AI integration is a priority for companies looking to improve their IT stack. Alongside that directive is a focus on AIOps and how IT operations as a whole will be positively impacted by these changes.

Bryan Krieger, CTO at RapidScale, told IT Brew that, as a rapidly evolving discipline with new challenges and responsibilities, AIOps offers leaders the chance to boost the efficiency and speed of their organizations’ AI efforts—if done right.

“It’s incumbent upon us to figure out how we best manage these new capabilities in our platforms, in our tool sets, and particularly around AI, and how we best leverage that,” Krieger said.

Must have. In an email to IT Brew, Keywords AI CEO Andy Li wrote that “AIOps is becoming a core operational capability rather than a nice-to-have.” That means more urgency around AIOps and finding the balance between operative capabilities and human oversight.

And there are agents to consider, too.—EH

It’s always cheaper to make your coffeebot at home.

Mike Toole, director of security and IT at Blumira, previously relied on a SaaS tool offered by an outside vendor to pair up employees for informal, get-to-know-you meetups. Then Toole discovered this matchmaking app’s functionality was something his team could brew on their own.

Toole and his team created their new “coffeebot” with an AI platform, using natural-language prompts like, “I want a platform to interface with the Slack API to pull all the users from a certain channel, match users once a week, and create a separate channel for matched employees to connect and sync their calendars.”

The original SaaS app option wasn’t “terribly expensive,” but the cloud-based cybersecurity company cut costs by getting rid of it.

“​We just basically built it ourselves and added some more features that they didn’t have,” Toole said. With their own app, Toole said the team could eliminate more personal questions that the vendor’s product would ask users, as well as offer a customized explanation of the intended purpose of the frequently caffeinated conversations—hence the company’s “coffeebot” nickname.

What this means for today’s SaaS vendors.—BH

IT professionals might be confused about the best ways to implement agentic AI. But with C-suite executives pressing for their organizations to adopt AI as quickly as possible, they need to make some kind of decision about AI agents. What’s their best course forward?

Agentic AI, while offering the tantalizing possibility of AI agents taking care of complicated workflows and saving everyone time, shouldn’t necessarily be applied to every single system or process without a deep evaluation.

That can lead to issues with managing C-suite expectations—your CEO wants agentic AI implemented now because they heard all about it at a conference.

John Searby, the chief strategy officer at Human Security, told IT Brew that success stories of automation are making executives react.

“Everyone wants to look at the bottom line and say…I can find some sort of improvement there, if I can automate better,” Searby said. “That has been pushed out as mandates in a lot of places. And the question has been, what is the risk of adopting it, cost of adopting it, and do we actually need it?”

And not everything needs autonomy.—CN