SOFTWARE

Francis Scialabba

When software engineers hand some of their day-to-day load to AI tools, they might include their load test, a common and important application check.

A load test reviews how a system behaves when subjected to a specific amount of user traffic or workload. Quality assurance (QA) engineers and developers define expected traffic and unexpected edge cases; testers then run scripts to simulate actions like logging in, searching, or purchasing—and see what lags, loads, and crashes.

Pros who spoke with IT Brew see AI tools helping with tedious aspects of the process, like finding testing cases and analyzing telemetry, but don’t envision those tools helping to run the test itself anytime soon.

A large language model is too unpredictable to be a “fire and forget” tool for load tests, Kevin McDonald, principal consultant at tech consultancy Hylaine, told us. “You have to have somebody there to monitor it. You have to have somebody there to make sure it’s doing what it should be doing, it’s testing the right things, and it didn’t go down a rabbit hole, or it didn’t start pulling in systems that don’t need to be involved.”

Where experts see AI helping in the process.—BH

      

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IT OPERATIONS

Francis Scialabba

Jason Elrod, VP and CISO at MultiCare Health System, a healthcare network in the Pacific Northwest covering 13 hospitals, describes his more than 30-person team as a “lean, mean, fighting security machine.”

But even lean and mean comes with challenges, especially when the job involves keeping critical healthcare machines on and attackers away, all while ensuring the cybersecurity team doesn’t become too tired and perspired.

“In most industries, downtime is measured primarily in dollars,” Elrod, also executive advisor at cybersecurity company Elisity, told IT Brew. “In healthcare, eventually you’re measuring it in clinical consequences, and so that changes how you make technology decisions, and it’s rough for IT professionals.”

To that end, IT teams at MultiCare have to measure both cyber risk as well as impact on patients. “[If] the air conditioning goes out in the summer or the heater goes out in the winter at the healthcare system: huge impact on patient care,” Elrod said. “We shift to the things that are the most impactful to the delivery of the mission, which is safe patient care.”

Why some IT healthcare pros are at risk of burnout.—BH

      

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IT STRATEGY

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You’ve heard of name-dropping—but have you heard of productivity-dropping?

According to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis’s analysis of nearly 500,000 earnings call transcripts between 2000 and 2025, C-suite leaders are spending more time on corporate earnings calls discussing productivity: The share of AI-related productivity sentences was 15.6% in Q4 of 2025, up from 1.5% in the same period in 2022, the year ChatGPT launched.

The St. Louis Fed was able to determine this by scanning transcripts for mentions of keywords related to productivity (e.g., “efficiency”) and using Qwen3-3B, a large language model, to determine details like whether those keywords were used to discuss AI.

But IT leaders sing a different tune.—BM

      

patch notes

Francis Scialabba

Today’s top IT reads.

Stat: 1,308. That’s the number of IT devices that have yet to be returned by former IRS employees who left during the start of the second Trump administration (as of November 2025). (FedScoop)

Quote: “Two is they never ask for traceable funds. If they need Bitcoin or gift cards or cash, you know the agenda.”—Gary Schildhorn, a Philadelphia attorney, on the common red flags associated with deepfake scams (BBC)

Read: The story of Linux. (TechRadar Pro)

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