IT STRATEGY

Anthony Moisant

For some lucky people, their career is also a mission—for Anthony Moisant, Indeed CIO and CSO, his path began as a young person experiencing homelessness and a high school dropout in Chicago.

His nontraditional journey gave Moisant a perspective on the need for community—and for opening doors.

“Coming out of Yale, coming out of Princeton, coming out of Harvard and Stanford, you have some opportunities that are just green lights for you,” Moisant told IT Brew. “When you’re underprivileged, when you’re a dropout, and you don’t have those green lights, you’ve got to work really, really hard—it’s imperative that people help you and open the doors.”

Forward path. Moisant joined the Navy in 1993, a decision that he said saved him from going down a bad path. An early interest in computing gave him a leg up and offered a different future.

“I had taught myself how to code early on when I was 11 years old, so I was very adept from a technology perspective—and when I joined the military, not a lot of people were,” Moisant said. “It was one of these things where I had just a tremendous amount of opportunity simply because I had fluency over technology.”

The next stop for Moisant? Silicon Valley.—EH

      

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IT STRATEGY

J.R. Storment

Whether token-maxxing or token-scrimping, it seems everyone in the industry would like clarity on what exactly a token is worth.

Companies like JPMorgan Chase, Accenture, Oracle, SAP, IBM, and many others have signed onto Linux Foundation’s new effort to create standards and best practices around assessing the cost and value of AI.

The Tokenomics Foundation’s debut comes after months of evolving business attitudes toward AI spending. Many companies were previously shelling out with abandon to spur adoption. But extravagant token bills have prompted more prudence.

One problem, though, in the words of Tokenomics Foundation Executive Director J.R. Storment, is that “a token is not a token is not a token.” It’s difficult to pin down the value of a token—which technically means a discrete unit of data processed by AI—across different tasks and models.

We spoke with Storment about how his experience heading up the similar cloud spending-focused FinOps Foundation prepared him for this role, how to plan an AI budget, and whether tokenomics is a long-term job in most companies.

Storment shares his advice for CIOs taking on tokens.—PK

      

WORD OF THE WEEK

Cloud automation: As organizations’ cloud setups grow more complex, even the largest IT teams increasingly need automation tools to ensure that clouds keep operating, scale as appropriate, and remain secure against internal and external threats. Learn more.

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CYBERSECURITY

Nick Iluzada

A lack of bugs might not be the first thing most people complain about, but for bug bounty hunters, empty nets are a bad sign for business.

For years, bug bounty hunters have earned cash—with some rewards from companies like Google hitting the six-figure mark—by finding and alerting companies to vulnerabilities in their websites and other IT infrastructure.

However, Cris Thomas, security advocate at cybersecurity company Semgrep, told IT Brew that he expects to see AI change the bug bounty program in the next six months to a year.

AI is getting better about finding security flaws in software, especially the newer frontier models; meanwhile, in-house cybersecurity teams at companies like Google are using AI to triage vulnerabilities faster.

“The price for the bugs that [hunters find] is going to increase, because there are going to be fewer bugs that are going to be available for bug bounty, fewer people to be able to find them, and so supply and demand, price is going to go up,” Thomas said, adding that bug hunters could expand into pen testing, with the caveat that AI is “changing that too.”

Some see AI empowering a younger crowd of bug hunters.—CN

      

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patch notes

Francis Scialabba

Today’s top IT reads.

Stat: 32%. That’s the proportion of people who have told a chatbot something they’ve kept from close friends, family, or medical professionals, according to a research survey of 1,944 US adults. (DuckDuckGo)

Quote: “By the time you’re looking at the bill, you’re dealing with token consumption, cloud infrastructure, multiple AI models, governance tooling, integration work, and increasingly autonomous agents making decisions across systems.”—Shane Cronin, head of FinOps and ITAM services at systems integrator SHI, on the challenge of calculating AI’s total cost of ownership (CIO)

Read: Need a change at work? See if any of these 23 desk accessories do the trick. (PCWorld)

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