I will be giving a thought-provoking talk about AI agents and digital labor at the Washington Area CTO Roundtable this Thursday. If you’re a member, I hope to see you there!

Tesco is sprinting to quit VMware and Broadcom despite rapid migration risks www.theregister.com/virtualizati... The VMware vSphere saga continues in legal slo-mo while companies + vendors increasingly redefine the cloud workload market. It looks a lot like new options and/or 3rd party support.

IT hurtles toward the ‘Great Enterprise Pricing Reset’ www.cio.com/article/4184... My take: There is little doubt now that AI disruption has reached SaaS in a major way, and will lead to a period of major uncertainty. But good things may be at the end of the tunnel for CIOs.

The new AWS FinOps Agent is very interesting and potentially invaluable for proactively managing cloud costs. I shared my thoughts about it with @cio.com: www.cio.com/article/4182... Of course, CIOs want a cross-cloud version of this. But this will do until then.

Overheard: For enterprise tech, we used to make decisions: - In the mainframe era, for 10-20 years - In the client/server era, for 5 years - In the Internet era, for 3 years - In the AI era, for 90 days

Salesforce’s Headless 360 monetization play will give CIOs a familiar budgeting headache www.cio.com/article/4178... My comments to @cio.com. Headless agents especially are poised to create all-new spend challenges!

The AI governance imperative you can’t afford to ignore www.cio.com/article/4176... Namely, observability. IT leaders must be aware of what their agents are doing + have done.

Interesting: CIOs are enlisting business users to vibe code their own apps www.cio.com/article/4176... Notably, actual CTOs + CIOs are reporting this, indicating encouraging results. I’ve long said that with good guardrails, this is much better than spreadsheets, the OG low code.

Coding assistants might be plateauing re: installs (though still, lots of new installs.) The question is why. Theories are: - Compute-constrain related - AI budget limits - Everyone who needs one has one - New players not accounted for here taking share Will watch closely.

Ultimately, the firm(s), or open source projects, that can make AI: - Compute efficient - Grounded (very low hallucinations) - Easily steerable towards goals - Safe - Reliable (follows guidelines consistently) Will win. It’s also the list of what it’ll take to make AI workable.

High-value use cases lag behind enterprise AI hype www.ciodive.com/news/enterpr... Just 16% of companies say AI delivers significant, measurable impact. But among organizations embedding AI directly into processes, 71% report moderate or substantial value, a vital clue IMO.

CIOs bring AI transformation home to IT workflows www.cio.com/article/4163... I also hear this a lot from CIOs I speak with: They are trying some of the more advanced and potentially riskier AI capabilities on themselves first, to validate them for broader use business.

My comments got a nice inclusion in CIODive’s coverage of Google new Agentic Data Cloud www.ciodive.com/news/google-... A serious data initiative to support enterprise AI agents

Google pitches Agentic Data Cloud to help enterprises turn data into context for AI agents www.infoworld.com/article/4162... My comments in @Infoworld on Google’s new data cloud for agents.

Amazing. The majority of new code written at Google was developed by AI. One of the top tech companies in history. The implications for society are writ large in this one stat. Jobs related to strategic thinking and trusted insight are the future.

Salesforce launches Headless 360 to support agent-first enterprise workflows www.cio.com/article/4159... I shared my thoughts with @cio.com this week about the major new AI platform news from #$SFDC.

When it comes to AI spend management, CIOs are not alone www.ciodive.com/news/ai-spen... My take: Getting control of token spend and all the other associated AI costs has become a first-order issue. FinOps is helping but not yet enough.

Seeing a quite a few enterprise agentic AI solutions suddenly shifting their go-to-market to reflect the (very) rapidly evolving new build and operating surfaces that OpenClaw, Claude Code, Hermes, and Perplexity Computer have brought to market. An update + overview soon…

CIOs reimagine business processes to reap AI benefits www.cio.com/article/4157... Many IT leaders have suddenly found themselves in a central role to rethink how business gets done. This is broadly opening the door to business leadership for the CIO.

Tech’s acceleration paves CIOs’ path to the corner office www.cio.com/article/4154... AI especially is paving the path from CIO -> CEO as the next wave of business transformation is fundamentally tech-driven.

Most orgs lack clear AI strategy but push to forge ahead www.ciodive.com/news/enterpr... More put their AI strategy w/ CIO or CTO + end up with limited goals focusing on $-cutting. My take: Tech leaders still concerned with AI tech maturity, but business leaders want transformation.

Lagging cloud maturity threatens enterprise AI plans www.ciodive.com/news/ntt-dat... My take: And data management maturity. Orgs that skimped on strategic tech change are paying the price in the AI era. 3/4 of orgs plan on increasing large cloud spend increases amid AI talent shortage.

I’m in the midst of a major refresh of my Agentic AI Signal for the Enterprise🚨 New vendors arriving. Major new capabilities emerging. Entirely updated platform rankings. Still the most comprehensive assessment of enterprise agentic AI platforms + the landscape just changed.🤖

CIOs reimagine software’s future as AI agents advance www.cio.com/article/4148... While SaaS may not be imminently threatened yet, here are how some top CIOs are using agents today. And what the issues are.

Use of AI Triples for Product and Enterprise Innovation in 2026 futurumgroup.com/press-releas... From my latest global CIO survey. The use of AI gets far more strategic this year.

Why CIOs need to focus on AI guardrails to boost adoption www.ciodive.com/news/ai-guar... My take: This is vital to get right in order to move fast with AI with confidence. Guardrails must be pervasive + well-thought out. And put in place quickly so AI adoption accelerates.

From apps to agents: Rearchitecting enterprise work around intent www.microsoft.com/en-us/power-... Good build on top of the great convo I had recently about AI agents with Microsoft’s Richard Riley…

The inside track on how boards evaluate their CIOs www.cio.com/article/4149... Also: The vast majority of CIOs are now expected to be board-ready.

So, it’s now pretty clear that compute itself is rapidly becoming the next currency. What’s just as interesting, as I look at some of the most innovative and useful token routers, is that they will take other tokens (stable coins, etc) as payment. Paying for tokens with tokens.

CIOs are suddenly seeing a notable uptick in autonomous AI, spurred by the success of OpenClaw and enterprise-grade equivalents like Claude Cowork www.cio.com/article/4146... My take: It’ll all come down to how good the guardrails and oversight are.

🚨The U.S. just dropped a major AI policy. It’s all about speed vs. safety. The new national AI framework pushes federal preemption + light-touch rules to speed innovation, avoid patchwork of state laws. Big implications for CIOs/vendors. Analysis soon! www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/u...

The zeitgeist: The modern AI-fluent employee will need to burn the equivalent of half their annual salary in tokens per year to be considered high performing.

I shared my thoughts with Infoworld on the new Genie Code from Databricks www.infoworld.com/article/4144... The goal is to highly automate data science and engineering tasks.

Banks struggle to scale AI as legacy tech devours IT budgets www.ciodive.com/news/banks-s... My take: The push of the last few years has left tech debt + data sprawl everywhere. Plus most of CIO budget is to run existing tech, leaving little for a big, sustained AI effort.

1/ A fascinating advance just happened in agentic work: We finally have the beginnings of real AI KPIs. Salesforce just introduced the “Agentic Work Unit” (AWU). My take: This is bigger than it looks at first. 🤖📊

Announcing Sana to turn its enterprise apps into execution engines, Workday gets serious about agentic AI www.cio.com/article/4146... I shared my thoughts with @cio.com about a major new entry in vertical AI agents.

CIOs cut IT corners to manufacture budget for AI www.cio.com/article/4137... IT leaders report “near daily” requests for potent new AI tools, far outstripping legacy procurement + adoption processes + insufficient $ to pay for them. My take: CIOs need a rethought ‘AI metabolism’.

Prediction: Business software firms that don’t build agents capable of doing everything their platforms do will be rapidly disintermediated by agent layers built by others. It flips the traditional advantage of APIs upside down. In other words, the agent layer is the new API.

Fascinating chart from the new labor market AI impact report from Anthropic. Some very large fields will be dramatically impacted. Note: This does not include humanoid robotics, which would include many more labor fields. Gap between red/blue is adoption, penetration.

📊⚡️ The enterprise tech agenda just shifted. My new 1H 2026 CIO & Tech Buyers Global Enterprise Decision Maker Survey reveals how CIO priorities are rapidly changing as AI moves from experimentation to operational strategy. Where budgets are moving. Where AI is actually being applied. Link soon!

Target fuels AI in $2B spending plan www.ciodive.com/news/target-... More evidence that companies view AI as absolutely strategic to their future growth.

Now seeing serious discussions about metrics of AI productivity. Tokens output per worker, for example. But unfortunately, the “per worker” part is superfluous. In my research, it’s clear workers are in competition with AI for many outputs. Useful output = only real metric.

It turns out that tech output productivity has tilted up sharply the last couple of years. It is clear that there is now a new ghost in the machine. And it looks a whole lot like an LLM.

Overheard: The model is now the commodity. And the context is now the moat.

1/ Many debates today around statements like this: The marginal cost of running an agent will drop essentially to the cost of electricity. Right now, running agents is indeed very expensive. But make no mistake, like all tech, the cost in the long term will fall towards zero.

Open-weight models no longer chasing proprietary AI. They’re drafting behind it at full speed. Gap likely closes for good by 2027 as OSS outpaces frontier scaling. CIO warning: Don’t lock strategy to model leaders. Advantage shifts to orchestration, data control, cost governance, not raw model IQ.

My latest research: The Great CIO Platform Reset: Why Agentic AI Is Forcing a 2026 Reckoning futurumgroup.com/press-releas... Bottom line: AI agents are reshaping enterprise platform strategy.

My comments in Infoworld on GitHub readying agents to automate repository maintenance (oh, and coding) www.infoworld.com/article/4133... My take: They are careful to position it as agents tending grunt work in repos, but they’ll basically be able to do most coding tasks.

The 7 biggest S/4HANA migration hurdles — and how to overcome them www.cio.com/article/4130... My take: Many CIOs I speak w/ are accumulating SAP instances faster than they can combine/rationalize them. ERP industry needs to adapt to AI speed if it doesn’t want to be left behind.

Most CIOs regret AI vendor, platform decisions www.ciodive.com/news/cios-re... Nearly 3 in 4 CIOs wish they hadn’t made certain AI vendor choices. Over half have had their CEO challenge them. My take: The AI budget runway will run out soon unless major results start coming in.