Your tech stack isn’t getting simpler—and you already knew that. But now there’s data to back it up.

In IT Brew’s latest research report, 75% of IT professionals say their organization’s tech stack is moderately or quite complex. Meanwhile, the pressure to automate and streamline remains—now it’s just arm-wrestling with everything else on the to-do list: modernizing core infrastructure, keeping the lights on, and making the case for ROI.

We surveyed 241 IT pros on the tools, tradeoffs, and tensions shaping their work right now—from automation ROI to tech stack complexity, and turned the findings into a report worth bookmarking. We’ve included interviews with IT pros who show how they’ve carried out complicated automation projects, and whether they saw serious benefits from their planning.

All about automating the tech stack.—BH, BM

If at first you don’t succeed, dust yourself off and try again—advice that also applies to AI pilots that don’t go as planned.

According to a July 2025 MIT study, 95% of generative AI pilots produce zero return on investment (ROI). Amazon Stores CISO Hudson Thrift told IT Brew in an interview at RSAC that failures are an expected part of experimenting with AI.

“They’re not only inevitable, they’re one of the best gifts you can have,” Thrift told IT Brew. “You often learn more from failures that you have than the successes you have.”

Pick your poison. Thrift sat down with IT Brew to discuss how companies can make the best of failed AI pilots, emphasizing the importance of having good purpose and intention behind these initiatives. He said Amazon Stores, for example, typically only pursues AI projects where the technology “makes sense” and seems capable of living up to the claims.

The pitfalls to avoid after experiencing an AI pilot failure.—BM

It takes a lot to make five cybersecurity experts scream in agony simultaneously, but Skyfall pulled it off.

In 2012, Brian Higgins sat down to watch the then-new James Bond film with a few recent standouts from a UK cybersecurity challenge, a government-sponsored effort to find emerging IT talent.

During a scene where “Q,” UK spy agency MI6’s tech pro (played by Ben Whishaw), plugs a questionable laptop captured from cybervillain Raoul Silva (Javier Bardem) into the agency’s network, Higgins and his movie mates groaned in disbelief.

“It’s absolute nonsense,” Higgins, now a security specialist at Comparitech, told us. “He just plugs it straight into the flipping—to his laptop, which is obviously linked to the MI6 network, the mainframe, etcetera, and bang, he basically knackers everyone for the rest of the whole film.”

Get your popcorn ready.—BH

When two companies combine, their tech stacks don’t always cooperate. IT leaders share practical advice—from auditing tools to securing admin access—on keeping systems running smoothly post-merger.