IT STRATEGY

Illustration: Morning Brew Design, Photos: Adobe Stock

You don’t need to be a tech-savvy retail giant to act like one, at least when it comes to IT.

At this year’s Walmart Associates Week in Northwest Arkansas, tech took center stage. IT Brew’s walkthrough of a working Walmart Supercenter during the conference not only peeled back the curtain on the tech enabling Walmart associates to serve customers more efficiently, but also highlighted lessons small retailers can borrow from the retail giant’s IT playbook.

Store run. Our June trip to the Walmart Supercenter wasn’t your average grocery run. While there, we heard from Brooks Forrest, VP of associate tools at Walmart, about the rail-based digital shelf labels (DSLs) that allow select stores to update item prices with the touch of a button…

Have a walk through the superstore.—BM

      

Sponsored By Hyland

Not getting the results you want from your enterprise AI pilot? Tech journalist Alex Kantrowitz sat down with Hyland CEO Jitesh S. Ghai to get the scoop on why so many enterprise AI pilots flame out—and what it takes to gain an edge.

They chatted about the myth of the “perfect” model and why businesses mistakenly create FOMO-driven, model-first experiments. You’ll get the scoop on how intentional, data-driven programs built around real business problems deliver the results you’re looking for.

Ghai said that your AI pilot’s biggest opportunity is hiding in unstructured data. He reported that 90% of enterprise data is unstructured (think healthcare referrals, insurance claims, + loans).

Structuring that data can help agents automate document-heavy work at scale.

Watch the full chat.

IT STRATEGY

Francis Scialabba

It’s a jungle out there for entry-level IT talent…and by jungle, we mean a wildly tough labor market.

Junior IT talent may feel like the cards are stacked against them as they embark on the job search. According to data from the US Census Bureau and the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, the unemployment rate for recent college graduates (those aged 22–27) was 5.6% in March, higher than the national average of 4.2%. Meanwhile, a June report from tech venture capital firm SignalFire also found the share of entry-level hiring at large tech companies (Amazon, Microsoft, and Nvidia, among others) fell 65% from 2019.

There’s still hope. While it may seem like a trying time to be a newcomer in the industry, there are still plenty of opportunities for fresh talent, according to Bill Driscoll, senior district president of technology staffing at Robert Half.

“We’re seeing a real uptick in hiring, a real uptick in project work,” Driscoll said. “We’re seeing…a prediction of an increase in the class of 2026. We’re seeing more AI roles now.”

See how today’s junior IT pros can stand out.—BM

      

WORD OF THE WEEK

Digital twins: As the digital representations of physical things (like places, systems, processes, and people), digital twins have three components: a physical element, that physical element’s digital representation, and real-time data that links the two together. Learn more.

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IT OPERATIONS

Ben Kothe

Before rapid manufacturing company Protolabs lets a large language model run through 15 million computer-aided design (CAD) files, the LLM needs to know the rules—and which files to stay away from, due to restrictions based on geography and sensitivity (i.e., a device for defense versus commercial use).

Protolabs’s Chief Technology and AI Officer Marc Kermisch needs to bring order to those millions of blueprints—and that means non-negotiable data standards.

Thread time. Protolabs has what it calls a full “digital thread”: engineers upload a CAD file, and that virtual representation helps drive the quick production of a component. Over the last 36 months, the team has woven AI into that workflow.

Pulling from millions of the company’s historical quotes and CAD files, AI tools evaluate a design for requirements and manufacturing specs. But reaching that level of automation required major cleanup.

“That raw data wasn’t tagged. We didn’t know what the value was going to be, we just stored it, but we had to start going back and tagging that data, categorizing it, and creating some metadata around it to make it usable by AI and the algorithms that we’re starting to evolve,” Kermisch told IT Brew, referring to CAD file elements like materials and manufacturing process.

Enter the data stewards.—BH

      

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patch notes

Francis Scialabba

Today’s top IT reads.

Stat: $800. That’s the median price that a US adult is willing to pay for a new laptop, half the median retail price for those devices, according to PCMag data from the past year. (PCMag)

Quote: “It would have taken me about 24 hours without rest to build something that took me three hours.”—Venezuelan programmer Jorge Bastidas on how he and a team used Claude Opus 4.8 and facial recognition software to quickly launch websites and applications for disaster relief (Rest of World)

Read: How close are we, really, to putting data centers in space? (Ars Technica)