IT STRATEGY

Morning Brew Inc, Photos: Adobe Stock

It was the splurgiest of times, it was the thriftiest of times—both can be true of IT budgets right now, depending on the price tag attached to every exec’s favorite two-letter buzzword.

While some companies are starting to get sticker shock from all their AI spending, investment in the technology continues to be a top priority for IT leaders. That means fewer resources left for more quotidian line items like infrastructure maintenance or legacy software contracts.

A recent Goldman Sachs survey of CIOs found that 42% of respondents—up from 35% in a previous survey last November—now expect AI to exceed 10% of their budgets in the next three years. Meanwhile, overall IT spending dipped slightly, and funding for two-thirds of AI inference costs is coming from budget reallocation, according to the survey.

“There may be some crowding out of category spend not tied to AI,” Goldman analysts led by Gabriela Borges wrote in the note. “[And] there may be some hesitancy on committing to larger IT projects before the impact of AI on core budget categories is clear.”

Why you have to look at AI like it’s your power bill.—PK

      

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Attackers are using automation to scale low-and-slow intrusion tactics. This means early anomaly detection is critical to defend against attacks.

Here’s how: AI enables real-time detection by correlating seemingly benign behaviors across systems, devices, and endpoints.

Comcast Business breaks it all down in their article, Why using AI to detect small cybersecurity anomalies is a big deal. Here’s a sneak peek of what you’ll learn:

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Stop threats in their tracks.

IT OPERATIONS

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What AI lurks in the heart of the tech stack? The shadow knows—shadow AI.

A new report from AIOps platform PagerDuty shows that 66% of office professionals are misusing tools at work, adding to an existing problem that’s plaguing enterprises across industries.

Company policies don’t seem to be dissuading the practice. PagerDuty found that 72% of professionals believe they understand how to use AI better than their organization’s IT teams.

It’s a challenge on a number of levels, PagerDuty CIO Eric Johnson told IT Brew, and one that’s getting worse.

“The pace and power of what we’re dealing with now is different,” Johnson said. “These tools are incredibly powerful, and the adoption and sophistication of what you can do with these tools is far surpassing anything I’ve ever seen.”

How to set manageable AI expectations with employees.—EH

      

WORD OF THE WEEK

Technical debt

Technical debt: During software development, developers and other IT professionals may take coding shortcuts to meet deadlines and deliver a finished product, or make poor decisions to speed up development or satisfy business objectives. Over time, these choices lead to technical debt, or a future need to refactor, debug, or otherwise fix the codebase. Learn more.

IT STRATEGY

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Many IT leaders turn to market-intelligence giants for help with buying decisions, tech trends, user data, and more. But with LLMs becoming increasingly sophisticated, do these leaders still need human consultants to the same degree?

AI ay ay. The idea that professionals may substitute a chatbot for traditional market research is not so far-fetched. Jessica Maria, CMO at cloud services provider RapidScale, told IT Brew some smaller and mid-market businesses can find utility in using AI to craft their own reports.

“Not every company has the budget to leverage the big firms,” Maria said. “And so, there’s a lot of value in being able to generate some of that themselves.”

Henrique Teixeira, SVP of strategy at Saviynt, told IT Brew he has even seen a couple of instances where clients have tried to replicate market research reports with AI tools.

“They come to us and say, ‘Hey, Henrique, we created this GenAI comparison between Saviynt and this other competitor. What do you think?’” Teixeira said. “And I shake my head.”

However, Maria cautioned there are some risks associated with relying on AI for market reports, including losing credibility.

Even today’s market-intelligence firms are trying AI.—BM

      

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patch notes

Francis Scialabba

Today’s top IT reads.

Stat: 250 Eiffel Towers. That’s how much AI infrastructure waste (2.5 million tons) UN researchers estimate will be produced annually by 2030. (United Nations University)

Quote: “I am jealous of my bugs, and I like this game too much to let models play it for me.”—Security Researcher Giuseppe Cali, on the role of AI in vulnerability detection (TechCrunch)

Read: One engineer’s quest to build a perfect self-setting clock—on the kitchen table. (Ars Technica)

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