chain forecasting to investment strategy and predictions.

The Architecture of Responsible AI: Balancing Innovation and Accountability

The field of AI governance suffers from what Mackenzie et al reaffirm as the “principal-agent problem,” where one party (the principal) delegates tasks to another party (the agent). But their interests are not perfectly aligned, leading to potential conflicts and inefficiencies. ... Architects occupy a unique position in this landscape. Unlike regulators who may impose constraints post-design, architects work at the intersection of possibility and constraint. They must balance competing requirements, such as performance and privacy, efficiency and equity, speed and safety, within coherent system designs. Every architectural decision must embed values, priorities, and assumptions about how systems should behave. ... current AI guidance suffers from systematic weaknesses: evidence quality is sacrificed for speed, commercial interests masquerade as objective advice, and some perspectives dominate while broader stakeholder voices remain unheard ... Architects, being well-placed to bridge the gap between strategy and technology, hold a key role in establishing the principles that govern how systems behave, interact, and evolve. In the context of AI, this principle set extends beyond technical design. It encompasses the ethical, social, and legal aspects as well. .

AI will make workers ‘busier in the future’ – so what’s the point exactly?

“I have to admit that I’m afraid to say that we are going to be busier in the future than now,” he told host Liz Claman. “And the reason for that is because a lot of different things that take a long time to do are now faster to do. I’m always waiting for work to get done because I’ve got more ideas.” ... “The more productive we are, the more opportunity we get to pursue new ideas,” Huang continued. Reading between the lines here, it seems the so-called efficiency gains afforded by AI will mean workers have more work dumped in their laps – onto the next task, no rest for the wicked, etc. Huang’s comments run counter to the prevailing sentiment among big tech executives on exactly what AI will deliver for both enterprises and individual workers. ... We’ve all read the marketing copy and heard it regurgitated by tech leaders on podcasts and keynote stages – AI will allow us to focus on the “more rewarding” aspects of our jobs. They’ve never fully explained what this entails, or how it will pan out in the workplace. To be quite honest, I don’t think they know what it means. Marketing probably made it up and they’ve stuck with it. ... Will we be busier spending time on those rewarding aspects of our jobs? I have to say, I’m doubtful. The reality is that workers will be pulled into other tasks and merely end up drowning in the same cumbersome workloads they’ve been dealing with since the pandemic.

Building Safer Digital Experiences Through Robust Testing Practices

Secure software testing forms the bedrock of resilient applications, proactively uncovering flaws before they become critical. Early testing practices can significantly reduce risks, costs, and exposure to threats. According to Global Market Insights, the growing number and size of data breaches have increased the need for security testing services. Organizations that heavily use security AI and automation save an average of USD 1.76 million compared to those that don’t. About 51% plan to increase their security spending. Early integration of techniques like Static Application Security Testing (SAST) can detect vulnerabilities in existing code. It can also help to fix bugs during development. ... Organizations must verify that their systems handle personal data securely and comply with global regulations like GDPR and CCPA. Testing ensures sensitive information is protected from leaks or unauthorized use. Americans are highly concerned about how companies use their private data. ... Stress testing evaluates how applications perform under extreme loads. It helps identify potential failures in scalability, response times, and resource management. Vulnerability assessments concentrate on uncovering security gaps. Verified Market Reports notes that, after recent financial crises, governments are putting stronger emphasis on stress testing.

Prompt Engineering Is Dead – Long Live PromptOps

PromptOps is gaining traction rapidly because it has the potential to address major challenges in the use of LLMs, such as prompt drift and suboptimal output. Yet incorporating PromptOps effectively into an organization is far from simple, requiring a structured and clear process, the right tools, and a mindset that enables collaboration and effective centralization. Digging deeper into what PromptOps is, why it is needed, and how it can be implemented effectively can help companies to find the right approach when incorporating this methodology for improving their LLM applications usage. ... Before PromptOps is implemented, an organization typically has prompts scattered across multiple teams and tools, with no structured management in place. The first stage of implementing PromptOps involves gathering every detail on LLM applications usage within an organization. It is essential to understand precisely which prompts are being used, by which teams, and with which models. The next stage is to build consistency into this practice by incorporating versioning and testing. Adding secure access control at this stage is also important, in order to ensure only those who need it have access to prompts. With these practices in place, organizations will be well-positioned to introduce cross-model design and embed core compliance and security practices into all prompt crafting.

Daily Tech Digest - September 09, 2025

Quote for the day:

“The greatest leader is not necessarily the one who does the greatest things. He is the one that gets the people to do the greatest things.” -- Ronald Reagan

Neuromorphic computing and the future of edge AI

While QC captures the mainstream headlines, neuromorphic computing has positioned itself as a force in the next era of AI. While conventional AI relies heavily on GPU/TPU-based architectures, neuromorphic systems mimic the parallel and event-driven nature of the human brain. ... Neuromorphic hardware has shown promise in edge environments where power efficiency, latency and adaptability matter most. From wearable medical devices to battlefield robotics, systems that can “think locally” without requiring constant cloud connectivity offer clear advantages. ... As neuromorphic computing matures, ethical and sustainability considerations will shape adoption as much as raw performance. Spiking neural networks’ efficiency reduces carbon footprints by cutting energy demands compared to GPUs, aligning with global decarbonization targets. At the same time, ensuring that neuromorphic models are transparent, bias‑aware and auditable is critical for applications in healthcare, defense and finance. Calls for AI governance frameworks now explicitly include neuromorphic AI, reflecting its potential role in high‑stakes decision‑making. Embedding sustainability and ethics into the neuromorphic roadmap will ensure that efficiency gains do not come at the cost of fairness or accountability.

10 security leadership career-killers — and how to avoid them

“Security has evolved from being the end goal to being a business-enabling function,” says James Carder, CISO at software maker Benevity. “That means security strategies, communications, planning, and execution need to be aligned with business outcomes. If security efforts aren’t returning meaningful ROI, CISOs are likely doing something wrong. Security should not operate as a cost center, and if we act or report like one, we’re failing in our roles.” ... CISOs generally know that the security function can’t be the “department of no.” But some don’t quite get to a “yes,” either, which means they’re still failing their organizations in a way that could stymie their careers, says Aimee Cardwell, CISO in residence at tech company Transcend and former CISO of UnitedHealth Group. ... CISOs who are too rigid with the rules do a disservice to their organizations and their professional prospects, says Cardwell. Such a situation recently came up in her organization, where one of her team members initially declined to permit a third-party application from being used by workers, pointing to a security policy barring such apps. ... CISOs who don’t have a firm grasp on all that they must secure won’t succeed in their roles. “If they don’t have visibility, if they can’t talk about the effectiveness of the controls, then they won’t have credibility and the confidence in them among leadership will erode,” Knisley says.

A CIO's Evolving Role in the Generative AI Era

The dual mandate facing CIOs today is demanding but unavoidable. They must deliver quick AI pilots that boards can take to the shareholders while also enforcing guardrails on security, ethics and cost aspects. Too much caution can make CIOs irrelevant. This balancing act requires not only technical fluency but also narrative skill. The ability to translate AI experiments into business outcomes that CEOs and boards can trust can make CIOs a force. The MIT report highlights another critical decision point: whether to build or buy. Many enterprises attempt internal builds, but externally built AI partnerships succeed twice as often. CIOs, pressured for fast results, must be pragmatic about when to build and when to partner. Gen AI does not - and never will - replace the CIO role. But it demands corrections. The CIO who once focused on alignment must now lead business transformation. Those who succeed will act less as CIOs and more as AI diplomats, bridging hype with pragmatism, connecting technological opportunities to shareholder value and balancing the boardroom's urgency with the operational reality. As AI advances, so does the CIO's role - but only if they evolve. Their reporting line to the CEO symbolizes greater trust and higher stakes. Unlike previous technology cycles, AI has brought the CIO to the forefront of transformation.

Building an AI Team May Mean Hiring Where the Talent Is, Not Where Your Bank Is

Much of the adaptation of banking to AI approaches requires close collaboration between AI talent with people who understand how the banking processes involved need to work. This will put people closer together, literally, to facilitate both quick and in-depth but always frequent interactions to make collaboration work — paradoxically, increased automation needs more face-to-face dealings at the formative stages. However, the "where" of the space will also hinge on where AI and innovation talent can be recruited, where that talent is being bred and wants to work, and the types of offices that talent will be attracted to. ... "Banks are also recruiting for emerging specialties in responsible AI and AI governance, ensuring that their AI initiatives are ethical, compliant and risk-managed," the report says. "As ‘agentic AI’ — autonomous AI agents — and generative AI gain traction, firms will need experts in these cutting-edge fields too." ... Decisions don’t stop at the border anymore. Jesrani says that savvy banks look for pockets of talent as well. ... "Banks are contemplating their global strategies because emerging markets can provide them with talent and capabilities that they may not be able to obtain in the U.S.," says Haglund. "Or there may be things happening in those markets that they need to be a part of in order to advance their core business capabilities."

How Data Immaturity is Preventing Advanced AI

Data immaturity, in the context of AI, refers to an organisation’s underdeveloped or inadequate data practices, which limit its ability to leverage AI effectively. It encompasses issues with data quality, accessibility, governance, and infrastructure. Critical signs of data immaturity include inconsistent, incomplete, or outdated data leading to unreliable AI outcomes; data silos across departments hindering access and comprehensive analysis, as well as weak data governance caused by a lack of policies on data ownership, compliance and security, which introduces risks and restricts AI usage. ... Data immaturity also leads to a lack of trust in analysis and predictability of execution. That puts a damper on any plans to leverage AI in a more autonomous manner—whether for business or operational process automation. A recent study by Kearney found that organisations globally are expecting to increase data and analytics budgets by 22% in the next three years as AI adoption scales. Fragmented data limits the predictive accuracy and reliability of AI, which are crucial for autonomous functions where decisions are made without human intervention. As a result, organisations must get their data houses in order before they will be able to truly take advantage of AI’s potential to optimise workflows and free up valuable time for humans to focus on strategy and design, tasks for which most AI is not yet well suited.

From Reactive Tools to Intelligent Agents: Fulcrum Digital’s AI-First Transformation

To mature, LLM is just one layer. Then you require the integration layer, how you integrate it. Every customer has multiple assets in their business which have to connect with LLM layers. Every business has so many existing applications and new applications; businesses are also buying some new AI agents from the market. How do you bring new AI agents, existing old systems, and new modern systems of the business together — integrating with LLM? That is one aspect. The second aspect is every business has its own data. So LLM has to train on those datasets. Copilot and OpenAI are trained on zillions of data, but that is LLM. Industry wants SLM—small language models, private language models, and industry-orientated language models. So LLMs have to be fine-tuned according to the industry and also fine-tuned according to their data. Nowadays people come to realise that LLMs will never give you 100 per cent accurate solutions, no matter which LLM you choose. That is the phenomenon customers and everybody are now learning. The difference between us and others: many players who are new to the game deliver results with LLMs at 70–75 per cent. Because we have matured this game with multiple LLMs coexisting, and with those LLMs together maturing our Ryze platform, we are able to deliver more than 93–95 per cent accuracy.

You Didn't Get Phished — You Onboarded the Attacker

Many organizations respond by overcorrecting: "I want my entire company to be as locked down as my most sensitive resource." It seems sensible—until the work slows to a crawl. Without nuanced controls that allow your security policies to distinguish between legitimate workflows and unnecessary exposure, simply applying rigid controls that lock everything down across the organization will grind productivity to a halt. Employees need access to do their jobs. If security policies are too restrictive, employees are either going to find workarounds or continually ask for exceptions. Over time, risk creeps in as exceptions become the norm. This collection of internal exceptions slowly pushes you back towards "the castle and moat" approach. The walls are fortified from the outside, but open on the inside. And giving employees the key to unlock everything inside so they can do their jobs means you are giving one to Jordan, too. ... A practical way to begin is by piloting ZSP on your most sensitive system for two weeks. Measure how access requests, approvals, and audits flow in practice. Quick wins here can build momentum for wider adoption, and prove that security and productivity don't have to be at odds. ... When work demands more, employees can receive it on request through time-bound, auditable workflows. Just enough access is granted just in time, then removed. By taking steps to operationalize zero standing privileges, you empower legitimate users to move quickly—without leaving persistent privileges lying around for Jordan to find.

OT Security: When Shutting Down Is Not an Option

some of the most urgent and disruptive threats today are unfolding far from the keyboard, in operational technology environments that keep factories running, energy flowing and transportation systems moving. In these sectors, digital attacks can lead to physical consequences, and defending OT environments demands specialized skills. Real-world incidents across manufacturing and critical infrastructure show how quickly operations can be disrupted when OT systems are not adequately protected. Just this week, Jaguar Land Rover disclosed that a cyberattack "severely disrupted" its automotive manufacturing operations. ... OT environments present challenges that differ sharply from traditional IT. While security is improving, OT security teams must protect legacy control systems running outdated firmware, making them difficult to patch. Operators need to prioritize uptime and safety over system changes; and IT and OT teams frequently work in silos. These conditions mean that breaches can have physical as well as digital consequences, from halting production to endangering lives. Training tailored to OT is essential to secure critical systems while maintaining operational continuity. ... An OT cybersecurity learning ecosystem is not a one-time checklist but a continuous program. The following elements help organizations choose training that meets current needs while building capacity for ongoing improvement.

Connected cars are racing ahead, but security is stuck in neutral

Connected cars are essentially digital platforms with multiple entry points for attackers. The research highlights several areas of concern. Remote access attacks can target telematics systems, wireless interfaces, or mobile apps linked to the car. Data leaks are another major issue because connected cars collect sensitive information, including location history and driving behavior, which is often stored in the cloud. Sensors present their own set of risks. Cameras, radar, lidar, and GPS can be manipulated, creating confusion for driver assistance systems. Once inside a vehicle, attackers can move deeper by exploiting the CAN bus, which connects key systems such as brakes, steering, and acceleration. ... Most drivers want information about what data is collected and where it goes, yet very few said they have received that information. Brand perception also plays a role. Many participants prefer European or Japanese brands, while some expressed distrust toward vehicles from certain countries, citing political concerns, safety issues, or perceived quality gaps. ... Manufacturers are pushing out new software-defined features, integrating apps, and rolling out over the air updates. This speed increases the number of attack paths and makes it harder for security practices and rules to keep up.

Circular strategies for data centers

Digital infrastructure is scaling rapidly, with rising AI workloads and increased compute density shaping investment decisions. Growth on that scale can generate unnecessary waste unless sustainability is integrated into planning. Circular thinking makes it possible to expand capacity without locking facilities into perpetual hardware turnover. Operators can incorporate flexibility into refresh cycles by working with vendors that design modular platforms or by adopting service-based models that build in maintenance, refurbishment, and recovery. ... Sustainable planning also involves continuous evaluation. Instead of defaulting to wholesale replacement, facilities can test whether assets still meet operational requirements through reconfiguration, upgrades, or role reassignment. This kind of iterative approach gives operators a way to match innovation with responsibility, ensuring that capacity keeps pace with demand without discarding equipment prematurely. ... The transition to circular practices is more than an environmental gesture. For data centers, it is a strategic shift in how infrastructure is procured, maintained, and retired. Extending lifecycles, redeploying equipment internally, refurbishing where possible, and ensuring secure, responsible recycling at the end of use all contribute to a more resilient operation in a resource-constrained and tightly regulated industry.

Daily Tech Digest - September 03, 2025

Quote for the day:

“The greatest leader is not necessarily the one who does the greatest things. He is the one that gets the people to do the greatest things.” -- Ronald Reagan

Understanding Problems in the Data Supply Chain: A Q&A with R Systems’ AI Director Samiksha Mishra

Think of data as moving through a supply chain: it’s sourced, labeled, cleaned, transformed, and then fed into models. If bias enters early – through underrepresentation in data collection, skewed labeling, or feature engineering – it doesn’t just persist but multiplies as the data moves downstream. By the time the model is trained, bias is deeply entrenched, and fixes can only patch symptoms, not address the root cause. Just like supply chains for physical goods need quality checks at every stage, AI systems need fairness validation points throughout the pipeline to prevent bias from becoming systemic. ... The key issue is that a small representational bias can be significantly amplified across the AI data supply chain due to reusability and interdependencies. When a biased dataset is reused, its initial flaw is propagated to multiple models and contexts. This is further magnified during preprocessing, as methods like feature scaling and augmentation can encode a biased feature into multiple new variables, effectively multiplying its weight. ... One effective way to integrate validation layers and bias filters into AI systems without sacrificing speed is to design them as lightweight checkpoints throughout the pipeline rather than heavy post-hoc add-ons. At the data stage, simple distributional checks such as χ² tests or KL-divergence can flag demographic imbalances at low computational cost.

Hackers Manipulate Claude AI Chatbot as Part of at Least 17 Cyber Attacks

While AI’s use in hacking has largely been a case of hype over actual threat to present, this new development is a concrete indicator that it is at minimum now substantially lowering the threshold for non-technical actors to execute viable cyber attacks. It is also clearly capable of speeding up and automating certain common aspects of attacks for the more polished professional hackers, increasing their output capability during windows in which they have the element of surprise and novelty. While the GTG-2002 activity is the most complex thus far, the threat report notes the Claude AI chatbot has also been successfully used for more individualized components of various cyber attacks. This includes use by suspected North Korean state-sponsored hackers as part of their remote IT worker scams, to include not just crafting detailed personas but also taking employment tests and doing day-to-day work once hired. Another highly active party in the UK has been using Claude to develop individual ransomware tools with sophisticated capabilities and sell them on underground forums, at a price of $400 to $1,200 each. ... Anthropic says that it has responded to the cyber attacks by adding a tailored classifier specifically for the observed activity and a new detection method to ensure similar activity is captured by the standard security pipeline.

Agentic AI: Storage and ‘the biggest tech refresh in IT history’

The interesting thing about agentic infrastructure is that agents can ultimately work across a number of different datasets, and even in different domains. You have kind of two types of agents – workers, and other agents, which are supervisors or supervisory agents. So, maybe I want to do something simple like develop a sales forecast for my product while reviewing all the customer conversations and the different databases or datasets that could inform my forecast. Well, that would take me to having agents that work on and process a number of different independent datasets that may not even be in my datacentre. ... So, anything that requires analytics requires a data warehouse. Anything that requires an understanding of unstructured data not only requires a file system or an object storage system, but it also requires a vector database to help AI agents understand what’s in those file systems through a process called retrieval augmented generative AI. The first thing that needs to be wrestled down is a reconciliation of this idea that there’s all sorts of different data sources, and all of them need to be modernised or ready for the AI computing that is about to hit these data sources. ... The first thing I would say is that there are best practices out in the market that should definitely be adhered to.

Tech leaders: Are you balancing AI transformation with employee needs?

On the surface, it might seem naïve for companies to talk about AI building people up and improving jobs when there’s so much negative news about its potential impact on employment. For example, Ford CEO Jim Farley recently predicted that AI will replace half of all white-collar workers in the US. Also, Fiverr CEO Micha Kaufman sent a memo to his team in which he said, “AI is coming for your job. Heck, it’s coming for my job, too. This is a wake-up call. It doesn’t matter if you’re a programmer, designer, product manager, data scientist, lawyer, customer support rep, salesperson, or a finance person. AI is coming for you.” Several tech companies like Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Salesforce have also been talking about how much of their work is already being done by AI. Of course, tech executives could just be hyping the technology they sell. But not all AI-related layoffs may actually be due to AI. ... AI, especially agentic AI, is changing the nature of work, and how companies will need to be organized, says Mary Alice Vuicic, chief people officer at Thomson Reuters. “Many companies ripped up their AI plans as agentic AI came to the forefront,” she says, as it’s moved on from being an assistant to being a team that works together to accomplish delegated tasks. This has the potential for unprecedented productivity improvements, but also unprecedented opportunities for augmentation, expansion, and growth.

When rivals come fishing: What keeps talent from taking the bait

Organisations can and do protect themselves with contracts—non-compete agreements, non-solicitation rules, confidentiality policies. They matter because they protect sensitive knowledge and prevent rivals from taking shortcuts. But they are not the same as retention. An employee with ambition, if disengaged, will eventually walk. ... If money were the sole reason employees left, the problem would be simpler. Counter-offers would solve it, at least temporarily. But every HR leader knows the story: a high performer accepts a lucrative counter-offer, only to resign again six months later. The issue lies elsewhere—career stagnation, lack of recognition, weak culture, or a disconnect with leadership. ... What works instead is open dialogue, competitive but fair rewards, and most importantly, visible career pathways. Employees, she stresses, need to feel that their organisation is invested in their long-term development, not just scrambling to keep them for another year. Tiwari also highlights something companies often neglect: succession planning. By identifying and nurturing future leaders early, organisations create continuity and reduce the shock when someone does leave. Alongside this, clear policies and awareness about confidentiality ensure that intellectual property remains protected even in times of churn. The recent frenzy of AI talent raids among global tech giants is an extreme example of this battle.

Agentic AI: A CISO’s security nightmare in the making?

CISOs don’t like operating in the dark, and this is one of the risks agentic AI brings. It can be deployed autonomously by teams or even individual users through a variety of applications without proper oversight from security and IT departments. This creates “shadow AI agents” that can operate without controls such as authentication, which makes it difficult to track their actions and behavior. This in turn can pose significant security risks, because unseen agents can introduce vulnerabilities. ... Agentic AI introduces the ability to make independent decisions and act without human oversight. This capability presents its own cybersecurity risk by potentially leaving organizations vulnerable. “Agentic AI systems are goal-driven and capable of making decisions without direct human approval,” Joyce says. “When objectives are poorly scoped or ambiguous, agents may act in ways that are misaligned with enterprise security or ethical standards.” ... Agents often collaborate with other agents to complete tasks, resulting in complex chains of communication and decision-making, PwC’s Joyce says. “These interactions can propagate sensitive data in unintended ways, creating compliance and security risks,” he says. ... Many early stage agents rely on brittle or undocumented APIs or browser automation, Mayham says. “We’ve seen cases where agents leak tokens via poorly scoped integrations, or exfiltrate data through unexpected plugin chains. The more fragmented the vendor stack, the bigger the surface area for something like this to happen,” he says.

How To Get The Best Out Of People Without Causing Burnout At Work

Comfort zones feel safe, but they also limit growth. Employees who stick with what they know may appear steady, but eventually they stagnate. Leaders who let people stay in their comfort zones for too long risk creating teams that lack adaptability. At the same time, pushing too aggressively can backfire. People who are stretched too far too quickly often feel stress and that drains motivation. This is when burnout at work begins. The real challenge is knowing how to respect comfort zones while creating enough stretch to build confidence. ... Gallup’s research shows that employees who use their strengths daily are six times more likely to be engaged. Tom Rath, co-author of StrengthsFinder, told me that leaning into natural talents is often the fastest path to confidence and performance gains. At the same time, he cautioned me against the idea that we should only focus on strengths. He said it is just as reckless to ignore weaknesses as it is to ignore strengths. His point was that leaders need balance. Too much time spent on weaknesses drains confidence, but avoiding them altogether prevents people from growing. ... It is not always easy to tell if resistance is fear or indifference. Fear usually comes with visible anxiety. The employee avoids the task but also worries about it. Laziness looks more like indifference with no visible discomfort. Leaders can uncover the difference by asking questions. If it is fear, support and small steps can help. If it is indifference, accountability and clear expectations may be the solution.

IT Leadership Takes on AGI

“We think about AGI in terms of stepwise progress toward machines that can go beyond visual perception and question answering to goal-based decision-making,” says Brian Weiss, chief technology officer at hyperautomation and enterprise AI infrastructure provider Hyperscience, in an email interview. “The real shift comes when systems don’t just read, classify and summarize human-generated document content, but when we entrust them with the ultimate business decisions.” ... OpenAI’s newly released GPT-5 isn’t AGI, though it can purportedly deliver more useful responses across different domains. Tal Lev-Ami, CTO and co-founder of media optimization and visual experience platform provider Cloudinary, says “reliable” is the operative word when it comes to AGI. ... “We may see impressive demonstrations sooner, but building systems that people can depend on for critical decisions requires extensive testing, safety measures, and regulatory frameworks that don't exist yet,” says Bosquez in an email interview. ... Artificial narrow intelligence or ANI (what we’ve been using) still isn’t perfect. Data is often to blame, which is why there’s a huge push toward AI-ready data. Yet, despite the plethora of tools available to manage data and data quality, some enterprises are still struggling. Without AI-ready data, enterprises invite reliability issues with any form of AI. “Today’s systems can hallucinate or take rogue actions, and we’ve all seen the examples.

How Causal Reasoning Addresses the Limitations of LLMs in Observability

A new class of AI-based observability solutions built on LLMs is gaining traction as they promise to simplify incident management, identify root causes, and automate remediation. These systems sift through high-volume telemetry, generate natural-language summaries based on their findings, and propose configuration or code-level changes. Additionally, with the advent of agentic AI, remediation workflows can be automated to advance the goal of self-healing environments. However, such tools remain fundamentally limited in their ability to perform root-cause analysis for modern applications. ... In observability contexts, LLMs can interpret complex logs and trace messages, summarize high-volume telemetry, translate natural-language queries into structured filters, and synthesize scripts or configuration changes to support remediation. Most LLM solutions rely on proprietary providers such as OpenAI and Anthropic, whose training data is opaque and often poorly aligned with specific codebases or deployment environments. More fundamentally, LLMs can only produce text. ... Agentic AI shifts observability workflows from passive diagnostics to active response by predicting failure paths, initiating remediations, and executing tasks such as service restarts, configuration rollbacks, and state validation.

The Future of Work Is Human: Insights From Workday and Deloitte Leader

While AI can do many things, Chalwin acknowledges, "it can't replace, especially as a leader, that collaboration with your team, ethical decision making, creativity and strategic thinking.” But what it can do is free up time from more manual tasks, allowing people to focus on more impactful work. When asked about shifting focus from traditional training to creating opportunities for adaptation and innovation, Zucker emphasized the value of determining the balance of empowering people and giving them time and access to new capabilities to develop new skills. She noted, "People need to feel comfortable with trying things.” This requires helping the workforce understand how to make decisions, be creative, and trust the integrity of the tools and data.... “We’re all on a path of continuous learning.” She remembers leadership development class where participants were encouraged to "try it, and try it again" with AI tools. This environment fosters understanding and challenges individuals to apply AI in their daily work, enabling the workforce to evolve and continually bolster skills. Chalwin points out that the workforce dynamics are constantly changing, with a mix of human and machine collaboration altering each leader's role. Leaders must ensure that they have the right people focusing on the right things and leveraging the power of technology to do some, but not all of the work.