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IT Brew

Tom McKay

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Aline Lerner on why job coding tests have gotten so onerous

Interviewing.io founder Aline Lerner on what to expect applying for a job at a top-tier tech firm right now.

A man typing on a laptop in front of a rack of servers.

Legacy technology is still costing businesses big time, Deloitte survey finds

 A Deloitte survey found 82% of respondent companies had missed cost reduction targets; incapable technology infrastructure was the biggest complication.

Eoin Higgins

IT job woes don’t extend to AI sector, studies find

“It’s the tech area du jour,” one expert says.

Two dots and an arrow connected by a curving line denoting IT strategy

IT Strategy

Brianna Monsanto

Trust is the foundation of all relationships. That’s why several tech companies are expanding their C-suites with an executive whose sole job is ensuring their company maintains high levels of integrity with customers.

These chief trust officers, or CTrOs, are C-suite executives who build stakeholder trust in their company, including in how it handles and secures consumer data. According to an 

, the role has emerged over the past decade amongst tech and B2B software companies in response to various issues, including the potential to use technology and data for privacy abuse, bias, and harassment.

“Effectively, what the role does is offer assurance to the customers or potential customers of that organization that their data, their information, their technology, the infrastructure, the platform itself, can be trusted as those customers adopt it,” Forrester VP and Principal Analyst Jeff Pollard told IT Brew. “So, it goes a little bit beyond security.”

In recent years, the CTrO role has found its way in the C-suites of various tech companies, including Salesforce and Autodesk. Pollard said it could be beneficial for a company to hire a CTrO because it escalates the responsibility of trust into an “executive priority.”

“You’re making them a member of the C-suite, which, in itself, shows an intentionality that I think is positive because it should influence the rest of what the company does,” Pollard said.

He added that designating a leader to be in charge of trust allows “more focus for the roles that roll up to the CTrO as opposed to everyone trying to do everything.”

However, adding a CTrO to your C-suite can come with baggage if not done properly, according to Pollard, who said the reporting structures associated with the role may unintentionally separate professionals from the technical side of their business.

“One of the very realistic concerns here, from a chief trust officer perspective, is when you’re broken out of the technology work and you span beyond that…just by definition, you do lose some insight as to what the tech org is doing,” he said.

 Chris Peake became CTrO at revenue AI platform company Gong in August. He told IT Brew his role combines IT and security at the SaaS provider.

“Day-to-day operationally, it’s addressing historical things on both the IT side of making sure that we’ve got systems up and running that support the business, [and] controlling endpoints and all those kinds of things,” Peake said, adding he is also responsible for making sure security is built into Gong’s products.

Peake, a former CISO, said a lot of the skills from his previous role have translated into his current one. However, he said the CTrO role differs from the CISO role because it operates more on the “business level,” as the work done by a CTrO can directly impact revenue generation, contract negotiation, and onboarding new customers.

“I think that’s why we see a lot of the chief trust officers are former CISOs, because there is a natural fit there,” Peake said. “It’s just adding that next layer.”

 Forrester claims the CTrO role is more than just a “passing trend,” perhaps unlike 

“If it does disappear, I don’t think the need for someone to oversee trust disappears,” Pollard said. “Maybe the title does, but if it does then it’s subsumed by the CISO…hopefully they use that as part of their new remit to expand upon what they’ve done in the past and not just be the sort of legacy department of ‘no.’”

Meet the new trending C-suite role: the chief trust officer

Why more SaaS companies are hiring chief trust officers 

Software companies are hiring chief trust officers to build trust and transparency with consumers.

Billy Hurley

As many employees use GenAI platforms to find the right answers to tech and business conundrums, some of their colleagues see value in collecting the right questions.

Three IT professionals shared what they learned after implementing “prompt libraries” for their organizations. Whether adding 50 new prompts in one month like West Monroe’s Reva Busby, or stopping at around 5 like PR-firm pro Emily Koehn, a collection of go-to chatbot inputs offers a helpful head start for a variety of tasks within an organization.

“I think a prompt library is important because it allows the use of AI to scale faster,” Busby, director of the commercial growth team at business and technology consulting firm West Monroe, told IT Brew. “You are getting pre-built and well-engineered prompts that you can use right off the bat, without having to have all that knowledge about building a prompt yourself.”

In 2023, West Monroe introduced Nigel, an internal chat platform assisting the company’s 2,000 employees with tasks like drafting emails, writing code, and analyzing datasets.

The platform holds a library of 278 prompts, and has about 12,000 all-time uses (and 8,000 just in 2025), according to data shared by WM.

While Busby did not reveal exact prompts, the director said one prompt for generating a sales email includes case-specific factors for the user to input, including: background information about a client, tone, and output format.

While some prompts may be a sentence long, Busby said, others related to sales or consultant teams are “robust” and may require lots of extra details “because you’re trying to execute a very specific workflow in the context of some repeatable service.”

Busby uses a specific prompt when organizing notes after a candidate interview—one that pulls data like job role, notes, and feedback into desired table formats.

For Koehn, PR account director at Crackle PR, the prompt library is a smaller guide for the nine or so full-time employees using tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Gemini. Prompts exist for main categories like:

 from analytics consulting firm Trust Insights, which factors role, action, context, and execution into the prompts. One helpful prompt for Koehn, she said, pulls the most headline-worthy findings from an uploaded client report.

“Now that gives me a fantastic starting point in minutes,” Koehn said. “Do I still go through every single tab of data and verify that AI didn’t hallucinate? Absolutely. Do I still look at the data to make sure that AI didn’t miss any things that are really significant or interesting? Absolutely.”

A report from the US Chamber of Commerce, which polled over 3,800 businesses in June 2025, found that 58% of small businesses (250 or fewer employees) use GenAI—up from 40% in 2024 and more than double compared to 2023 (23%).

Generative AI is also popular with the companies who are investing heavily in creating it. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella revealed some 

 recently on LinkedIn, including “Based on my prior interactions with [/person], give me 5 things likely top of mind for our next meeting.”

West Monroe’s library, built “from scratch,” according to Busby, organizes prompts by topics (productivity and performance management, for example) and job role (like sales). A search bar gives employees suggestions for helpful inputs, and prompts can also be ranked and sorted by usage and popularity, Reva said; employees can pin their favorites.

“You need to be able to narrow down quickly to what’s relevant to you,” Busby said.

Recommendation #2. Get everyone involved.

When West Monroe’s Nigel came online, the team noticed a trend: a few people were writing all the prompts. Busby stressed the importance of letting employees “cocreate” on prompts; the firm has even recently offered a prompt-building “wizard” for the non-experts.

As long as a prompt doesn’t include a restricted topic like financials and compensation, Busby noted in a follow-up email to IT Brew, it will appear in the library, and employees can offer ideas and commentary to the prompt author. (The company also highlights standout prompts each month on the company’s homepage, Busby told us.)

Brady Lewis, senior director of AI innovation at marketing consultancy Marketri, has led the refinement of a prompt library that he says has reached 150 full prompts.

Lewis also meets every Monday with a six-person, cross-department AI council to investigate any problems with deployment, and to review new prompts for vague or otherwise troubling results.

And some prompts require…more prompts. Lewis advises employees with frustrating results to copy the output that 

work and try a new LLM (or start over with the same one) “to reframe the question.”

Lewis also has a collection—a small library if you will—of 10 or so prompt blocks. These little promptlets can aid in the construction of new prompts: “I want this formatted specifically in a CSV table format,” for example.

It’s a challenge, Lewis admits—balancing continuous education while not trying to “bombard the employees” with hours of training.

“We can’t control every single aspect of what every single employee does at all times. We’re trying to provide as many guardrails and make things as easy as possible,” Lewis said.

Illustration of an opened book laying on a book shelf with floating ai prompts above.

Best practices for building a prompt library

Three pros share what they learned about collecting good queries.

If you’re not careful, a test environment can turn into a live-run of a security disaster.

When Rob Forbes was working as a senior security architect, just a few years ago, he watched a major retailer inadvertently use live customer data in a platform not meant for production. The test platform—a customer identity and access management system, he recalled—was tied to production databases, so changes made in the former “rippled down into the production environment.”

“We had to quickly yank that back down before it got found and scanned on the internet,” Forbes, now field CISO at cybersecurity services company Stratascale, told IT Brew.

Forbes shared how his team revamped the change-management process following the rough test—a phase of software development that leaves plenty of opportunities for access and data leaks.

There are typically four stages of software development: 

A test platform—a complete setup of applications, infrastructure, and data that allows software to be tested for functionality and security

A staging platform, which is meant to simulate production before moving to the actual…

The test platform is in a controlled, non-production setting, not meant for public access or to host production data, according to John Pettit, CTO at Google Premier partner and consultancy Promevo.

“People start to blur the line between the test and staging,” Pettit said.

DevOps company Perforce Software, in a global survey of 250 orgs, found that 86% of organizations allow “data compliance exceptions” in non-production environments.

With test environments, Pettit sees a conflict between a team of fast-moving developers and a team of security practitioners who want some questions answered first.

“You have a culture responsible for protection, and you have a culture who’s responsible for building stuff and getting things done,” Pettit said. “The ‘getting things done’ team once they’re given access to something, rarely has the security mindset to think about, ‘How do I keep us safe?’”

Forbes added that access and data shortcomings often happen in test platforms because developers may be unfamiliar with a given cloud platform’s controls.

Following the incident with the retailer, Forbes said his team amassed “an inventory of failings” and tasked themselves with asking developers questions like: Why was production data used in test environments? Why were developers given admin accounts created for database access?

Following the incident (and for future test platforms), Forbes and his team created a process that snapshotted customer data and ran it through a data hygiene tool to scrub out sensitive information like account numbers and addresses.

Other companies rely on similar methods to ensure their valuable data is safe in case of an incident. In July, for example, Dell confirmed a breach of its Solution Centers test environment—a way to preview features to customers—

 that the data used “is primarily synthetic (fake) data, publicly available datasets used solely for product demonstration purposes or Dell scripts, systems data, non-sensitive information and testing outputs.” (Dell did not share the cause of the breach.)

Independent software vendors (ISVs) like Ensono sell test-server licenses to customers.

Once a “test” environment includes company data, Pettit treats the “test” like a production environment, recommending hardening practices such as password-rotation requirements, identity-aware proxies that restrict access over the internet, and monitoring from a security operations center (SOC) environment.

“I think that word ‘test’ is sort of a dangerous word to start with,” Pettit said. “If it’s a publicly accessible server that has your credentials, if it can connect to your data, connect your other internal systems, it’s not a test system.”

Forbes sees the test problem only becoming more challenging as companies try out AI.

 found that 44% of surveyed US employees said their orgs have implemented new AI tools—up from 33% in 2024.

Agents will need to be instructed on what coding languages, platforms, language models, and servers it can leverage, Forbes said, and it must be equipped with access restrictions and logging.

Agents, perhaps, are on the “getting things done” team.

“There are a lot more controls that we need to apply to AI because, again, it’s just trying to complete the task,” he said.


3D blue, pink, and green error alerts layered over each other

When a test platform fails

 IT pros share how practice environments can be far from perfect.

Raise your hand if you’ve ever felt personally victimized by 

 the process of implementing GenAI tools at your company.

If you’ve raised your hand, you’re not alone. According to a 

 from AI company ABBYY, almost one-third (31%) of companies admitted training their GenAI models proved harder than they thought.

Companies admitted other challenges when implementing GenAI tools, including not having 

ABBYY’s report is based on an Opinium Research survey that queried 1,200 senior managers across industries based in the US, UK, France, Germany, Australia, and Singapore.

Markus Demirci, CEO of Rollio AI, told IT Brew part of the reason some companies struggle with training models is because of poor data quality, noting that data may be coming from legacy systems. He added companies that want to run “proper AI” and autonomous agents need to first provide them with context, circumstantial information that allow LLMs to make more informed responses.

He compared the task to teaching a child how to communicate their needs.

“When you have a very small kid, they cry when something’s wrong and once they grow older, they learn how to speak a language, and then they can communicate with you what’s really wrong,” Demirci said.

“At the beginning, the baby would just cry and that’s basically where we are with most of the companies and their contextual data they have available,” he added.

Brian Shannon, CTO at cloud-management company Flexera, said difficulties during training can also occur because most LLMs are generic and meant to solve general problems as opposed to an organization’s specific needs and domains.

“They’re trying to solve general-purpose problems,” Shannon said. “But, most of us in the enterprise, we exist because we solve some particular problem in our industry.”

While the senior managers fessed up to several hiccups when deploying AI, most believed the eventual comeback was greater than the initial setback. More than eight in 10 (82%) said they were either very satisfied or fully satisfied with the output of their GenAI tools within their company.

For companies that are in the middle of implementing GenAI tools and aren’t yet seeing the value of their AI investment,

Shannon advised them to set measurable outcomes so that they can have accurate expectations of what to expect.

“For example, I might say, ‘Our goal is to increase revenue by 10% on this product line by introducing AI’…as opposed to, ‘Let’s use AI,’” Shannon said.

And in cases where those outcomes aren’t met by a set timeline, Demirci said not to fear: Those failures can be informative, and give you the opportunity to tweak an AI project.

An AI robot robot sitting side by side with a businessman at an office desk working

Almost one-third of organizations admit training GenAI models was harder than expected 

Other challenges companies say they faced when deploying GenAI tools include hallucinations and tools unintentionally causing employees to spend more time on tasks.

 in the job market, and that includes tech—but the AI data subsector is still booming, necessitating a workforce with certifications and education.

Luckily for novice tech workers looking to get on board the AI data train, the federal government recently 

 of an education savings plan to allow anyone to spend tax-advantaged dollars on a broad swath of tech training and certifications in all kinds of disciplines, from AI to cybersecurity to networking.

The 529 savings plan has been around for decades, with students able to place post-tax dollars in an investment fund then draw that money tax-free for qualified educational expenses. As part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act that Congress passed in early July, families and students can now use their 529 money to pay for non-degree training and credentialing, including tech upskilling.

For certification and training organizations like CompTIA, it’s been a long time coming. Seth Robinson, the group’s VP of industry research, told IT Brew that a larger breadth of choice for fund usage is helpful—and that employers should embrace these alternative avenues to training.

“They provide a lot of benefits,” Robinson said. “And there are some trade-offs, some pros and cons to either approach.”

Of primary concern is how the regulatory framework shakes out, and whether or not the rule-making process actually delivers. But overall the potential of the new 529 regulations likely outweighs the difficult regulatory complications.

“If somebody was considering a technology career and they had 529 funds available to use, and were wondering where to get started, we would encourage them to start with some kind of learning,” Robinson said.

There are more options than just certifications. Martha Heller, CEO of recruiting firm Heller, told IT Brew that, in her view, the real difference-makers in the new tech economy are going to be the people who have the ability to grab a new trend and take advantage of it. That makes the winner of the AI job market the person behind change management, Heller said.

“The skill set is, ‘I’m going to come in, I know this process like the back of my hand,’” Heller said. “And as such, I can rethink how we can do this process using AI to be efficient, and I can get all the people around me to start thinking that way too.”

Given the demand for employees skilled in change management, AI, and other disciplines for tech professions, many prospective hires are skipping the four-year degrees in favor of certifications and training—a process that 529s can make more economical than before. Meanwhile, companies should take this opportunity to engage in “skills-based hiring,” looking in non-traditional corners to meet their talent needs.

“What I would say to companies thinking about this whole degree thing is, go look in your manufacturing plants work for the person who’s grown up on the shop floor, and he or she knows everything about that, but has also been known for thinking of out of the box and raising their hands for things—get them to tell you how their world changes with AI,” Heller said. “That’s the person you want to be focused on, not the data scientist or the or the tech programmer.”

Update 9/26/2025: A reference to Tech+ certification in a quote has been corrected.

The expanded 529 plan is one option for IT pros looking to get ahead

Now that 529 plans can pay for more training and certifications, IT pros can quickly upskill.

 from IT software company GoTo suggests the answer is “yes.” CEO Rich Veldran told IT Brew that employees realize AI can take over routine tasks, impacting their day-to-day workflows, including whether they actually need to be present in an office to do their jobs.

“I personally believe that it’s always going to be a hybrid world,” Veldran said.

Enthusiasm for AI among surveyed employees is notable: GoTo found that 71% believe AI could improve their workplace flexibility and work–life balance. Around two-thirds said that AI would allow them to work anywhere without a loss of productivity, and 65% said it could even improve customer service while working remotely.

For Martha Heller, CEO of tech recruiting firm Heller, the question of remote and hybrid work comes down to what kind of work culture your company wants. AI can play a role, she said, but she’s hesitant to say it can be a determining factor.

“Don’t let AI’s efficacy determine what your strategy for remote is going to be,” Heller said. “Because, one, it’s not an AI decision, it’s a human decision, and, two, AI tools are so nascent right now. We are just at the beginning of the success of these tools.”

Remote work comes with challenges, including security concerns. Executives using personal devices at home and in the office to access sensitive information can make protecting IT infrastructure exponentially more difficult, SANS Institute instructor Lodrina Cherne 

: “issues of remote work and executives aren’t an order of multitude; it’s an order of magnitude.”

And with more RTO policies in place in the last year, IT teams are stretched to 

 about cybersecurity. Remote work also raises some concerns around productivity, though a 2024 

 found that working away from the office had little to no impact.

Seth Robinson, CompTIA VP of industry research, told IT Brew that SMBs are exploring whether their resources and needs will support remote work.. Traditionally, larger enterprises have more human capital, motivating a return to office. In theory, AI tools could help smaller companies boost productivity and free up resources in ways that allow staff to work remotely by streamlining aspects of the in-office workflow, such as generating meeting notes.

“Certainly, if you’re a small business, being flexible with remote work policies really broadens the path that you would have to bring talent in,” Robinson said. “And so in a lot of cases, it is to those companies’ benefit to be leveraging remote or hybrid work, and to the extent that the technology tools allow that, and AI enables those technology tools, I think we’re going to see some intersections there.”

IT teams were even more enthusiastic about the technology. GoTo reported that nine out of 10 IT leaders surveyed said AI improved outcomes for remote staff. Veldran said he’d tell IT teams that because the technology is a game-changer for remote work, they need to be ready.

“My suggestion would be two things: set expectations about what you would assume productivity will be, and define what the outcomes are that you’re looking for,” Veldran said. “And then measure them.”

Collage featuring a robot and a human worker at office desks, each inside distinct, shaped containers. (Credit: Morning Brew Design)

AI impact on remote work has employees optimistic 

“I personally believe that it’s always going to be a hybrid world for us,” GoTo CEO tells IT Brew.

 when they are with your outdated network infrastructure.

Breakups can also be pretty eye-opening. At least, that was the case for Kenneth Burdine, associate VP and deputy CIO at the Kentucky Community and Technical College System (KCTCS). Last year, KCTCS underwent a massive network transformation to address some of the 

 student and faculty members encountered when on one of the college system’s 16 colleges.

Burdine told IT Brew the college system made the transition to Juniper Networks from an industry-standard networking provider, a move that has invigorated KCTCS users and staffers.

“I’ve been doing this for 30 years. I have a whole new outlook,” Burdine said. “I’m excited.”

 Burdine said uptime is crucial for KCTCS students, who need to complete their coursework at the school’s more than 80 campuses.

Support tickets prior to the college system’s recent overhaul were mainly related to dropped network coverage and slower connection speeds. Burdine said wireless is a “fun beast to tame” because when an issue arises, users will often do a “drive by” ticket request, meaning the request is solved before IT staffers get to it.

“By the time we answer the ticket and we go and investigate, the issue has resolved itself, thus exhausting any kind of troubleshooting methods that we have,” he said.

Addressing faculty members’ problems with KCTCS’s network had a “grapevine effect,” Burdine added, because of how tedious it was to find time to discuss the reported issues.

“By that time…they’re so busy and they have other things to worry about that they forget, or they don’t have a complete understanding of what happened,” Burdine said.

Burdine said KCTCS’s old network infrastructure was about five years old. Shashi Kiran, CMO at 

 provider Nile, said the fast rate of change on the vendor side of the network industry has shortened the lifespan of network investments for organizations.

“Networks used to be looked at as investments for a decade or more,” Kiran said. “Then, it got down to five to seven years. Now, we are seeing faster refreshes happen, particularly with the old type of networks, which are predominantly designed for static environments.”

A network overhaul for an entity like KCTCS is not an easy one given its large footprint of campuses and buildings.

“We had 3,000 units, indoor and outdoor,” Burdine said. “That’s a lot of units over 90-plus locations all across the state of Kentucky.”

However, Burdine said the deployment of the new network infrastructure was a “seamless” and non-disruptive process because the brunt of the installation process involved taking one access point (AP) down and putting the new one up.

“It took longer to climb that ladder to…take the AP down and put it up than for it to [actually] register and start taking on clients,” Burdine said.

“Because of this, we were able to implement a complete overhaul of our wireless to Juniper in less than 90 days, which, wow. I don’t know? I think it’s a world record,” he added.

Once access points were up and running, Burdine said Juniper’s Mist platform, which leverages AI to improve user experience, takes the guesswork out of troubleshooting problems.

“You could go into the issue itself and then Mist would go into whitepapers and describe what the issue is, and 99.9% [of the time] it would say, ‘This is the first action you should take, second action you should take, third action you should take to resolve that issue,’” Burdine said.

 The network upgrade has paid off for KCTCS on many fronts. Burdine said the revamp has “rejuvenated” his IT staffers because they are learning something new.

“They’re happy to have something that’s more proactive than reactive,” he said.

Kristin Russell, CEO of IT solutions provider CBTS, said KCTCS hasn’t logged any single access point-related tickets since January. CBTS has partnered with KCTCS since 2002 and assisted the college system in its transition.

“With fewer manual fixes, they can focus on higher value work for students,” Russell said.

Students have not been vocal about changes to connectivity on campus, which Russell takes as a good sign, as users typically only reach out when they encounter a negative experience.

“We take great pride in [making] sure that we’re 100% up,” Burdine said. “And I know nobody can do 100%, I’ll take 99.99999%. How about that?”

Update: Kenneth Burdine is deputy CIO. A previous version of this article stated that he was deputy CISO.

School building with Wi-Fi symbol above it.