IT STRATEGY

Morning Brew Inc, Photo: Adobe Stock

White Castle may be known for its miniature sliders, but its digital transformation plans are anything but tiny.

For the past six years, the fast food burger chain has cooked up automation initiatives across its stores to help employees better serve customers.

Meet Julia. Part of White Castle’s digital transformation efforts have revolved around Julia, a drive-thru AI voice assistant. White Castle CIO Susan Carroll-Boser told IT Brew that Julia helps drive-thru employees “be a little bit less of an octopus.”

“They’re trying to do five or six different things. They’re trying to talk to and be pleasant in the drive-thru. They’re trying to take money from the car that came up. They are trying to hand food out. They’re trying to have a memorable moment at the window where they actually talk to people and are friendly,” Carroll-Boser said. “And that’s a lot to ask.”

More on fry-cook robots and drive-thru AI.—BM

      

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IT OPERATIONS

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Nobody likes writing a runbook, according to Todd Thorsen, CISO at data resilience and protection platform CrashPlan.

While runbooks’ standardized instructions for go-to IT problems can prove helpful for both new hires and on-call team members, producing these guides is “extra added overhead,” Thorsen said.

An IT pro has enough going on without spending hours laying out the directions for hardening a Ubuntu server or troubleshooting API latency with a payment platform.

But that extra workload hasn’t stopped Thorsen’s team from writing about 20 runbooks for their organization, including one on how to deploy vulnerability sensors in a new cloud environment.

Running to embrace the runbook.—BH

      

IT STRATEGY

Amelia Kinsinger

Are AI agents ready for the big leagues? Few companies can explain what happens when an AI agent misreads a permission, burns through a token budget like Pac-Man on a power pellet, or gets asked to do something a little too human. IT Brew’s latest e-book breaks down where agentic AI actually stands today—who’s deploying it, what’s breaking, and what your CFO and security team should be asking before you hand agents the keys.

What you’ll learn:

• How companies like JPMorgan Chase and Yum! are actually putting AI agents to work inside their tech stacks—and where those deployments are hitting real limits.
• Why “tokenmaxxing” is quietly becoming a budget line item, and how to keep agentic AI from eating your margins.
• The guardrails that cybersecurity teams are (and aren’t) putting in place to stop agents from touching data or systems they shouldn’t.

Making agents work for you.—CN, BM, EH, PK

      

Sponsored By Eaton

Deal you back in? Ace of Uptime, the decision-based online card game built around real IT scenarios, is back for National IT Pro Day. This time with new decks built around the problems IT pros deal with every day. Can you stand up to these new challenges?

What’s your most common “this will fix it” move?

🔁 Restart everything

⚡ Add more power and hope for the best

🙈 Ignore it until it’s definitely a problem

👀 “Let’s monitor it” (and circle back later)

Jobs

CollabWORK connects you to the hidden job market through IT Brew and other trusted channels. Browse roles curated specifically for this community by clicking through to the job board.

patch notes

Francis Scialabba

Today’s top IT reads.

Stat: 8.7 million. That’s how many customers have had their PII exposed after a cyberattack affected three UK airports. (CPO Magazine)

Quote: “I do think that the vision of recursive self-improvement is spooking people.”—Nat Soares, a computer scientist at MIRA and coauthor of If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, said about the fears around human destruction at the hands of AI (Wired)

Read: Rogue AI agents hate CAPTCHA as much as everyone else. (TechCrunch)

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