Many people start off the new year with fun, low-stakes resolutions. Jason Rebholz, co-founder and CEO of Evoke Security, had a more unusual beginning to his 2026: He inadvertently interviewed a deepfaked candidate for a security researcher role.

It all started with a LinkedIn post. In January, Rebholz used LinkedIn to promote a few vacant roles at his AI security company. He received a message from an individual who claimed to know just the right person for an open security researcher position.

“It wasn’t somebody that I had known before, but this is kind of the nature of dealing with posting things publicly,” Rebholz said.

Keep an eye on it.—BM

A screenshot buried in the comment section of a Marc Benioff LinkedIn post around a year ago gave Salesforce’s Bernard Slowey a jolt. It showed the then-new Agentforce help portal directing the customer to a Salesforce competitor.

“I was literally like, ‘Oh my god, what has happened here? This is not good. My job is going to be gone tomorrow,’” Slowey, who is—spoiler alert—still Salesforce’s SVP of digital customer success, told us.

You may have heard the now-infamous stat that 95% of enterprise generative AI pilots fail before they reach production. Or maybe you have some thoughts on why that MIT report’s methodology was flawed. In any case, abundant data show that a sizable chunk of AI prototypes don’t go as planned—and ROI is questionable.

More on CFO Brew.—PK

Nothing is free from consequences of the climate crisis—including data centers.

Threats to tech infrastructure from heat, flooding, and other weather-related dangers are not a new phenomenon, nor are they unique to data centers. But as the industry builds capacity to manage the AI boom, concerns over the climate crisis’s impact are growing.

Siddartha Jha, CEO of climate solutions platform Arbol, sees the danger as an opportunity for the tech industry to adjust its priorities toward climate risk management. The money involved is not a trivial concern, he added.

“Your cost structure can be very linked to weather,” Jha said.

Climate central.—EH

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• Staff Linux System Administrator at Micron Technology, Inc.
• Data Quality Governance, VP at Morgan Stanley
• Cloud Security Engineer - Assistant Vice President at Citi
• Sr. Director of ACS Software and Solutions Engineering at HP Inc.
• District Manager, Biomedical Engineering at Sodexo