Digital twins have been a key tool for organisations to create virtual replicas of operating environments. From transportation to manufacturing and oil & gas, they help simulate performance and prepare for 'what-if scenarios'. But they're evolving.

On this week's episode, Bobby talks to ITPro's news and analysis editor, Ross Kelly, to ask what exactly a digital twin is and how they are evolving since the arrival of generative AI.

The term 'digital twin' is even taking on different meanings; in some cases it's not just a virtual replica of a factory floor, for example. We are now seeing digital twins of people, with Forrester describing them as 'Digital Doubles'. Gartner also predicts that some organisations will begin creating 'Digital Twins of Customers' as a way to simulate how customers might respond to specific scenarios.

Highlights

"We covered this around two years ago on the website: 'AI and digital twins are a match made in heaven'. AI within the context of a digital twin can help improve visualization of real-world dynamics that you're trying to replicate, make sense of the data that you're gathering here, and reduce workloads. For the people that would have traditionally, taken all this on board and been operating and leading the charge on this front."

"I think a great example of AI being used in digital twins at the moment is in Dubai. They launched a digital twin of the entire city, 190-5000 buildings, hundreds of 1000s of infrastructure assets, hundreds of 1000s of public facilities as well. Again, this is part of Dubai's broader digital transformation strategy, but fundamentally this comes down to urban planning and just making it easier, allowing them to create a comprehensive map of everything there."

"Over the last year or two, we've heard chatter about digital doubles or digital twins of workers as well. I think we're going down the rabbit hole here, so to speak. But Forrester's spoken about this quite frequently. The idea of creating a digital double of a worker that's based on all of the information available on that worker internally, their skill sets, what particular unit of the business they're in, and what role they have. There was a fascinating article on the BBC in April this year around Digital Richard, which is essentially an AI, a digital twin of an individual worker. Here, it's not so much a chat bot."

Links

• Are AI digital twins a match made in heaven?
• Does your business need a digital twin?

The rise and fall of tokenmaxxing has been dramatic, not least because of how quickly it happened. From a darling of CEOs wanting to show how AI-forward they are to a balance sheet nightmare, the journey this particular strategy for measuring AI lasted mere months before its star started to fade.

In this episode of the ITPro Podcast, Jane and Bobby are joined by Frank Böhmer, CEO of Ninox, to talk about what prompted the trend in tokenmaxxing, why it fell apart, and what comes next.

Highlights

"[Gamification] leads to a pretty high stress factor for the employees, because they feel really pressed, even if it's not a direct performance metric, if it's just ... something that creates visibility, and so they feel really pressured to utilize LLMs to the highest possible amount."

"If you put this kind of as a success metric and monitor it, then it becomes useless, because people kind of optimize for that ... so even just looking at the output, so the number of tokens does not say a lot, and it's very easy to use models in a way that is not efficient. It can easily, for example, pollute the context window by just cramping in all the information you have."

"When you have to work with within the constraints of a budget or a token budget, then there are clearly ways to optimize the outcome I can create with models, for example, by providing the right information within the context of the model, by making sure that all the data that the company processes is readily available for models to work with by giving the right guidelines for teams to utilize that by giving them access to the right models in the right context."

Footnotes and sources

• Could rising token costs boost interest in on-premises hardware?
• Uber’s eye-watering AI bill shows enterprises are ‘still measuring AI success through consumption rather than outcomes’ – and it's warping our perception of ROI and productivity
• IT leaders are being stung by "unexpected" AI costs
• The AI pricing time bomb
• ‘What we’re seeing right now is just rapid escalation in AI token spend’: Accenture tells staff to stop using AI for unnecessary tasks amid surging costs
• Surging AI costs could exceed developer salaries by 2028 – analysts say context engineering could be the key to optimizing token consumption
• Companies are regretting investing in generative AI so quickly – here’s how to avoid buyer’s remorse
• Goodhart's law - Wikipedia

It's a very uncomfortable end to June with temperature records once again being broken across Europe. The technology world is moving forward unabated, though, still talking about AI and, in particular, the workforce and infrastructure that underpins it.

Do we have the talent to meet the demand for AI? Do we have the power to keep our data centers operational? And can the European Union get us off our dependence on Google Workspace and Microsoft 365?

ITPro's news editor Ross Kelly joins Jane and Bobby to look back on some of the most interesting stories of the month.

Highlights

"It's a paradox, isn't it. AI is going to remove and destroy half of the entry-level roles within the next decade. White-collar roles are going to be impacted, but at the same time, we're dealing with a massive deficit, specifically for AI roles. The messaging here is so all over the place, so consistently, that I think a lot of people are just maybe a bit jarred by it all."

"The higher occupancy, the greater the energy draw, and if you've got a problem with energy supply, then greater tenancy or greater occupancy rather becomes a problem. I understand the problem of electricity demands, sitting here in a heat wave. People are already talking about how if everybody deploys air conditioning into their houses, that it's going to cause a problem for the national grid. I understand that, but the bit about occupancy being so high, I'm baffled that this is allegedly a negative part of this story."

"Not to offend any guests of said podcast, but it does sometimes feel like a bit of a 'no true Scotsman' argument when it comes to open source. That this isn't quite actually open source because this tiny bit of it is not actually, or this isn't open source because it's actually based on this thing that is a commercial thing belonging to somebody else. I think it's possible that the Document Foundation has a point that what the European Union has declared is like this open source saying truly sovereign whatever isn't, it's kind of halfway there, but I do also wonder if there's sort of almost a back compatibility stepping stone type thing going on, because already lots of organizations within the European Union will have been using Microsoft, so it might just be easier to have something that's based on Microsoft standards initially before then transitioning to something else."

Links

• UK faces huge AI talent shortage
• The UK is running on fumes as data center build-outs can't keep pace with demand
• Euro-Office 'sovereignty' claims questioned in scathing open letter by LibreOffice maintainers

This week's episode comes to you live from Las Vegas, where we link up with Jane McCallion at HPE Discover and also ITPro's news editor, Ross Kelly, at Pure Accelerate.

Jane talks us through all the major announcements at HPE, with a heavy focus on how its Juniper Networks acquisition is impacting its new products and services. She also gives her thoughts on CEO Antonio Neri and the company's approach to agents.

Across the Las Vegas Strip at Resorts World, Ross gives us his insight into Everpure, the impact of rising hardware costs on its business, and how organizations can get their data AI-ready.

Highlights

"Despite the fact that Juniper has been part of HPE for nearly a year now, this has been the first chance, really, to celebrate it ... [so] the focus has been solidly on networking, and it's slightly hard to say whether this is because this is the first time they've really got to talk about the acquisition that they've really fully integrated everything."

"This idea of cross-pollination has come to fruition. There are parts of Mist, which was a Juniper offering that are now available on Aruba Central and ditto, parts of the Aruba offering that are now available through Mist. So the idea is to give everybody the opportunity to use the full product portfolio without having to move from the platform that they're already using. That's got to change at some point, but there has to be some kind of integration of the two platforms at some point, but I think you know there's a slow and steady let's not upset anybody type approach, which is fair enough."

"[Everpure has] been on a big pivot over the last 18 months. This time last year, Pure announced the launch of their Enterprise Data Cloud, which was part of this sort of pivot towards more of a data management approach. And then they've definitely continued on that vein this year. A couple of big product announcements all focused on this area, it's something that they're really, really moving towards, pushing towards, hard."

"I think on a broader sense, with all of these announcements, Everpure is going into not uncharted territory, but they are to some extent on a collision course, I think, with a lot of other organizations in the industry ... you know, your Snowflakes, Data Bricks, even, like I said, Salesforce."

Links

• Everpure CEO Charlie Giancarlo says firm will share the burden with customers amid rising hardware costs
• Forget tokenomics – agents are a personnel cost
• HPE unveils a raft of new networking products for AI workloads at Discover 2026

Are businesses heading for an AI pricing time bomb? With companies like Uber suddenly raising concerns about the inability to draw a clear line between token usage and visible improvements, there is a growing question about the real cost of AI and agents.

On this episode of the ITPro Podcast, Bobby Hellard and Ross Kelly are joined by the CEO of Mendix, Raymond Kok, to discuss the different scenarios facing businesses as the true cost of AI hits home.

Highlights

"I think more and more the conversation is shifting in that direction. So, starting with what are the business-relevant use cases, and I'm saying business-relevant on purpose, because there are plenty of interesting use cases around generative AI, but it's about the business-relevant use cases. Then it's about what is the job that needs to get done, and then to your question, how do you actually budget for agents like you budget for your human workforce in any company? And I think slowly but surely that narrative is changing, right, and I think what we're going to go see is that after the IPO of Anthropic and OpenAI, the prices will further soar, and I think this conversation will become more and more important."

"I'm glad that actually you're talking about it in your podcast, because I think it's now really becoming an issue, meaning that CEOs and CIOs were obviously promoting their employees to become AI literate and started to make AI tooling available to their workforce. 24 months ago, they were able to sign attractive deals with the big technology providers and get their people going, but now the bill is starting to show up. It used to be maybe 10, 20, maybe 50k a month for a larger company, but it's now moving into the hundreds of ks, and guess what, because this is also usage-based, it's very hard to control, right, so most of the monetization models, as you know, of these large language providers are based on usage."

Footnotes

• Could rising token costs boost interest in on-premises hardware?
• 'One-size-fits-all' agent governance sets enterprises up to fail
• IT leaders are bullish on agents, but keeping falling at the final hurdle – here's why

When we talk about wireless connectivity, often what we’re thinking about is WiFi, however mobile connectivity such as 5G is still important for many sectors.

What happens to a business when mobile connectivity is inadequate or fails completely?

On this episode of the ITPro Podcast Jane and Bobby are joined by Paul McHugh, VP of EMEA sales at Ericsson, to discuss how wireless connectivity issues can affect businesses.

Highlights

"Businesses believe that in terms of delivering the best business outcomes that the most operational efficiency that they can, they recognize now, perhaps more so than in the past, that networking underpins that on the basis that so many of the services and the processes that they run are technology based, and the majority of that technology needs to be connected."

"Historically, when we talk about resilience in networking, we just talk about more lines, okay, more more cables, more fiber going into a location. That doesn't always offer true resilience, particularly if all of those lines ... actually terminate at the same local exchange, for example. What is much more appreciated now, and this isn't just the view of networking vendors like Ericsson ... is that to achieve true resilience in a network, you actually need a variety of types of connectivity"

Footnotes

• Three and Ericsson just launched a first-of-its-kind managed 5G service for businesses
• ePrivate 5G and partner ecosystems: The blueprint for intelligent infrastructure
• Sign up to the ITPro Newsletter

The month of May is coming to a blistering hot end. Across Europe, new high temperature records are being set and unpredictability is very literally in the air as people wonder how they will adapt to these rapid meteorological changes long term.

In the world of IT, technology may be evolving equally rapidly but are the takes from the AI faithful still that hot or is the discourse increasingly predictable?

Plus, a dapper ransomware outfit is gaining infamy as one of the most active and successful cyber gangs in the world.

Highlights

"It's a fairly tepid take. The idea that the professions that will survive the AI revolutions are the ones that need to physically be done – trades, as we say in British English. Also ... things like hairdressers, carers, nurses, doctors, whatnot, they're all supposed to be kind of fairly safe professions as well."

"You wouldn't take a section of your employees and give them access to everything, or leave them to run consistently and hope that everything works out, because it would just end up in failure with data privacy issues [and] all kinds of problems. What Gartner's report said was that if you fail to distinguish between an agent's ability to act and the scope of access it's granted, then it will come down to some kind of a failure, and these are often not noticed until the failure happens."

"[The Gentlemen] feel kind of somewhat nomadic, somewhat just able to turn their attention to wherever is going to be the most lucrative spot for them ... [and] they are now responsible for 10% of all cyber crime."

Footnotes

• Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says these professions will be the big winners of the generative AI boom
• Are AI tools making us less intelligent?
• 'One-size-fits-all' agent governance sets enterprises up to fail
• “Now we have, for the very first time, useful AI” – Jensen Huang and Michael Dell talk up the power of agentic AI at Dell Technologies World 2026
• New ransomware threat group, The Gentlemen, has become one of the most active ransomware operators, accounting for 10% of all attacks
• Uber Says Its AI Costs Just Aren't Worth It

It’s been a busy week for the enterprise tech world in Las Vegas as Dell Technologies customers, partners, and channel partners poured into the Venetian Conference Center to hear about the company’s latest strategies, products, and predictions for the future of IT.

In this episode, Bobby speaks to Jane about what she’s learnt during her week at the conference, what some of the big announcements were, and whether her pre-conference predictions were correct.

Highlights

“The move towards agents has changed the conversation around what's important in terms of hardware, so for parallel computing and for LLM training and whatnot, it's all about the GPUs, but as we move to inference and we’ve moved to to AI agents, the CPU starts to become more important again, just because of how compute intensive these things are.”

“Agents are token hungry, you know. They can use up in days or months what otherwise would take in months to a year. You may have seen the story, or listeners may have seen the story, that Uber has used up its entire AI budget for 2026 in April or early May … and it‘s prompting a bit of a rethink about how this is used now.”

“It seems like there's a reckoning with the economics of this since the invention of agents and their increasingly widespread use thanks to OpenClaw. There's a big change coming and fortuitously for Dell, from my perspective, and from the perspective of experts who I spoke to for my feature on this, it does probably work out quite well for Dell and other hardware vendors.”

Related content

• Could rising token costs boost interest in on-premises hardware?
• “Now we have, for the very first time, useful AI” – Jensen Huang and Michael Dell talk up the power of agentic AI at Dell Technologies World 2026
• Dell unveils Deskside Agentic AI at Dell Technologies World 2026
• Three things I expect to see at Dell Technologies World 2026, and one I don’t
• Google Cloud Next 2026: Scaling AI agents
• The agentic identity crisis
• CES 2026: The year of AI PCs?

IT leaders are carefully assessing the extent to which AI-generated code can make a difference in their business.

On the one hand, AI developers promise their tools can enable faster code deployment and free up time for developers. On the other, it can be difficult to know where to start with AI tools – particularly if you want total reliability in your code.

How can enterprises make best use of AI code? And what do these tools mean for the developer teams of the future?

In this episode, Jane and Rory are joined by Colin Jarvis, head of forward deployed engineering at OpenAI, to discuss internal code generation.

Highlights

"The folks who use [AI] to increase the output of their existing specialists and their existing like experienced staff, are the folks who are seeing the best output. And I think the folks who see it as an excuse to as, sort of a race to the bottom, are the people who who struggle a bit more."

"[Hiring junior developers] has been a big focus of ours [and]... the number of entry level people has increased in the [forward deployment engineering] team over the last three to six months and the reason for that is that we're finding with the right sort of enablement ... they improve very, very fas, and they end up being as productive as some of our more experienced staff very quickly."

Footnotes

• Enterprises keep cutting staff for AI – and they keep regretting it
• As a software developer, you naturally need to have a willingness to learn
• OpenAI's Codex app is now available on macOS
• OpenAI ramps up enterprise AI push with new consultancy launch

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IT spend can be incredibly hard to accurately calculate. If you’re reliant on public cloud providers for your AI and software needs, you’re open to price rises, license changes, and other baked in costs.

The past few years have seen some firms choose to repatriate workloads to offset cloud costs – but this comes with its own risks. Surging international oil and gas prices, driven by conflict, are driving up bills for enterprises and consumers alike – bad news for those running AI workloads on premise.

How can leaders begin to get a grip on these costs? And what are some of the major challenges down the road?

In this episode Rory is joined by Greg Holmes, EMEA Field CTO at Apptio (an IBM Company), to discuss managing technology spend in the face of rising global instability.

Highlights

"I think companies are struggling to really understand what the cost per query is, but they may have an understanding of the whole service. They know how big their bill with a certain AI provider is, but I've heard of companies who've blown through a whole year's budget of AI in a couple of months of the year..."

"You notice that there's cheaper periods of the day to use energy, and then there's very expensive periods of the day, and some suppliers even give free energy or pay you to use energy when it's at really high availability. So it can be a good case to say then if workloads don't need to run at a particular time, if there's some flexibility, then having a system that can help you schedule and plan workloads and the running of those workloads, regardless of if they're in public cloud providers or in your own data center, could actually make a big difference as well."

"[I]n the cloud, we call this kind of operation FinOps, right? So FinOps is looking at a very granular level, because a lot of your cloud billing data and a lot of your cloud consumption data can be seen on an hourly basis. We can actually break that down and provide alerting to rapid changes in your consumption, but we can also help organizations use that programmatically, so you can make it available through API back to the developers, so they could actually be looking at their costs as things are going and choose appropriately."

"Yeah, well, we're certainly seeing countries putting the pause on certain developments. So I was reading recently about Denmark halting additional gen AI data centers, partly because of the power consumption demands. So for instance, a country like Denmark has a peak demand at around seven gigawatts. They had a set of requests of about 60 gigawatts for that country, right? So it's ten times, or nine times the peak and AI data centers were taking up about 14 gigawatts of those requests."

Footnotes

• UK firms ponder offshoring AI workloads as energy costs surge
• The power challenges UK data centers face
• UK government to prioritize data center grid access, cut down on speculative applications
• Costly cloud storage fees are pushing IT budgets to breaking point
• What is FinOps, and how can it help to reduce cloud costs?
• Denmark faces data center reckoning as power grid overwhelmed by surging demand

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April has come to an end and what a busy month it’s been, with major announcements, updates, and cancellations across all corners of the tech sector.

Earlier this month, OpenAI made headlines throughout the UK with the news that it was pausing its landmark Stargate UK project citing region-specific difficulties. But how do these claims stack up, given signs OpenAI is pulling back from other key compute projects?

Also this month, John Ternus was announced as the incoming CEO at Apple. What does the Apple’s hardware king mean for the tech giant going forward? And DeepSeek released its much-awaited v4 Pro frontier model – with a muted response.

In this episode, Rory is once again joined by Ross Kelly, ITPro’s news and analysis editor, to discuss some of April's biggest news.

Highlights

"Stargate UK was this flagship expansion to compute capacity across the UK. Big money involved, big names involved. But now it's hit the rocks, largely due to a combination of sort of factors that, I suppose, are outside of OpenAI's control."

"So John Ternus is an apple veteran. He was the SVP for hardware engineering at Apple, he's been there since 2001, he's part of the bricks and mortar of Apple. It makes perfect sense that you would have Ternus move into this role. "

"We are edging closer to companies like deep seek being able to completely rely on Chinese energy production, Chinese chip production and Chinese AI training, essentially making them completely resilient to any shifts, bans, tariffs, embargoes that the US may experience or want to impose."

Footnotes

• OpenAI hits the brakes on Stargate UK infrastructure project, citing energy costs and regulatory concerns
• Has another OpenAI Stargate project hit the rocks?
• OpenAI announces first permanent London office in UK expansion push
• MacBook Neo: everything you need to know about Apple's £599 laptop
• M5 MacBook Pro is a minor spec bump with increased GPU performance – but once again, the immense battery life is the standout feature
• The Apple Mac Mini M4 is an affordable powerhouse that's perfect for any office desk – and it's also utterly adorable
• Who is John Ternus?
• ‘Steve Jobs was never going to be an easy act to follow’: How Tim Cook transformed Apple into a ‘durable’ tech industry powerhouse
• DeepSeek V4 Preview Release
• DeepSeek rocked Silicon Valley in January 2025 – one year on it looks set to shake things up again with a powerful new model release
• Using DeepSeek at work is like ‘printing out and handing over your confidential information’

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Las Vegas may be known as the city of sin, but in the world of tech it’s also the land of conferences. Taking over the Mandalay Bay resort this week was Google Cloud Next, Alphabet’s chance to show off the latest in its cloud strategy and – naturally – AI tools.

AI agents, in particular, have been a focus this year as Google Cloud looks to meet surging customer demand with infrastructure and software innovations for AI inference.

What story has Google been looking to tell at the event? And what’s the reality behind it?

In this episode, Jane speaks to Rory about some of the key talking points at Google Cloud Next 2026.

Highlights

"I think the big thing that has been very positive from customers is Google Cloud keeps reiterating that it understands that people are in a multi-cloud world, that no one wants to actually go all in and locked in on one cloud provider, and also seemingly recognizes that no one's looking to kind of abandon everything that they already pay for and to go fully in house with Google."

"So in a pod of 9600 of these 8t TPUs, they can deliver 121 exaflops of FP4 compute – I'm stressing that because it's not, you know, we're not talking about 64 bit top500 stuff here, but we are talking about FP4 low resolution data processing – which is ideal, actually, for training workloads. So that's that's significant."

"It feels like DeepMind kind of has a seat at every table. A lot of the announcements that we hear, like in the in the security space, which we didn't have time for, we're being told that they're being developed with DeepMind in the room."

Footnotes

• 'The goal for this year will be to automate all security processes': Google Cloud is betting on Wiz to usher in a new era of AI security
• Google expands Gemini Enterprise, consolidates Vertex AI services to simplify agent deployment
• Google Cloud announces eighth-generation TPUs, boasting AI training and inference leaps
• Google Cloud Next 2026: all the live updates as they happen
• Google Cloud Next 2026 is a chance to demonstrate Google’s unique advantages

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For many, quantum computing is a little like nuclear fusion. Each is at the very furthest reaches of deep tech – and each its its own way will change the fabric of the world when realised.

Physicists hope that commercial nuclear reactors could be realised by the early 2040s. But quantum computing could come sooner – far sooner.

When it does arrive – and leaders in the space now say it could do by 2029 – quantum computing will represent the most severe of risks to our encryption algorithms. Luckily, experts are already working on establishing standards for post-quantum approaches – now it’s up to business to put them in place. How long do we have to adopt post-quantum encryption? And what are challenges are business leaders up against?

In this episode, Rory is joined by Jason Soroko, senior fellow at Sectigo, to unpack the technicalities of post quantum cryptography and what it means for cybersecurity professionals.

Highlights

"We now just had a paper that was just announced where optically corrected physical qubits down to 10,000 physical qubits can now be considered a cryptographically relevant quantum computer. And that, actually, has prompted the likes of Google and even Cloudflare to say that they're going to be preparing as if 2029 is the date, and that's not long from now."

"So when you think about blockchain and cryptocurrencies, a lot of people think 'I'm good, this is hashing, I don't have to worry about this'. Well, Google just reminded everybody that cryptocurrency wallets are basically a PKI key pair, and that key pair is typically generated by a specific ECC curve, and that will absolutely be vulnerable."

"My fear is that down the chain, everybody has so much work to do that they're putting this as a level 10, plan Z that will never get get dealt with. I think, though, that the one of the reasons why I forgive anybody for also making that mistake is, there's not a lot right now to be sold as from the vendor community to people."

"This is what you're seeing right now, that not all the standards are completely written yet. And so therefore I think, to me as an open source steward, I would be taking inventory of where am I using RSA or ACC, anywhere in my projects?"

Footnotes

• Post-quantum cryptography is now top of mind for cybersecurity leaders
• Get started on post-quantum encryption, organizations warned
• Google just revised its ‘Q-Day’ timeline: Quantum computers could break existing encryption techniques within three years – and enterprises are nowhere near ready
• What will the Quantum-Safe 360 Alliance mean for your business and its post-quantum security posture?
• NCSC: Timelines for migration to post-quantum cryptography
• NIST: Post-quantum cryptography

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AI deployment is inextricably linked to the United States of America. Many of the major frontier labs are based there and the cloud providers that businesses depend on to access the latest models are majority American.

But all over Europe, businesses are considering questioning the extent to which their critical workloads should be dependent on the US.

In a recent edition of the podcast, we covered all things digital sovereignty. In this episode, we're zooming in on how this push for sovereignty is compatible with AI adoption for European businesses. What does ‘AI sovereignty’ mean in practical terms? And how can businesses isolate workloads from the wider world without falling behind?

In this episode, Rory speaks to René Büst, senior director, analyst in Gartner's Emerging Market Dynamics practice, to explore how European CIOs can balance sovereignty, agility, and compliance.

Highlights

"So if you look at the spectrum, we also see that the global providers are of course making some steps, because money talks in the end of the day, and they have opened here more sovereign offerings by, for example, partnering with local system integrators or local vendors."

"You can be 100% compliant, but at the same time 0% sovereign, because if someone else has a kill switch and can shut your environment off, you might be still compliant, but you won't exist anymore, right?"

"[T]here are more providers across Europe than I think the public knows about. And this is, of course, also an issue but this is absolutely one of the strategies that some have started to follow, or which which can be followed. But of course, it comes also with a cost, because one thing [that] is also true is that the more innovative AI models or AI technologies are still coming from the United States or from China. So there is a trade off, and CIOs then have to make compromise to say, 'Do I need really a lot of sovereignty, or can I balance the risks that way that I'm okay by using foreign AI technologies?'"

Footnotes

• Can the UK achieve AI sovereignty?
• EU businesses will flock to ‘region-specific’ AI platforms by 2027 – but cost could be a major hurdle
• Will the future of AI be made in Europe? The EU thinks so
• The second enforcement deadline for the EU AI Act is approaching – here’s what businesses need to know about the General-Purpose AI Code of Practice
• What is the EU's AI plan?
• AWS says only Europeans will run its European Sovereign Cloud service
• Google is getting serious on cloud sovereignty
• What the new Microsoft Sovereign Cloud push means for European customers

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It’s long been said that good data is necessary before you can have good AI. But to an increasing degree, AI is also helping businesses manage, analyze, and generate their data too.

With AI code generation already well understood, businesses are also leaning on natural language processing and agentic AI to help their experts such as data engineers and data scientists automate their work more effectively.

What does all this mean for businesses looking to adopt AI? And how is the UK AI market maturing?

In this episode, recorded on the ground at Databricks AI Days London 2026, Rory speaks to Michael Green, UK&I managing director at Databricks and Richard Shaw, AVP Field Engineering at Databricks, to better understand how data and AI are converging.

Highlights

"Historically, if you look in organizations, people look at things as complex, you're going to need technical teams, you're going to need a data analyst team. And also, there was a timeframe attached to it as well that people, if they wanted that information readily, they'd have to go and speak to that team. They might not get the report back for 24, 48, hours, sometimes days, if not weeks. Actually, depending what it is, natural language has broken that down. It's putting the power into the hands of the business. Putting that power into the hands of the C-suite."

"Deterministic versus non deterministic is really what what companies are really interested in. Am I going to get the same result with the same question two times? Can I then trust it? Going back a few years, the approach was, some customers would say we're always going to have a human in the loop at this point. That used to happen when cars first hit the road, you'd have person walking in front of me with a flag. But that's not scalable, and you can only have so many people checking the output of these systems."

"We talk about democratizing data and AI, we often reference that, it's putting that into the hands of their organization. Going back to that point, I said about having my internal LLM, using their data that they've had locked and hidden away for years. So organizations, whether they're new to market, digital natives, or whether we've got large based enterprises that have been around for decades, success for those organizations is unlocking the data, making sure that it's completely governed, it's seure, and then using generative AI and moving into the next modern area of the world to actually drive that value and be a game changer within the market."

Footnotes

• What is natural language processing?
• ‘A true vote of confidence’: Databricks announces $850m UK investment as firm looks to quadruple London office footprint
• "We want AI to work for Britain": The UK government wants to upskill 10 million Brits in AI by 2030 – and the courses are free to access
• The UK’s AI ambitions depend on channel partners
• Microsoft says fear of falling behind is driving an AI arms race among UK businesses – and it's fueling record adoption rates
• Databricks wants to train 100,000 people in AI across the UK and Ireland – here's how to get involved

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In March the clocks change, Spring begins to show its face, and many companies enter their next financial quarter. But in cybersecurity, no such rays of sunshine are to be found.

In the past week, speakers from across the cybersecurity industry came together at RSAC Conference to warn about the latest threats facing businesses. Some warned that just as AI agents are becoming an opportunity for leaders, they’re also becoming a potential threat vector.

Also this month, Arm has unveiled its first in-house chip, the Arm AGI CPU. What does it mean, and is this a win for UK tech?

In this episode Jane and Rory welcome back Ross Kelly, ITPro’s news and analysis editor, to unpack some of the biggest news items from throughout March.

Highlights

"AI was obviously a big talking point at the at the conference this week, it seems cyber security professionals have their work cut out for them. At the very least, there's an opportunity here for cyber professionals to lead AI adoption globally. That was the key takeaway from the opening keynote by Hugh Thompson, RSAC executive chairman. There's a lot to be said about the fact that cyber professionals are now doing a lot of firefighting."

"You can't even give these entities training. They may be behaving in a way that is similar to how a human would behave, but you can't give something that doesn't have human intellect training, which I guess makes them potentially even more dangerous."

"It's kind of a move away from the IP-first approach that Arm has taken for all this time. But also it's not moving Arm into direct competition in the GPU market which, as we know, as we've covered, is heavily saturated, particularly by the likes of Nvidia and AMD, but also Intel at a data center level,"

Footnotes

• Safe AI adoption rests on cybersecurity professionals, says RSAC chairman
• Enterprises need to think of agents as ‘digital co-workers’ – and that means implementing the same security safeguards
• Observability will be key to agentic AI safety, says Microsoft Security exec
• The key risks security teams face in 2026
• Tenable co-CEO Stephen Vintz says enterprises need to get serious about tackling the AI “responsibility gap”
• Systems are deterministic, people are probabilistic – AI is both, and that's a headache for cyber teams

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Apple made waves at the start of March with the launch of the MacBook Neo, its first budget laptop.

As RAM prices skyrocket, businesses are under pressure to make device purchases that count and that will future-proof their workers for years to come. Both Apple and manufactures in the Windows ecosystem are vying for enterprise money in the budget and pro segments – even as it becomes more expensive than ever to spec devices to 16GB of memory and beyond.

Where does the latest Apple release fit into the wider business laptop ecosystem?

This week, Rory speaks to Bobby Hellard, ITPro’s reviews editor, to unpack all things MacBook Neo, Windows laptops, and the future of business hardware.

Highlights

"It's just a clever kind of construct. It's got a mobile chip, very low RAM, the display isn't as the best, and it's got some things missing from it that you would find on the MacBook Pro or the MacBook Air. So it's for people that want a MacBook but don't want to have the best of the best, don't want to spend so much money."

"So for single tests and single apps, it's brilliant, and that's part of the reason why they've got that A18 chip in there. It's an AI ready chip, and it can optimize the laptop better than it would with an M1 chip. So you get enough power and specific power to various apps so they work perfectly, no more, no less.

"Well, it felt like a return to form for MWC this year, because there were a lot of handsets, a lot of showcases. There were some foldable phones, folding screen laptops as well – Huawei was one of those it has, which we've reviewed, the MateBook Fold, which is an all-display laptop that folds. That was on display, it's very beautiful. Lenovo had some modular PCs, so they've got a new modular concept, which is an AI PC that you can completely tear down and pull apart, which has loads of use cases, particularly for fixing and sustainability."

Footnotes

• MacBook Neo: everything you need to know about Apple's £599 laptop
• The MacBook Neo is another Apple master stroke, and it couldn’t have come at a better time
• Low-budget devices are the biggest casualty of the RAM crisis
• Give businesses more practical AI services and some return on investment before you go selling 6G
• Lenovo wows at MWC with concepts for a modular ThinkBook and desktop AI-devices
• AMD thinks ‘AI on the PC has crossed an important line’ – the rise of ‘Agent Computers’ will be the next big breakthrough
• Are AI PCs becoming the norm?
• Nobody asked for AI PCs, but they’ve been thrust upon us – at least Dell realizes it’s probably made a mistake

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Fraud has evolved in leaps and bounds over the past few years, with new technology and more digitally native businesses than ever providing the ideal attack surface for fraudsters.

As attackers look to lure in business professionals with new tech such as deepfakes and AI scams, enterprise cybersecurity teams and cybersecurity vendors are faced with the task of combatting cyber fraud more effectively.

How can we combat this new frontier of cyber fraud?

In this episode, Jane is joined by Paul Weathersby, chief product officer, Identity, Fraud & Financial Crime Compliance at Experian, to explore the increasing sophistication of cyber crime and fraud campaigns.

Highlights

"I think the challenge that it creates for, say, financial institutions as an example, is it's becoming much harder to manage the fraud due to the rising threat of AI. The impact that that's having is it isn't necessarily making it more sophisticated. So what an average bank is now seeing is that the the odd sophisticated attack that they used to see is now happening on a regular basis. They might have seen something that was very well coordinated, very well orchestrated, happening once in a while. Now those types of attack are being replicated using AI and happening all of the time."

"So behavioral analytics plays a big part in understanding whether the behavior of the user is that of a person. So a genuine person, not being coerced into performing actions on behalf of someone else, and is actually a bot. So one of the very simple rules that you can look at, for example, is if the interaction with the user is from a phone, to make sure that the phone is held and used at an angle which would be normal."

"Now what we've seen is that AI has now been used to clone voices, which it can be done with as little as three seconds of audio of the from the genuine person to effectively clone the the voice pattern in order to get through those particular controls."

"What you actually see is sometimes these synthetic identities can be something which build up over years, so even sometimes as long as five years. So they look like real people, they transact like real people, and then on any given day, the fraudsters in control of these synthetic IDs decide to actually commit the fraud at that particular point."

Footnotes

• Interpol teams up with tech firms to seize 45,000 malicious IPs, servers in global cyber crime crackdown
• Is your new hire an AI clone? Microsoft says North Korean hackers are using AI to impersonate job seekers and steal company secrets
• Deepfake business risks are growing – here's what leaders need to know

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Women are still greatly underrepresented in STEM. The latest figures from the Women Tech Network show women only make up around 26-27% of the STEM workforce and the organization estimates that at the current rate of change, it will be nearly 123 years before the economic gender gap is closed.

It’s International Women’s Day 2026 – and the rate of women hired in tech continues to lag far behind that of men.

As hiring teams turn to AI tools to automatically field candidates, we’re at something of a crossroads – do we fix the bias inherent in hiring? Or simply replicate it at scale with similarly biased AI tools?

In this episode, Jane are Rory are joined by Clare Hickie, EMEA CTO at Workday, to discuss how businesses can engage in bias-free talent acquisition in the age of AI.

Highlights

"It's not a problem if you control it, and the only way that you can control it is to ensure that you have got a responsible AI program, the right measures, the right procedures, the right guardrails and the right protocols in place."

"I've been in technology a long, long time, and it's now it's my job to really pay back. And my job in paying back is by ensuring that I can go out and really encourage and inspire young people into technology. So there's a couple of things going on."

"We've seen a negative impact on society as a consequence of AI as well, right? But what we're really are driving for is that positive impact on society, and the only way you can do that is removing the bias of the past. And the way you remove that biased information is to use the technology to also ensuring that you're operating with clean data and with context.

"You have to apply fair processes. You have to apply, apply fair procedures. So in the past, organizations, for example, didn't even have to post that there was another job, it was a tap on the shoulder after another tap on the shoulder. And sometimes, you know what? It worked and then for many they were just not even considered, because they were just forming these groups and teams and leadership teams that they were all from themselves.

Footnotes

• International Women’s Day 2026: why are there still so few women working in cybersecurity?
• Gender diversity improvements could be the key to tackling the UK's AI skills shortage
• Why are so many men in tech blind to the gender divide?
• Is diversity still a challenge in the channel?

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February is the shortest month, but you wouldn’t know it from the sheer amount of news that’s broken in just the past 26 days.

Amid growing fears of AI stealing jobs, OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman has claimed that firms are simply using the technology as an excuse for mass layoffs. Earlier this month, a series of Anthropic releases drove stocks down at a range of companies – all tied to fears that the SaaS model might be on its way out.

Also this month, Pure Storage has rebranded as Everpure – what’s behind this decision and what does it say about the company’s strategy going forward?

In this episode, Jane and Rory welcome back Ross Kelly, ITPro’s news and analysis editor, to explore some of February’s biggest stories.

Highlights

"The central concern here is that a lot of AI companies, particularly Anthropic and OpenAI etc, are now launching sector-specific tools that are very proficient here, to the point where a lot of customer service, or legal industry tasks can be conducted by agents, automated. This has a lot of investors concerned about the long-term impact on the software as a service industry – you have a lot of, again, sector-specific software companies, very specific tools based on particular tasks within multiple industry verticals."

"These are comments that Sam Altman made at the New Delhi AI Impact Summit last week, essentially around the fact that a lot of companies are 'AI washing'. Which, roughly translated, means they're using AI as an excuse for layoffs, when the reality is that there's potentially poor financial performance there or ulterior motives."

"So this ties in with a big acquisition here from Everpure, formerly Pure Storage of 1touch, which is a data orchestration and management platform. The rebrand here is interesting because, you know, I attended Pure Accelerate 2025, Pure Storage's annual conference, and a big focus there was around, the data management aspect of what they're looking at now with their platform approach. They launched their enterprise data cloud, which again, is an all-encompassing ecosystem."

Footnotes

• Sam Altman just said what everyone is thinking about AI layoffs
• Why Anthropic sent software stocks into freefall
• Anthropic says Claude Code can help streamline 'cost-prohibitive' COBOL modernization, but IBM says it's not that simple
• What might cause the 'AI bubble' to burst – and what impact would that have on the business world?
• Pure Storage snaps up 1touch in data management pivot

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Digital sovereignty has quietly become one of the most urgent requirements in the tech sector. Once a matter for policy debate, this is now a critical business issue and as much a matter of resilience as one of compliance.

Indeed while we’ve spoken about the need for digital sovereignty before, recent geopolitical developments have cast the debate in far starker light. With European governments and businesses leaning heavily into digital sovereignty, it’s clear there’s an emerging race to secure critical workloads.

Just how important will digital sovereignty be in 2026?

In this episode, Jane and Rory discuss all things digital sovereignty – how it’s being realized, the scale of the transformation, and how we could see things play out.

Highlights

"Gartner has projected that worldwide, sovereign cloud is spending. So that's infrastructure is set to surge to 80 billion in 2026 which is a 35.6% increase from 2025 and in 2027 Gartner thinks that spending is going to reach $110 billion so it's a lot of money. It's a lot of money, and especially as it's growing."

"These facilities that we're talking about, they take time and money, they are an investment. This is a buying of a house versus a buying of a phone. The way that Gartner is talking about projecting this growth is quite remarkable, really. [It's] less like houses, more like airports, something where there is a deep investment at an infrastructure and time level versus just going out and buying a consumer good or something you might refresh every five years."

"If I were a European policymaker, politician, I would be nervous about how much is sitting with American companies potentially, when they could just be hauled over the calls under the CLOUD Act or whatever. And I do appreciate that these companies, you know, it's in their business interest to try and reassure their European customers and they're clearly making steps in that direction. But as you say, it's untested. So you can see why digital sovereignty is such an important consideration, both at the national level and at a business level as well."

Footnotes

• Sovereign infrastructure spend to triple in Europe as fifth of workloads stay local
• What is a sovereign cloud?
• Sovereign cloud services are now the “bare minimum” expected by customers, and hyperscalers are scrambling to meet demand
• What the new AWS European Sovereign Cloud means for enterprises
• What the new Microsoft Sovereign Cloud push means for European customers
• CIOs wrestle with Europe's new digital sovereignty approach
• Can the UK achieve AI sovereignty?

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Identity controls in the enterprise have only become more complicated over the last few years.

Initially, the focus was on IoT devices, which were exploding in the enterprise environment. But recent years have brought an onslaught of AI tools and AI agents, all of which come with security and governance complications.

How can business leaders get a grip on the adoption of AI agents, particularly as these tools begin to communicate with one another and with third-party enterprise tools?

In this episode, Rory speaks to Shiven Ramji, president, Auth0 at Okta, to discuss the future of identity, security and governance in the face of AI agents.

Highlights

"An agent can do lots of things on demand, so we all know that there are a lot of benefits and power with this technology. But my biggest concern is that, I think from a security privacy perspective, we need to make sure that these agents are deployed with utmost care and making sure all the principles that we use today from a security standpoint are applied and ensure that these agents don't do things that we don't want them to do."

"Agents can call other agents or other LLMs, agents can access file systems, agents can query databases. agents can view your other internal applications, can query your internal knowledge management systems, so on and so forth. So you really have to make sure that you have control over all of these resources internally and so, I think the second issue here that's getting amplified in a pretty significant way, is a lot of CIOs and CISOs are concerned that if you have these rogue agents running around in your environment, you're not sure that their internal permissions model is set up in a way to handle the use cases that are potentially being executed by agents."

"My bet will be a lot of these protocols will be part of some of these large, open source ecosystems and bodies, so that they have their own governance, and people can contribute and and then I think everybody is motivated to make sure that there are standard ways through which agents are communicating with each other."

Footnotes

• Agentic AI carries huge implications for security teams - here's what leaders should know
• Agentic AI poses major challenge for security professionals, says Palo Alto Networks’ EMEA CISO
• ‘There’s been tremendous agent washing’: Dell Technologies CTO John Roese says the real potential of AI agents is just being realized – and they could end up managing humans
• Microsoft expects 1.3 billion AI agents to be in operation by 2028 – here’s how it plans to get them working together
• IT leaders don’t trust AI agents yet – and they’re missing out on huge financial gains
• Want to deliver a successful agentic AI project? Stop treating it like traditional software
• AWS CEO Matt Garman says AI agents will have 'as much impact on your business as the internet or cloud'
• Workers view agents as ‘important teammates’ – but the prospect of an AI 'boss' is a step too far

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January is supposed to be a month full of new starts and potential, in which we try to embrace resolutions or set out our plans for the year ahead.

But in the tech sector, it’s become something of an ominous month – the start of layoff season. January 2026 has been no different, with Amazon announcing 16,000 jobs cut in a plan that could see up to 30,000 cut by the end of May according to Reuters.

Earlier in the month, Dell made waves at CES 2026 with the news that it’s reviving the XPS laptop line, just one year on from its announcement that the brand would be deprecated. What can we make of the job cuts and of Dell's reversal?

In this episode, Rory welcomes back Ross Kelly, ITPro's news and analysis editor, to explore some of January's biggest stories.

Highlights

"What we do know is that this could reach 30,000 and reporting from the BBC suggests that insiders have had a bit of an inkling that there have been job cuts on the horizon over the last couple of weeks. It's also worth noting that in October, Amazon cut more staff – again, this was part of a big efficiency drive."

"I think there is a risk this might open the floodgates potentially for another really bad year in tech layoffs. You know we're in January, the first month, and Amazon's cut 16,000 staff. And the number could reach as high as 30,000. There might be a few other organizations keeping their finger on the pulse and seeing, you know, how is this going to unfold for for AWS and and co and can we follow suit?"

"When you look at consumer sentiment on this, the XPS is an iconic brand. It's a name that everybody across the enterprise and consumer markets has known for the best part of two decades."

"So from the beginning of this AI PC craze, I think the big talking point from our perspective has been the enterprise space and there are tangible benefits here, there's a lot of benefits for organizations. These are devices that IT teams, security leaders, IT leaders are going to be very interested in, whereas, when you're talking about shiny new AI features that run in the background for consumers I think the messaging has been botched there."

Footnotes

• Amazon is cutting 14,000 roles in a bid to ‘operate like the world's largest startup’
• ‘Lean into it’: Amazon CEO Andy Jassy thinks enterprises need to embrace AI to avoid being left behind – even if that means fewer jobs in the future
• Fresh Microsoft layoffs hit software engineering roles, documents show
• Return of the XPS: Dell resurrects iconic brand at CES after customer demand
• Dell kills off XPS and other brands for PC simplicity

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The environmental impact of AI is a growing area of study and one that businesses must begin to seriously consider.

When you power a data center with coal, it’s obvious that it’s having a detrimental impact on the environment. But is a ‘green’ data center really green? And to what extent might the benefits of AI outweigh potential environmental negatives?

In this episode, Jane and Rory discuss the shifting sustainability targets of the world’s public cloud giants, as caused by AI, and what they’re doing to get back on track.

Highlights

"Google had a 22% rise in scope three emissions in 2023 for example, and it pinned a lot of this on increases in data center capacity. Microsoft and AWS don't give exact figures, but they similarly attributed it to data center build out. AWS, in fact, said that its scope three rise was primarily from data center construction and fuel consumption by third party delivery service providers, so that all gets tallied up."

"One of the ways that they're beginning to do this is by using cleaner materials. So something that we covered is that Microsoft has actually begun using mass timber for its data center construction, which to some degrees, supplements steel and concrete. Google and AWS and Microsoft as well are also looking at methods to buy lower carbon concrete, which is just formulated in a different way, to reduce the upfront emissions associated with it."

"In all cases, this is not out of the hands of the company. The company has just made a decision that it would rather pursue aggressive data center expansion than meeting its 2024, 2025, sustainability targets."

"Ultimately, though, these sites can only be so efficient, and when you really, really drill down, one of the main things that they're going to have to do... is secure just clean power or data centers in order to prove credentials. The other thing that the hyperscalers will really have to do before, I think before 2030 is prove that the actual output of these data centers has some kind of net positive for the environment."

Footnotes

• Microsoft Environmental Sustainability Report 2025
• Amazon 2024 Sustainability Report
• Google 2025 Environmental Report
• Google emissions have surged 51% in five years – but it’s making solid progress in data center efficiency
• Data center carbon emissions are set to skyrocket by 2030, with hyperscalers producing 2.5 billion tons of carbon
• Small businesses are ‘flying blind’ on carbon emissions and struggling to meet sustainability goals – and the blame lies with big tech vendors
• Big tech’s solution for AI-related carbon emissions could be more AI
• Microsoft wants to drastically cut carbon emissions, so it’s building data centers with wood
• Can small modular reactors meet data center power demand?
• Google just confirmed the location of its first small modular reactor
• Hyperscalers go nuclear
• Gas-powered data centers: what's behind the boom?
• Could all data centers go solar?
• TPUs: Google's home advantage
• What is a tensor processing unit (TPU)?
• AI’s thirsty secret

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The tech sector started this year with a bang at CES 2026, the annual event that brings together over 140,000 attendees to share the latest innovations in consumer and business technology.

Unsurprisingly, at this year’s event AI was a primary focus – with more details on Nvidia and AMD’s latest hardware, alongside AI PC innovations by brands like Lenovo.

Alongside these headlines, however, we also saw a return to form by companies such as Dell, with the resurrection of the XPS laptop range. What did we learn from CES about what to expect in business hardware over the coming year?

In this episode, Jane and Rory are joined by Mike Moore, deputy editor at TechRadar Pro, to discuss the biggest moments from CES 2026.

Highlights

"AMD is predicting that 2026 is going to be the first year when there's more AI PCs sold than non AI PCs and that's devices with an NPU, which can obviously be used for for all kinds of tasks. But, yeah, it seems that this is the next kind of big highlight and big landmark for device makers especially."

"So it's very interesting that this has been reversed quite so quickly, and they've clearly put a lot of effort and a lot of research and development into building a really striking and professional looking device. The fact that the XPS logo is now on the lid, replacing the Dell logo, is quite telling, they really want to have this front and center as well."

"That was the big theme of Lisa Su's keynote for AMD, saying that we're going to need yotta scale power. Which is numbers beyond most ordinary, everyday understanding, I think it's 10 yotta flops, which definitely is not something I've just made up, but a one followed by 24 zeros. So around 10,000 times the amount of AI compute that we saw a couple of years ago. So by the end of the decade, we need all of this power and infrastructure – where does it all come from? Who's going to be building it? How is it maintained and ensure that it's running correctly? It's the companies like AMD and Nvidia who really want to take a step forward and take responsibility for that."

Footnotes

• CES 2026: All the live updates as they happen from day one
• AI PCs will ‘become the norm’ by 2029 as enterprise and consumer demand surges
• Return of the XPS: Dell resurrects iconic brand at CES after customer demand
• Lenovo reveals slick rollable screen concept and a voice-controlled ThinkBook at CES 2026
• A Lenovo partnership may be the only thing FIFA gets right for the World Cup, going by CES 2026
• Nobody asked for AI PCs, but they’ve been thrust upon us – at least Dell realizes it’s probably made a mistake

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We’re just over a week into 2026 but already, enterprise cybersecurity teams will be hard at work repelling attacks – and business leaders will be worrying about the year ahead.

On the one hand, we’re told that AI tools are beginning to empower security teams to go further and faster. On the other, the use of AI by hackers to launch attacks also appears to be on the rise.

All of this is happening against a backdrop of rising geopolitical tensions and continual attacks by state-sponsored hacking groups against businesses. How will all this come together in 2026 and beyond?

In this episode, Jane and Rory are joined by Jamie Collier, lead advisor in Europe at Google Threat Intelligence Group, to explore the risks – both novel and ordinary – enterprises face in 2026.

Highlights

"I think one of the big reflections for me is just the extent to which threat actors are adapting to what I would call modern infrastructure. We think about the way that a lot of these traditional attacks have worked, we've seen that typical hack moving through the network, escalating privileges, etc. When we look towards defending cloud, SaaS, these sorts of spaces, it's a very different space, a lot more emphasis on identity and that is providing, effectively, a bypass to a lot of those complex threat operations where these threat actors can just really log in."

"The most obvious way that for actors are using AI is probably the most boring in terms of it's just different levels of automation of their attack life cycle. It's crafting phishing emails. It's conducting reconnaissance. I think that sort of goes without saying, and actually a lot of that is in areas we're not necessarily going to fully see, because they're going to be doing that with their own models, etc."

"There is a lot more to North Korea than just IT workers, right? We see also very big targeting of software developers, we see cryptocurrency remains a primary target, and I think given that their kind of dual objective of financial motivated operations and strategic intelligence gathering, it actually exposes a lot of organizations to all sorts of different types of North Korean threats that range from tailored targeting, to employment fraud, to initial access to cryptocurrency theft, ransomware, supply chain compromise."

Footnotes

• NCSC issues urgent warning over growing AI prompt injection risks – here’s what you need to know
• Cyber experts have been warning about AI-powered DDoS attacks – now they’re becoming a reality
• Salt Typhoon attack on US congressional email system ‘exposes how vulnerable core communications systems remain to nation-state actors’
• OpenAI says prompt injection attacks are a serious threat for AI browsers – and it’s a problem that’s ‘unlikely to ever be fully solved'
• OpenAI turns to red teamers to prevent malicious ChatGPT use as company warns future models could pose 'high' security risk
• A flaw in Google’s new Gemini CLI tool could’ve allowed hackers to exfiltrate data
• Google says you shouldn't worry about AI malware – but that won’t last long as hackers refine techniques
• North Korean IT workers: The growing threat
• North Korean hackers continue targeting developers in open source malware campaign - and experts say as many as 36,000 victims have been snared so far
• CRINK attacks: which nation state hackers will be the biggest threat in 2026?

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As we ring in the new year, we’re returning to the ITPro tradition of looking ahead and discussing the key trends that will shape the tech sector in 2026.

While there will undoubtedly be surprises ahead, both exciting and concerning, it’s also possible to look at some of the standout moments from 2025 to help us understand where we’re headed.

So what can we expect IT decision makers to come up against in 2026?

For this new year’s edition of the podcast, Jane and Rory welcome back Ross Kelly, ITPro’s News and Analysis Editor, to discuss the key trends that will shape 2026.

Highlights

"We've covered this quite extensively around the long term costs of botched AI adoption programs. That's no different to a botched digital transformation program in, say, 2018. So it's the same issues that you've always had with digital transformation that you're now seeing in AI transformations as well. The big focus there is uptake among staff and on board with these programs."

"Marc Benioff was was outspoken earlier in the year by saying, 'today's CEOs are the last that will have a fully human workforce', which is another way of saying, we're cutting numbers."

"[There] seems to be a real sharp focus from North Korean state-backed groups essentially getting a member of the group to infiltrate an organization and then they essentially have the keys to the castle themselves, they're in. That's obviously going to prompt more robust hiring and background check processes from businesses. But that's another area that state sponsored groups are going to wreak havoc over the next year."

"The rate at which we get new supercomputers is accelerating, we get them more and more frequently. And this isn't my imagination. I thought it might be, but I have checked with experts and this is a real thing that is definitely happening. We, just a month or two ago, had the US Department of Energy announce what can only be described in journalistic-ese as a slew of new supercomputers that will be coming."

Footnotes

• AI adoption is finally driving ROI for B2B teams in the UK and EU
• AI is finally delivering bang for its buck, according to Microsoft
• UK firms are pouring money into AI, but they won’t see a return on investment unless they address these key issues
• Former NCSC head says the Jaguar Land Rover attack was the 'single most financially damaging cyber event ever to hit the UK' as impact laid bare
• If you're not taking insider threats seriously, then the CrowdStrike incident should be a big wake up call
• North Korean IT workers: The growing threat
• US Department of Energy’s supercomputer shopping spree continues with Solstice and Equinox
• Inside Isambard-AI: The UK’s most powerful supercomputer
• Nvidia just announced new supercomputers and an open AI model family for science at SC 2025

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2025 has almost come to a close and the new year is right around the corner.

At this time of year, it’s usual to reflect on the year and consider some of the biggest, most impactful things that have happened. But here at ITPro, we like to take a different approach: what didn’t happen?

The tech industry can’t help but make bold promises and some just don’t pan out. What are some of the biggest targets, trends, and predictions that just haven’t come to fruition in 2025?

In this episode, Jane and Rory are once again joined by Ross Kelly, news and analysis editor at ITPro, to discuss the biggest misses of the year.

Highlights

"When Llama came out, they were hailed for the fact that it's, 'open source'. Yeah, they had a really strong start. But the big incumbents in the industry were always going to catch up. You know, Google. You look over the last two, three months, Google has really come back into its own. "

"We saw Google do that 'code red', initially go with Bard, rebrand that to Gemini, and then just plug away at that and really carve itself market space in the years since. Meanwhile, Meta actually got that early advantage in open source AI, and has spent the following years kind of squandering that."

"Quantum is a kind of rad sounding name and everyone wants to throw stuff at it, because it sounds kind of futuristic, but also maybe possible. And I don't know, I don't even know how useful it I don't even know how useful it's going to be... it does just feel like here one of these kind of frontier technologies that is just around the corner. But it just doesn't feel very real."

Footnotes

• Is enterprise agentic AI adoption matching the hype?
• ‘Agent washing’ is here: Most agentic AI tools are just ‘repackaged’ RPA solutions and chatbots – and Gartner says 40% of projects will be ditched within two years
• Agentic AI carries huge implications for security teams - here's what leaders should know
• 'It's slop': OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy pours cold water on agentic AI hype – so your jobs are safe, at least for now
• IBM is targeting 'quantum advantage' in 12 months – and says useful quantum computing is just a few years away
• SAS thinks quantum AI has huge enterprise potential – here's why
• SAS rejects generative AI hype in favor of data fundamentals at Innovate 2025
• Post-quantum cryptography is now top of mind for cybersecurity leaders
• Why does Nvidia have a no-chip quantum strategy?
• Meta executive denies hyping up Llama 4 benchmark scores – but what can users expect from the new models?

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Cybersecurity teams are facing a double edged sword of challenges and opportunities. On the one hand, AI tools offer a great deal of autonomous working and the promise of automating some of the more laborious tasks that a cybersecurity team has to undertake.

On the other hand, attackers are also using AI to launch large scale attacks such as sophisticated phishing campaigns and identity theft. To fight this threat, cybersecurity teams will need to unify data like never before and take advantage of as many new technologies and processes as they can.

How can they go about this? And what does a unified cybersecurity strategy really look like in 2026?

In this episode, Rory is joined by Mandy Andress, chief information security officer at Elastic, to explore how businesses can evolve their threat detection and security posture, as well as how AI is lowering the barrier to entry for attackers.

Highlights

"Of course, it all started with phishing messages. It used to be really easy to identify a phishing message, and AI was able to fix that and solve a lot of the language challenges and grammar and the punctuation challenges."

"So we talk about zero trust, we talk about least privilege, and none of those foundational elements have changed. I think in some cases, they've become even more critical, certainly least privileged, as you're looking at system accounts and and non-human identities and agents and really focusing on what they can and cannot do what they can and cannot access. From a threat actor perspective, those are our perfect lateral movement capabilities, 'let me be able to take over an agent and have it do what I want it to do' versus what it's potentially expected to be doing."

"We're starting to see augmenting of analysts, we're starting to see some autonomous workflows, but we're still taking the approach of how we have been looking at things and then adding on or expanding some capabilities. There will be a point in maybe five, seven years out that we are going to need to make a fundamental shift in our approach to continue to build and leverage all of the advantages that we would be able to have."

"The key way for success in today's environment is you need to understand what is happening. You need to have a very holistic, comprehensive view of both what is happening and what exists in your environment, and bringing in as much context, telemetry understanding as possible,

Footnotes

• In the age of AI threats, the future of security is unified
• AI-generated code is now the cause of one-in-five breaches – but developers and security leaders alike are convinced the technology will come good eventually
• AI-generated code risks: What CISOs need to know
• Agentic AI carries huge implications for security teams - here's what leaders should know
• The NCSC touts honeypots and ‘cyber deception’ tactics as the key to combating hackers — but they could ‘lead to a false sense of security’

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In the race to train and deploy generative AI models, companies have poured hundreds of billions of dollars into GPUs, chips that have become essential for the parallel processing needs of large language models.

Nvidia alone has forecast $500 billion in sales across 2025 and 2026, driven largely by Jensen Huang, founder and CEO at Nvidia, recently stated that “inference has become the most compute-intensive phase of AI — demanding real-time reasoning at planetary scale”.

Google is meeting these demands in its own way. Unlike other firms reliant on chips by Nvidia, AMD, and others, Google has long used its in-house ‘tensor processing units’ (TPUs) for AI training and inference.

What are the benefits and drawbacks of Google’s reliance on TPUs? And how do its chips stack up against the competition?

In this episode, Jane and Rory discuss TPUs – Google’s specialized processors for AI and ML – and how they could help the hyperscaler outcompete its rivals.

Highlights

“So one of the main advantages of TPUs for Google is that it designs them, it has them manufactured through TSMC, which means it has sole dibs on them. This avoids a lot of the supply chain bottlenecks we've seen in recent years where companies have been queuing up for Nvidia chips. Nation states have been queuing up for Nvidia chips, or they've been forced to buy them in massive quantities up front and then slowly figure out where they're going to deploy them all.”

“Nvidia really is setting the standard on enterprise AI hardware. Like you said, Intel, AMD are also major players in the space and they have their chunk of the market, but Nvidia is the one that the major AI developers come back to again and again. It's making the hundred billion dollar announcements, all of this investment that seems to be announced every month.”

“It's a trade off for Google, because what you're doing is throwing a lot more compute at one workload, but potentially you're sacrificing some latency there. So all of that is to say that it's not as simple as just bigger numbers are better here. It really depends on the workload. But it's clear that, particularly with the latest iteration of TPUs, Google is seriously contending with the raw performance that companies like Nvidia can offer.”

“I'd say at this point it's clear that we haven't quite hit the wall that maybe some people were predicting earlier in the year, where people were saying it's incremental returns, if you just increase the size of the model – and maybe we do need to go back to the drawing board. I think Gemini 3 Pro shows that, at least for now, there is some life in just scaling things and seeing how much performance we can squeeze out of them.”

Footnotes

• What is a tensor processing unit (TPU)?
• ‘TPUs just work’: Why Google Cloud is betting big on its custom chips
• Google boasts that a single Gemini prompt uses roughly the same energy as a basic search – but that’s not painting the full picture
• Google Cloud announces major computing boost with Ironwood chip, new hypercomputer upgrades
• Google claims its AI chips are ‘faster, greener’ than Nvidia’s

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HPE Discover Barcelona 2025 was in full swing this past week, with thousands of attendees descending on the Fira Barcelona to hear the latest news on the networking, servers, storage, supercomputing – and, of course, AI.

It’s a pivotal time for the firm, as it consolidates its hardware partnerships and heralds a recent acquisition, while laying out its strategy to help customers not only meet demand, but expand their networks and adopt new technologies.

What are some of the biggest things HPE announced – and what does the firm have lined up for 2026 and beyond?

In this episode, Rory interviews Jane live on the ground at HPE Discover Barcelona 2025, to unpack all things HPE.

Highlights

"Yes, the integration is rapid, and that's something that both [Rami] Rahim and [Antonio] Neri have been pointing to, that they're not going to take years and years to do this, that, you know, they're starting it now."

"So what's happening? I mean, calling it a 'cross pollination' is perhaps, in my opinion, not quite the right word, because what's actually going on is sort of moving bits from each company across to effectively the other company. So while HPE is talking about that eventually they'll just be unified, and it's going to be one networking business, as things are there is an understanding of the fact that Juniper and Aruba, their backgrounds and specialties are quite different."

"So on the Monday, Nvidia and HPE announced that the first AI factory lab in the European Union – important caveat – is going to be installed in the city of Grenoble in the south of France. It is focused on the sovereign AI element of this. Now, sovereign AI is something that frequently – sovereign cloud as well – frequently comes up at the European conferences, because realistically, it's Europeans and the Middle East who really care about this stuff."

"HPE has launched a Helios project with AMD. So Helios was announced at advancing AI in June, it is a double wide rack scale AI solution. It's being positioned that HPE is the first to do this and it was kind of hinted at that this joint announcement from them, it's Q1 announcement, which is largely what AMD CEO Lisa Su was like hinting at back in June."

Footnotes

• HPE Discover Barcelona 2025: All the news, updates, and announcements live from Barcelona
• HPE promises “cross pollinated" future for Aruba and Juniper
• HPE and Nvidia launch first EU AI factory lab in France
• HPE and AMD reveal first Helios offering for cloud service providers and neoclouds

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As a business leader, you’d like to believe that your staff are entirely trustworthy. Effective enterprises run on workforce confidence – but in some cases, that trust can be misplaced.

In November, CrowdStrike admitted one of its own employees had provided screenshots of internal systems to hackers in exchange for a sizable payout. Industry experts have told ITPro the incident should act as a wake up call to the all-too-serious risk of insider threats.

Earlier in the month, websites all over the world went offline after a major outage at the content delivery network service provider Cloudflare. What was the cause of the incident: had Cloudflare fallen victim to the kind of DDoS attack it’s famous for preventing?

In this episode, Jane and Rory welcome back Ross Kelly, ITPro’s news and analysis editor, to explore some of November’s biggest stories.

Highlights

"The individual was believed to have been paid around $25,000 for this, which all things considered, I think, is quite low when you're risking being fired and, you know, a potential jail sentence in the aftermath of this. So these were leaked on Telegram. CrowdStrike, obviously, was made aware of this and they reacted pretty swiftly like we mentioned. That person has since been dismissed, I don't think it was too much of an issue for HR in that situation."

"A lot of organizations still lack formal insider threat programs. It's something that's just not really on their radar because a lot of the time, the headlines are based around you ransomware attacks, malware, etc, etc. And so, you know, when you have an individual in your company that's potentially at risk, how do you deal with that?"

“An outage at Cloudflare, I think, is a worst case scenario for a lot of organizations, a lot of online services."

“The outage itself was a result of a bug in its bot management software. So, the software that essentially allows websites to allow bots onto their individual sites, or prevent bots from accessing their sites, a bug in that service and that software caused this, which created somewhat of a cascading effect where a lot of websites essentially just were bricked for a good couple of hours."

Footnotes

• If you're not taking insider threats seriously, then the CrowdStrike incident should be a big wake up call
• Nearly 700,000 customers impacted after insider attack at US fintech firm
• AI means cyber teams are rethinking their approach to insider threats
• ‘Insiders don’t need to break in’: A developer crippled company networks with malicious code and a ‘kill switch’ after being sacked – and experts warn it shows the huge danger of insider threats
• Everything you need to know about Cloudflare
• The Cloudflare outage explained: What happened, who was impacted, and what was the root cause?
• Cloudflare says AI companies have been “scraping content without limits” – now it’s letting website owners block crawlers and force them to pay
• Security experts issue warning over the rise of 'gray bot' AI web scrapers
• Cloudflare is fighting back against AI web scrapers
• Nearly half of all digital initiatives still fail – here’s how you can learn from the ‘digital vanguard’ and deliver success

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It seems that everywhere you look these days, businesses are implementing AI features, tools, chatbots, and pilots. But researchers keep coming to the same conclusion about the benefits of enterprise AI adoption – that return on investment is slim to none.

While this isn’t the case for every business, it’s certainly a worry that hangs over discussions of the technology. The secret to making AI projects succeed is knowledge that every leader is after right now – and knowing what not to do is just as important.

Where are businesses going wrong with AI adoption? And how can they apply the learnings of the past few years to ramp up return on investment?Today, we’re joined by Alan Trefler, founder and CEO at Pegasystems, to unpack the main hurdles businesses face when it comes to AI adoption – and why AI failure is becoming such a widespread concern.

In this episode, Jane and Rory speak to Alan Trefler, founder and CEO at Pegasystems, to unpack the main hurdles businesses face when it comes to AI adoption – and why AI failure is becoming such a widespread concern.

Highlights

"You know, the thing about the AI capabilities is it's enormously powerful in putting together a demo. But when you want to do something that needs to be reliable, you need to have made sure that you've made the right decisions about what AI to use in what places."

"Well, I would say it's almost entirely strategic error in terms of people not actually having thought through what the different limitations of the AI are and how applicable they are to the particular problem they're trying to solve. Also, there is a completely mind-numbing amount of vendor hype in the market, I think, unduly covering and coloring the normal thought processes that people go through – and because it's beautiful and easy to get something to work a little, people assume that if they keep doing it the same way it'll work reliably."

"I think that not only is there not a good understanding at the board level, I would say in many technical organizations there's not a good understanding, which is why you have your articles about 95% of projects not going to production. It wasn't that those projects couldn't have gone into production, it's that they were doing the wrong things at design time and as a result, they did the wrong things at runtime."

Footnotes

• Why are so many AI projects destined for failure? Inexperienced staff, poor planning, and a shoehorned approach to agile development are all stifling innovation
• AI-generated code is now the cause of one-in-five breaches – but developers and security leaders alike are convinced the technology will come good eventually
• Nearly half of all digital initiatives still fail – here’s how you can learn from the ‘digital vanguard’ and deliver success

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The end of October was punctuated with a series of major cloud outages, first at AWS and then at Microsoft, bringing a wide range of websites and business applications offline.

In the previous episode, we spoke about this in a reactive sense – the immediate customers impacted and the likely causes.

But it's also important to break the problem down at a strategic and technical level. Just how do outages at this scale occur – and what’s it like as an insider, fighting to bring services back online?

In this episode Rory speaks to James Kretchmar, SVP & CTO of the cloud technology group at Akamai Technologies, to get an insider’s perspective on cloud outages and how businesses can navigate these incidents.

Highlights

"The worst feeling in the world is to be in the middle of an incident and realize that it would be a great thing that you could do to resolve that incident, if only a tool had been built before, right? So it'd be great if you figure that out before you get into that incident, and then you have the tool ready to go. "

"[O]ne of the things that's actually very satisfying in an incident is we've had circumstances where one system does start to fail, but we had built a safety system and it kicks in, and you see that it works. You know, it's immensely satisfying."

"The big difference between a short outage and a long outage is, 'do we know immediately how to remediate a problem of this nature?', versus 'we're not sure and/or we have to be careful not to cause a bigger problem."

"Well, one way or another, the 'what if' scenario planning has to happen. I think the extent to which you do that in real world circumstances, that'll be case by case, dependent of what makes the most sense to do. But the most important thing is to make sure that you do have that proactive and consistently, this is not something to do just after a big outage, as part of your normal work process, to be thinking, 'okay, what are the ways that things can go wrong. And then, yes, actually stepping through 'okay, if this happened, what would we do? Do we have the facilities available to be able to debug this problem, to pull this mitigator into place?'"

Footnotes

• Amazon Web Services outage live: Hundreds of apps including Slack, mobile carriers, banking services down
• The AWS outage brought much of the web to its knees: Here's how it happened, who it affected, and how much it might cost
• The Microsoft Azure outage explained: What happened, who was impacted, and what can we learn from it?
• Australia internet banking outage blamed on DDoS mitigation service
• Why the CrowdStrike outage was a wakeup call for developer teams

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It’s Halloween and what better way to mark the day than discuss one of the biggest horror stories of October?

We are of course referring to the AWS outage, which on 20 October took down some incredibly notable websites and caused global disruption. It’s the latest, most severe example of why data centers are considered critical infrastructure – and acts as a stark reminder to IT administrators that even big tech can fall foul of technical errors.

Of course, October hasn’t just been defined by negative stories. At the end of the month, the US Department of Energy has revealed a slew of supercomputer announcements. What are they for, and when can they be expected to be up and running?

In this episode Jane and Rory speak once again to Ross Kelly, ITPro’s news and analysis editor, to the show to discuss the biggest developments of the month.

Highlights

"A lot of services were down. Some of the biggest websites, applications, platforms on the web, spanning the consumer and enterprise spaces, were were impacted by this. I mean, you guys know Slack was down for a period, so we were having to communicate over WhatsApp, but major banks, Lloyds, Halifax, their apps were down and Snapchat was down."

"AWS, the engineers that were scrambling to fix this, should be commended because by late morning UK time, they had mitigated the error and resolved this. But it was the actual recovery period for a lot of organizations that was going to be quite lengthy."

"...I've written about the launch of not one, not two, but eight supercomputers, or the announcement they're going to be created. So these are quite an eclectic mix of systems.

"Now, what I will say is that of all of these, of all of them, we have a solid date for one, which is Equinox. We only have that, and it's the first half of 2026. In a press briefing from HPE, before we knew what the big announcement was going to be on Monday, we were told that the first systems on the Cray GX, 5000 would be delivered in 2027 so you can guess that Discovery and an AI cluster, so not another supercomputer, an AI cluster called Lux – both of which will be at Oak Ridge – will probably be online In 2027."

"China's top supercomputers don't rank in the Top 500 whatsoever, because it's not public information. The US and this administration, which is vocally hyping up the competition with China, talking about how the US has to maintain its foothold as the home of AI and the home of high performance computing takes the opposite approach, where they want to dominate the Top 500 list. They want DOE to have as many of those top 10 supercomputer spots as possible. But it does seem that that takes precedent over then going on to explain what they're actually being used for."

Footnotes

• Amazon Web Services outage live: Hundreds of apps including Slack, mobile carriers, banking services down
• The AWS outage brought much of the web to its knees: Here's how it happened, who it affected, and how much it might cost
• HPE's new Cray system is a pocket powerhouse
• US Department of Energy’s supercomputer shopping spree continues with Solstice and Equinox
• Inside Lumi, one of the world’s greenest supercomputers
• Inside Isambard-AI: The UK’s most powerful supercomputer
• Top 500 June 2025 list

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Business software is evolving faster than ever before, with advancements such as AI spurring developers to introduce new ways of working and interacting with the software layer.

But by and large, business hardware has stayed much the same for the past decade. With a few notable exceptions, the laptops, desktops, and portables we use for work today are simply evolved versions of what we were using in 2015.

Is this set to change? And what could the hardware of the future look like?

In this episode Rory speaks to Bobby Hellard, ITPro’s reviews editor, to explore some of the latest advances in business hardware and ask – is this the best it gets?

Highlights

"[T]he actual experience of using it is it was great. The reMarkable Paper Pro doesn't have any apps, so you don't get notifications and it's really good if you just want to think about an idea, write it down. You're not distracted, you're not tempted to look on social media or check your email, you're just on the device, right? That's great to sort of lock yourself in. And I think that's the case with the others as well."

"For us, everyday people, us business people, us office workers, you could probably get a laptop from five years ago and do just fine provided the battery lasts."

"The question there is, are we going to forego laptops and also start wearing glasses at some point in the office? Where do you see this happening? I mean, is it going to be people in data centers dealing with heavy analytical stuff walking around with glasses? I don't know, it still seems like it's not got a better way of doing it than the laptop. Is my my theory there."

Footnotes

• The Huawei MateBook Fold Ultimate Edition is a unique take on what it means to be a laptop – but good luck getting it outside of China
• E-ink is on-trend and I'm all for it
• ReMarkable Paper Pro review: The e-ink color tablet that lets you think
• The ReMarkable Paper Pro Move gives you e-ink in a pocketable package – but it's not without fault
• Supernote A5 X2 Manta review: A premium e-ink tablet that's still somewhat Spartan
• The Amazon Kindle Scribe is no bullet journal – it is, in fact, a fairly basic E Ink tablet

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San Francisco has played host this week to one of the biggest tech conferences of the year, Salesforce Dreamforce.

The stalwart event has seamlessly transformed from being all about cloud for the best part of 20 years to being heavily AI focused in the past two years.

What can we learn from the pronouncements – and contradictions – being delivered on stage this year?

In this episode Jane speaks to Rory, who has been on the ground this week reporting from Salesforce Dreamforce 2025.

Highlights

"This year is part two of the hard turn into AI agents. Ross wrote a great piece last year on how Agentforce is kind of intended to be Salesforce's Chat GPT moment. So this is Salesforce's dedicated AI agents platform – platform kind of undersells how extensive it is. It's not just like a marketplace for agents, for example. It's kind of a marketplace/fabric/agent builder."

"Slack is more and more becoming the front end for interacting with your Salesforce data. So CRM data from Salesforce will now be directly accessible in Slack. You can pull data through from Tableau, from HR, IT from sales, by just invoking it through agents"

"Slackbot is being updated so it can now summarize documents, summarize threads, draft project updates, everything you would expect from from an LLM. But also, over time, the idea is it will become more personalized to you as a worker and to your organization. So it will be able to offer you more personalized assistance."

Footnotes

• Dreamforce 2025 live: All the latest updates from San Francisco
• ‘I don't think anyone is farther in the enterprise’: Marc Benioff is bullish on Salesforce’s agentic AI lead – and Agentforce 360 will help it stay top of the perch
• Salesforce just launched a new catch-all platform to build enterprise AI agents
• Slack is now the key to Salesforce’s agentic AI plans
• "Do not sacrifice your entry-level jobs": Salesforce might be all in on AI, but it isn't giving up on junior workers yet – despite Marc Benioff's job replacement claims
• Why Dreamforce 2025 will be all about agents, agents, agents

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The rise in popularity of generative AI has been centered largely around cloud AI, with popular chatbots and models accessed via API or dedicated websites. But with the right hardware, AI models can also be run on-device – and PC manufacturers are rushing to fill this niche.

AI PCs are quickly becoming the norm for new product lineups, with specialized hardware to run certain AI processes on-device, alongside integrated AI assistant software.

But what are the main benefits of this technology to businesses – and how far can we expect AI to transform the PC?

In this episode, Jane and Rory are joined by Ranjit Atwal, senior director analyst at Gartner, to explore the impact of AI on PCs and how it’s already being deployed at the edge.

Highlights

"There are very sound reasons to use the capabilities of an AI PC. So if you think about real time... Salesforce is thinking about, okay, in real time, some of our applications need to be closer to the user, and maybe using some of that real time data. So the latency and the security and the privacy of that data is secured on device."

"We've been saying that quite quickly, a large majority of PCs, because they've got NPUs, would all be AI PCs. So they will all be capable, the distinction is not whether it's an AI PC or not. The distinction will be, what kind of AI PC will you need to run?"

"So as [business leaders are] looking at buying the next fleet of AI PCs, and the price point differential hasn't been as big as it was maybe at the beginning of the year, memory pricing has come down, which means the overall pricing of those AI PCs has also come down. It makes them more feasible, and they're future proofing.

Footnotes

• What is an NPU and what can they do for your business?
• Dell says Windows 11 migration is a prime opportunity to overhaul ageing PC fleets – and AI devices are in the spotlight
• AI PCs will ‘become the norm’ by 2029 as enterprise and consumer demand surges
• AI PCs are becoming a no-brainer for IT decision makers
• AI PCs are paying dividends for HP as firm reports sales surge
• “It’s almost mind boggling” – Dell is betting big on AI PCs, but customers are less enthusiastic

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As developers have embraced AI to a greater degree, many have hailed the rise of so called vibe coding, in which broad prompts are given to AI models to produce refined code that's actionable and in many cases deployable.

But vibe coding also comes with risks, because by its very nature it's more of a hands-off activity. It decreases the degree to which developers can explain what their code is doing, and may lead to them overlooking vulnerabilities.

How serious is this risk, and what are the potential benefits of vibe coding in the future?

In this episode, Rory speaks to Simon Black, director of evangelism at Mendix, to unpack what vibe coding is and why it comes with such high risks.

Highlights

"I think currently, vibe coding and the process of vibe coding has some of limitations. I think the challenge of vibe coding is that they are trying to speed up the part of development that people find most difficult, which is writing the code. And you know that that comes with a lot of advantages. You can get things done very, very quickly, but it often forgets about all the other challenges with software development, things like being able to do peer reviews, being able to improve the deployment, the full software development life cycle."

"You need to need to give it context of your organization and how it builds software. Not just the code but how do I evaluate what type of software we should even be building as an organization? How do I assign the value to it? How do I understand which projects to pick first? You need to be able to give it context around how you govern, how you audit projects."

"They've taken a coders' approach to a no coders' world. Let's say it makes sense. So they've gone, okay, well, we need to build applications quicker. The best way we can do that is by giving AI the ability to generate code. Okay, great. That works if you're giving to a developer audience, not so great if you're giving it to maybe more of a citizen developer, or someone that is not from a software development background, and expecting them to understand, you know, TypeScript or understand React code or understand how databases work and so on.

Footnotes

• Senior developers are all in on vibe coding, but junior staff lack the experience to spot critical flaws
• Want to supercharge your vibe coding skills? Here are the best AI models developers can use to generate secure code
• AI coding really isn't living up to expectations – "the savings have been unremarkable" but not for the reason you might think
• Researchers tested over 100 leading AI models on coding tasks — nearly half produced glaring security flaws
• MCP servers used by developers and 'vibe coders' are riddled with vulnerabilities – here’s what you need to know
• The Replit vibe coding incident gives us a glimpse into why developers are still wary of AI coding assistants

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The UK has immense AI potential, according to some of the biggest names in tech, with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang having described the region as being in a “Goldilocks circumstance” due to its strong AI ecosystem and rich academic history.

This month, the US tech ecosystem made its first significant contribution to recognizing this reality with tens of billions invested in the UK ecosystem.

Will it pay off? And what does this investment mean in practical terms?

In this episode, Rory welcomes back Ross Kelly, ITPro’s news and analysis editor, to unpack this bumper investment in the UK tech ecosystem.

Highlights

"When you go back to Nvidia's initial announcement at the start of the week, it's basically committed over 120,000 GPUs in total for the entire country. So, yeah, this is huge amount of hardware that's going to be pouring into the UK in the next couple of years. I mean, from your perspective, the way I look at this is you have the headline numbers, the £11 billion. But you know, I think you also have to take into account that a significant portion of this investment will be taken up by the GPUs themselves."

"In terms of the private sector here, I think it is the same case where we have a really fantastic, really vibrant tech sector in the UK but it has been, I guess, impeded, inhibited in terms of the infrastructure there. When you go back to the beginning of the sort of generative AI boom, there was the big talking point around, you know, power grids, and whether the national grid would be able to cope with surging power demands, also data center capacity as well."

"When you look at how a lot of big hyperscalers operate as well, in terms of their cloud zones, they've often been on regional or national scale. But I think given the way we're going, like you said in terms of redundancy and whatnot, a more hyper-localized network of data centers, of infrastructure across the UK, makes sense."

Footnotes

• Google opens doors on UK data center ahead of Trump visit
• Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella says UK ties are 'stronger than ever' as tech giant pledges $30bn investment
• UK to host largest European GPU cluster under £11 billion Nvidia investment plans
• Is the ‘British firm’ at the heart of Britain’s AI plans actually British?
• UK is going to be ‘AI superpower’, says Nvidia boss as he invests £500m
• ‘This is the largest AI ecosystem in the world without its own infrastructure’: Jensen Huang thinks the UK has immense AI potential – but it still has a lot of work to do

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Identity management in security has been a difficult issue for many years, but the arrival of AI and AI agents has only complicated this picture.

In addition to human and machine identities, cybersecurity professionals now have to handle potentially thousands of AI agent identities across MCP and API endpoints.

How can businesses handle all of these complications while maintaining their cybersecurity?

In this episode, Rory speaks to Art Gilliland, CEO at cybersecurity firm Delinea, to discuss the thorny issue of identity attacks, and how IT leaders can get a grip on digital identities.

Highlights

"I think what you're seeing now is the adversaries, the bad guys, they're basically focused on, 'look where's the weakest link, where is the place where we've spent the least?' And infrastructure people are about throughput and speed and access, and security is about protection. And if you have a domain that is split between those two, you're going to find weaknesses."

"I think one of the, one of the things that has always been true is that there is a structural imbalance in the security world, and that structural imbalance is the adversary just has a structural benefit. They're always advantaged."

"Identity really is sort of the tip of the spear of watching for breaches, because there will be failures probing an identity that will give you indicators that something bad is going to happen before it happens. Once they have the authenticated identity, then it's really damaging. But if you can see the leading indicators, you can get in front of it, and I think this is where AI is going to really help."

Footnotes

• Machine identity attacks will be top of mind for security leaders in 2025
• Non-human identities: Are we sleepwalking into a security crisis?
• Microsoft expects 1.3 billion AI agents to be in operation by 2028 – here’s how it plans to get them working together
• IT leaders don’t trust AI agents yet – and they’re missing out on huge financial gains
• What is the Internet of Things (IoT)?

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The flow of data is core to businesses all around the world – how much can be transmitted, and at what speed, is a fundamental aspect of IT systems ranging from cloud computing to the frontier of AI models.

In data centers, the tech sector is focused on reducing latency, improving bandwidth, and reducing energy consumption to improve AI performance and lower operating costs. But achieving these goals by shifting about current technology can only go so far.

Increasingly, firms are looking to cutting-edge technologies and approach such as all-photonics networks, which use photons for all processes including data transfer and storage, rather than electronic components. How close are we to achieving this technology? And how could it benefit every business.

In this episode, Rory is joined Chris Wright, senior vice president global engineering and CTO at Red Hat, to discuss the potential benefits of photonics based networks and how they could upend current network architecture.

Highlights

"[A]s we introduce all photonics networks and this end to end connectivity, extend it into the data center, we're reducing the latency such that it starts to feel much more like it's just another server and another rack in the same data center. We're literally approaching the speed of light in terms of how we transmit signals from end to end and the latency in, say, thousand of kilometers is still measured in a small number of milliseconds in a way that again, it starts to feel like you're very close."

"[T]o really inspire change you need to show something better, not just at a technical level but at some kind of an outcome. Why is this better for a user, for a business? And so while we have a really deep technology focus in the IOWN Global Forum, in order to bring that to life we've always had an interest in thinking about it through the lens of use cases. So the global forum's membership base isn't only the technology providers, the network builders. It includes members who represent different industry focus areas, and that's really been since the beginning."

"Also that low latency, high bandwidth connectivity gives you flexibility in where you actually place data centers. So you could place data centers in areas that are easier to power, easier to cool for example, maybe not in the core of an urban environment, maybe just slightly outside of a city closer to a water source for cooling or as a power source, or closer to to a wind farm or solar farm."

Footnotes

• What is latency?
• Is latency always important?
• The answer to data center sustainability? Industry rallies around light-based networking systems

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Digital sovereignty is an issue that has been bubbling away in the background of IT for some time but doesn’t often see the limelight. In this episode of the ITPro Podcast, we’ve decided to change that.

From sovereign clouds to AI, Jane McCallion and Ross Kelly dig into what digital sovereignty is, how it’s being used, and its relationship with AI, cloud, and national data regulations.

Highlights

“The World Economic Forum describes digital sovereignty as the ability to have control over your own digital destiny andI think that's a really great way of describing it. And when you look at how the EU has positioned itself in recent years, that certainly is the key focus there – it's all about … maintaining control.”

“You can't understate the impact of regulatory compliance in the EU – that's the huge driving factor, Microsoft, AWS, Oracle, Google Cloud, they wouldn't be bending over backwards if they didn't know the risks there. And for individual organizations as well as customers of these providers, they're the ones that are pushing for this because they're conscious of their compliance as well.”

Related links

• Sovereign cloud services are now the “bare minimum” expected by customers, and hyperscalers are scrambling to meet demand
• What the new Microsoft Sovereign Cloud push means for European customers
• AWS says only Europeans will run its European Sovereign Cloud service
• What is a sovereign cloud?
• SAP wants to take data sovereignty to the next level with new 'on-site' infrastructure options
• HPE launches exclusive sovereign cloud offering for the channel

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In a recent episode of the podcast, we discussed the potential for AI to actually replace developer jobs. This is a complicated issue, as one has to consider both the accuracy of outputs – how well LLMs can code – as well as what execs think it can do.

Well, AWS CEO Matt Garman has weighed in this month, calling replacing devs with AI “the dumbest thing” he’s ever heard. Elsewhere in August, Cisco has engaged in a round of layoffs, despite healthy figures in its recent financial report.

What does all this mean for tech jobs at large?

In this episode Jane and Rory welcome back Ross Kelly, ITPro’s news and analysis editor, to explain why tech jobs have become such a hot talking point this August.

Highlights

"Microsoft's been so vocal in AI over the last two years because it was the first mover, the early starter so to speak, in this iteration of the AI race. AWS is, when you look at the areas that they've operated in as a trio in the cloud industry, AWS is the old guard. It's perhaps a little bit more cautious conservative in that regard."

"This isn't something new. We had small rounds of cuts at Microsoft earlier this summer and engineers were disproportionately affected by that. I don't think it necessarily signals anything to do with AI, but I think more the fact that Cisco's just reported some seriously strong financial results."

"A big talking point within the financial report is around AI, infrastructure and services, a big revenue driver there. Cisco has been on a real, I want to say warpath, but they've been on a big push here over the last 18 months."

Footnotes

• AWS CEO Matt Garman just said what everyone is thinking about AI replacing software developers
• Software engineers among hardest hit in latest Cisco layoffs
• Microsoft layoffs set to hit 9,000 staff in biggest round of cuts since 2023
• Fresh Microsoft layoffs hit software engineering roles, documents show
• Microsoft says these 10 jobs are at highest risk of being upended by AI – but experts say there's nothing to worry about yet
• This Stanford study shows AI is starting to take jobs – and those identified as highest risk are eerily similar to a recent Microsoft study

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Every now and then, international law enforcement announces a stunning takedown of a cyber crime group.

Typically realized in the form of website shutdowns, in which the National Crime Agency logo is emblazoned across the dark web site of would-be hackers, these are powerful PR moves to show that cyber crime doesn’t always pay – and the seriousness with which law enforcement approaches these crimes.

But the truth is, hackers continue to operate. And sometimes, the very groups that have been billed done and dusted simply reemerge under a new site, new servers, or with a fresh coat of paint. What can we learn from this cycle – and does the industry need to take a different approach?

In this episode, Rory is once again joined by Ross Kelly, ITPro’s news and analysis editor, to explore some of the most prominent cyber crime gang takedowns we’ve had recently and what it means for the sector.

Highlights

"What you mentioned around, you know, data being leaked, that's vital intelligence for law enforcement, for threat researchers, and that's the big takeaway from a lot of these takedowns, I guess. In the wake of that, you're seizing domains, you're seizing servers, you're getting really valuable information on how these organizations work."

"The Veeam report said payments rose to an average of $1.1 3 million. And that's a 104% increase compared to the first quarter of this year. You know, the median payment rose two fold to $400,000, so it's high stakes. At the same time, though, we are seeing a stronger approach by enterprises. We had coverage out today as well, mentioning the fact that organizations are just outright refusing to pay and a part of that is down to the fact that they're really implementing more robust backup and recovery."

"With the Cobalt Strike situation, this is a really great example of enterprises teaming up law enforcement also having a critical role to play. The numbers speak for themselves: 200 malicious domains, 600 servers taken down by Europol. And misuse of the tool decreased by 80%, I mean that's a significant decrease there and I think it's an excellent example of the real impact that coordinated takedowns can have."

Footnotes

• BlackSuit ransomware gang taken down in latest law enforcement sting – but members have already formed a new group
• Cobalt Strike abusers have been dealt a hammer blow: An "aggressive" takedown campaign by Fortra and Microsoft shuttered over 200 malicious domains – and it’s cut the misuse of the tool by 80%
• Hundreds of Cobalt Strike servers have been taken offline in a major law enforcement sting
• Ransomware victims are refusing to play ball with hackers – just 17% of enterprises have paid up so far in 2025, marking an all-time low
• Average ransom payment doubles in a single quarter
• 75% of UK business leaders are willing to risk criminal penalties to pay ransoms
• Can the UK ban ransomware payments?
• LockBit could be done and dusted after NCA operation gained access to admin environments, source code, and affiliate info
• LockBit ransomware group falls victim to hackers itself
• The Zservers takedown is another big win for law enforcement
• ‘I take pleasure in thinking I can rid society of at least some of them’: A cyber vigilante is dumping information on notorious ransomware criminals – and security experts say police will be keeping close tabs

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For years, we humanities graduates have been told variations of the following message: you’re better off learning to code, because we’ll always need developers but writers will go the way of the dodo.

But advances in AI since 2022 have put this to the test. While human writers are no doubt being forced to compete with AI-written content, developers are also being asked to outsource more and more of their work to large language models in a bid for improved productivity.

While AI-generated code can be quick to produce and efficient to run, it also comes with associated risks such as overlooked vulnerabilities.

Are developers actually going to lose their jobs to the machine?

Highlights

"84% of developers now use AI or plan to use AI daily. But 46% of those same respondents have said they basically don't trust the accuracy of AI code. 61.7% also said they have ethical or security concerns about AI code. So forget the saturation. Even people who are using it are saying, Yeah, you know, I use it, but that doesn't mean I trust it."

"Okay, but what if we need people who have experience? What then? How do people get that experience? If junior jobs have gone, what happens when there's nobody available to double check these codebase translations?"

"Like you say, it's very murky to say the 25% of internal code, or 20 to 30% of internal code, is AI generated. Okay well, as you say, that's not production. And also, what is this internal code doing? Because if it's just 20% that does the stuff like, it checks that the coffee machine isn't about to run out of beans then, yeah, fine. "

Footnotes

• 84% of software developers are now using AI, but nearly half 'don't trust' the technology over accuracy concerns
• Researchers tested over 100 leading AI models on coding tasks — nearly half produced glaring security flaws
• Claude Opus 4.1
• Google CEO says more than 25% of the company's code is now AI-generated – is this the future of software development?
• Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella joins Google’s Sundar Pichai in revealing the scale of AI-generated code at the tech giant
• AI-generated code risks: What CISOs need to know

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As the old saying goes, it never rains but it pours. And, seeing how we’re based in the UK, it would be fitting that the month this most accurately described in 2025 so far has been July.

In the past four weeks, two almighty security stories have broken, with far-reaching implications for the tech sector and beyond. First, we learned that the China-backed hacking group Salt Typhoon had critically breached the US National Guard for more than a year – and has potentially gone undetected in other US military networks.

Later in the month, Microsoft revealed a major vulnerability in on-premises Sharepoint servers, sounding the alarm for users to patch with urgency – but the days after have seen attack after successful attack carried out.

In this episode Jane welcomes back Ross Kelly, ITPro’s news and analysis editor, to explore what happened to make July such a bad month for cybersecurity.

Highlights

"The figures from the DoD report are quite concerning the exfiltrated network configuration files to "enable cyber intrusion elsewhere". And between January 2023 and March 2024, [they] stole 1400 plus configuration files – those are associated with 70 US government critical infrastructure, identities, 12 sectors. You know, that's devastating."

"We keep seeing incidents like this and there was a similar incident by a similarly named group, Volt Typhoon, which managed to stay under the radar in the US electric grid for around a year. So this is precisely what these state affiliated, I guess you could say, groups intend to do. They like to dig their claws into something and see how it, to put it very casually, see how it goes. "

"I think it's safe to say Microsoft said 'patch now, please, please patch'. It's worth noting as well that Microsoft admitted that it saw hackers trying to exploit this flaw as early as 7 July."

Footnotes

• ‘All US forces must now assume their networks are compromised’ after Salt Typhoon breach
• FCC orders telcos to sharpen up security after Salt Typhoon chaos
• UK cyber experts on red alert after Salt Typhoon attacks on US telcos
• Salt Typhoon hacker group recorded conversations of ‘very senior’ US political figures
• 300 days under the radar: How Volt Typhoon eluded detection in the US electric grid for nearly a year
• Microsoft’s new SharePoint vulnerability – everything you need to know
• NCSC says ‘limited number’ of UK firms affected by SharePoint attack as global impact spreads
• SharePoint flaw: Microsoft says hackers deploying ransomware

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Ransomware payments could soon be a thing of the past in the UK – at least that’s the hope of new controls and mandatory reporting requirements to prevent ransomware from inflicting damage on UK businesses.

Under government proposals, public bodies and operators of critical national infrastructure would be banned from paying up when they’re hit by ransomware – and other businesses would have to be transparent when they decide to cough up the cash.

But can we really put a lid on ransomware? And might the new rules have unintended negative consequences?

In this episode, Jane and Rory discuss the UK government’s new ransomware payment ban and what it could mean for the sector.

Highlights

"You can see why ransomware is is such a lucrative operation for these threat groups, because for some businesses, there's very little argument. You know, 'okay, we plan for this, here's the cash, can we have our data back?.' It's a pretty seamless operation."

"There's been a mixed response from the cybersecurity industry. So some have praised it as a bit of a no brainer, others have warned that it really doesn't do very much to defend businesses, as we've been discussing. Jonathan Wright, who is a partner in the UK Data privacy and cybersecurity practice at Hunton, Andrews Kurth LLP law firm, said that the ban risks punishing the victims."

"We are always covering cases of ransomware causing serious damage to businesses and we recently, in fact, published a piece that said that cyber attacks cost UK businesses alone £64 billion a year. That's including ransom payments, but also staff overtime, lost business and all the other associated costs. So it's clear that it has a major impact on the economy."

Footnotes

• Nearly half of MSPs admit to having a ransomware kitty
• A ransomware payments ban risks criminalizing victims
• The end of ransomware payments: How businesses fit into the fight
• Building ransomware resilience to avoid paying out
• UK government officials consider banning ransomware payments

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Cyber attacks can feel a layer detached from the real world. Yes, businesses frequently see IP stolen, get frozen out of systems, or have data wiped by malicious actors. But if you haven’t got your finger on the pulse, cyber attacks can also fail to register in your day to day.

But there are instances where cyber attacks come crashing into the lives of everyday people, and become impossible to ignore: when attackers go after critical infrastructure and operational technology.

Breaches and malware attacks at power and water plants, against core supply chain organizations, or against transport networks can all cause catastrophic damage, enormous financial losses – and even lead to deaths. What are some of the groups leading the charge against critical infrastructure, how are groups targeting operational technology – and what can we do to protect that infrastructure we hold most dear?

In this episode, Rory speaks with Magpie Graham, technical director of intel and services at Dragos, to discuss attacks on operational technology, critical infrastructure, and the future of large-scale cyber attacks.

Highlights

"We're used to hearing about attacks against a server, maybe it's a mail server, could be a firewall, something in the periphery that is exposed to the internet. But unfortunately, the cyber hygiene around a lot of OT systems is so poor that there is actually exposure to the direct Internet with a service that would actually allow manipulation of those processes within an OT environment, often not even requiring any form of authentication, never mind the requirement to exploit that software that's running."

"When you're looking at endpoints of a network where four or five different groups be egressing from, it's not always easy to categorize which group is it that's interested in which target, or at what point in their larger operational plan are they. Is this reconnaissance we're seeing? Are they scanning external infrastructure to look for vulnerabilities, or is this actually part of a dedicated, focused intrusion at a specific organization?"

"So something we try to do whenever a bulletin comes in from a vendor is to actually say, if you can't patch, you can take these additional steps. And it could be as simple as blocking a port, it could be that you re-architect part of the network, you don't have to necessarily have brilliantly segregated, distinct networks for all of your OT and your different processes that are firewalled off from each other. I mean, ideally you should, but if you can't maybe that piece of equipment should be behind an additional firewall."

Footnotes

• Manufacturing firms are struggling to handle rising OT security threats
• 300 days under the radar: How Volt Typhoon eluded detection in the US electric grid for nearly a year
• Volt Typhoon is wreaking havoc again – this time on US internet providers
• Microsoft: Russia increasingly timing cyber attacks with missile strikes in Ukraine

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The level to which firms are already using AI varies according to technological maturity, strategic focus, and on an industry by industry basis.

But what’s clear is that from the smallest to the largest businesses, the landscape is already shifting. We’ve spoken about AI agents on the podcast before – the promise of autonomous AI activity – but it’s only now that businesses are beginning to put more faith in these tools.

How is AI already being used to improve business processes? And what will progress in the sector look like?

In this episode, Rory speaks to Oliver Parker, VP AI GTM at Google Cloud, to explore some of the practical ways AI is changing organizations from startups to the enterprise.

Highlights

“So, I often say to clients, and it sounds a little cliche, yes, it's about use cases but it's about a use case with a business case. And that business case could be changing NPS scores, it could be around basket conversion if you're a retailer, it could be around citizenship, if you're in the public sector, and planning documents like I referenced earlier.”

“There's sort of two schools of thought, which is, everything looks leaner going forward, everyone's a 10x, I can be a 10x go to market leader, I can be a 10x engineer. So we don't need more of me, because I'm doing 10 more. So I think that's one school of thought, but I still think people are going to continue hiring.”

“I mean, obviously at an engineering level and developers, you're looking for very strong backgrounds and engineering development, but also people that have used and use a lot of these tools on a day to day basis.”

Footnotes

• The UK government is teaming up with Google Cloud to kill public sector legacy tech
• Google Cloud announces new data residency flexibility for UK firms, accelerator for regional startups
• Enterprises are worried about agentic AI security risks – Gartner says the answer is just adding more AI agents
• How effective are AI agents?
• IT leaders are less AI-ready than they were a year ago, says Cisco report

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