IT STRATEGY

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Everyone’s talking about the potential of AI—but what about the cost of putting it into practice?

Wildly fluctuating token usage (and spending) is one strong indicator of the AI space’s chaos. For enterprise IT executives, pricing and cost controls are becoming more important as the capabilities of AI are varying widely, Skan AI CEO and co-founder Avinash Misra told IT Brew.

“The world is still learning to have the most optimal, well-architected approach towards delivering value with AI in those scaled workflows and complex business processes,” Misra said. “The translation from personal productivity to enterprise productivity in complex business processes is an art, a science that is being learned by enterprises.”

AI investment remains high but the ROI is still debatable.—EH

      

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We’re back with our Salesforce Dreamforce executive spotlights, and today, we’re sharing some insights from Preet Takkar. He’s a partner, global and US salesforce leader at PwC.

Takkar noted that the AI workforce is certainly changing the human workforce. But what does this mean specifically? Is it cause for concern, or is it only an addition to human brainpower?

He explained that if we’re changing the ways of working and agentic AI is doing much of that heavy lifting, the incentive and structural models of the organization will change. The question is if organizations are ensuring these changes bolster their foundation rather than contradict or jeopardize it.

When human time isn’t taken up by manual tasks, Takkar shared that this is when the workforce dividend can come into play. Time could be freed up for supervision and governance, key factors to a healthy system.

Learn more.

IT STRATEGY

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Tech unemployment ticked up in September, but demand for IT talent was strong, in another indication of an unsettled industry labor market.

AI continued to be a major driver of the tech labor market. As Jordan Rosenblatt, solutions consulting manager at Nexthink, told IT Brew, it’s important to balance the market’s AI skills gap with the potential the ubiquitous technology brings to the enterprise.

“You want workers that are able to take on these new technologies and utilize them effectively,” Rosenblatt said. “At the same time, we see a lot of fear in the market around AI potentially replacing people.

The tech unemployment rate rose to 3.3% in September.—EH

      

WORD OF THE WEEK

Containerization: For many years, developers built and deployed software for specific environments, which made it difficult to port code between platforms (such as operating systems or vendor-specific clouds) without bugs and other problems. Containerization eliminates many of those problems by abstracting the application’s functionality from the host operating system and underlying hardware infrastructure. Learn more.

IT STRATEGY

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If a third-party vendor for AI or other mission-critical software were to collapse, what should a business do?

Sahil Agarwal, field AI security fellow at Anaconda and co-founder and CEO of Enkrypt AI, told IT Brew that, given the number of organizations depending on third-party vendors for AI models, businesses “need to think about how they are looking at that risk.”

For example, if an AI lab suddenly goes out of business or suffers a catastrophic hack, its clients may not have much time before workflows dependent on that lab’s products begin to degrade. Ideally, Agarwal said, those clients could “switch in a matter of seconds to a new frontier lab or a new vendor.”

To offset the risk of outsourcing to a single vendor, Agarwal suggested that organizations rely on multiple vendors, and consider resiliency plans in the event of an outage.

Are your backups in order?—CN

      

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patch notes

Francis Scialabba

Today’s top IT reads.

Stat: 1 in 3. That’s the proportion of developers who are “not happy at work,” according to a survey of over 30,000 respondents. (Stack Overflow)

Quote: “When an agent goes rogue, that usually means the agent did exactly what it was told, and what it was told wasn’t right.”—Andy Sen, CTO at B2B commerce platform provider AppDirect, on where the buck stops with so-called rogue agents (CIO)

Read: A look back at the life of software pioneer Margaret Hamilton, who led the creation of code that helped land Apollo 11 on the Moon. (The Register)

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