September 15, 2026

Presented By

It’s Tuesday, and National IT Professionals Day! Hopefully you’re treated to free coffee and doughnuts instead of being asked to fix everyone’s laptops.

In today’s edition:

🏰 Brick by brick

🏃 Run it back

🤖 Workin’ 9 to 5

—Brianna Monsanto, Billy Hurley, Caroline Nihill, Eoin Higgins, Patrick Kulp

IT STRATEGY

Want a side of AI with that?

A White Castle restaurant sign against a purple background with lines of code around it.

Morning Brew Inc, Photo: Adobe Stock

White Castle may be known for its miniature sliders, but its digital transformation plans are anything but tiny.

For the past six years, the fast food burger chain has cooked up automation initiatives across its stores to help employees better serve customers.

Meet Julia. Part of White Castle’s digital transformation efforts have revolved around Julia, a drive-thru AI voice assistant. White Castle CIO Susan Carroll-Boser told IT Brew that Julia helps drive-thru employees “be a little bit less of an octopus.”

“They’re trying to do five or six different things. They’re trying to talk to and be pleasant in the drive-thru. They’re trying to take money from the car that came up. They are trying to hand food out. They’re trying to have a memorable moment at the window where they actually talk to people and are friendly,” Carroll-Boser said. “And that’s a lot to ask.”

More on fry-cook robots and drive-thru AI.—BM

Sponsored By Salesforce

It was all a dream

While we don’t know what magazines you used to read, big launches, bold ideas and more are now streaming on Salesforce+.

Dreamforce streams free from anywhere with 400+ sessions, virtual hands-on trainings, and some of the world’s most influential voices.

Here are three sessions you can't miss:

Dreamforce Main Keynote unveiling announcements and innovations shaping the agentic enterprise.
AIforce Keynote breaking down how you can get the AI you want, the trust you need, and the AI ROI your enterprise demands.
Security Keynote explaining how to secure and govern agentic enterprises while accelerating AI with trust, visibility, and guardrails.

Plus, get a first look at Claudeforce and see how Salesforce and Anthropic are bringing Claude together with trusted Salesforce data, permissions, and governance.

Stream Dreamforce live for free.

IT OPERATIONS

Walk before you runbook

A robot hand being trained on a book by a human hand

Getty Images

Nobody likes writing a runbook, according to Todd Thorsen, CISO at data resilience and protection platform CrashPlan.

While runbooks’ standardized instructions for go-to IT problems can prove helpful for both new hires and on-call team members, producing these guides is “extra added overhead,” Thorsen said.

An IT pro has enough going on without spending hours laying out the directions for hardening a Ubuntu server or troubleshooting API latency with a payment platform.

But that extra workload hasn’t stopped Thorsen’s team from writing about 20 runbooks for their organization, including one on how to deploy vulnerability sensors in a new cloud environment.

Running to embrace the runbook.—BH

IT STRATEGY

Workin’ bot

Amelia Kinsinger

Are AI agents ready for the big leagues? Few companies can explain what happens when an AI agent misreads a permission, burns through a token budget like Pac-Man on a power pellet, or gets asked to do something a little too human. IT Brew’s latest e-book breaks down where agentic AI actually stands today—who’s deploying it, what’s breaking, and what your CFO and security team should be asking before you hand agents the keys.

What you’ll learn:

How companies like JPMorgan Chase and Yum! are actually putting AI agents to work inside their tech stacks—and where those deployments are hitting real limits.
Why “tokenmaxxing” is quietly becoming a budget line item, and how to keep agentic AI from eating your margins.
The guardrails that cybersecurity teams are (and aren’t) putting in place to stop agents from touching data or systems they shouldn’t.

Making agents work for you.—CN, BM, EH, PK

Sponsored By Eaton

Deal you back in? Ace of Uptime, the decision-based online card game built around real IT scenarios, is back for National IT Pro Day. This time with new decks built around the problems IT pros deal with every day. Can you stand up to these new challenges?

What’s your most common “this will fix it” move?

🔁 Restart everything

⚡ Add more power and hope for the best

🙈 Ignore it until it’s definitely a problem

👀 “Let’s monitor it” (and circle back later)

patch notes

Francis Scialabba

Today’s top IT reads.

Stat: 8.7 million. That’s how many customers have had their PII exposed after a cyberattack affected three UK airports. (CPO Magazine)

Quote: “I do think that the vision of recursive self-improvement is spooking people.”—Nat Soares, a computer scientist at MIRA and coauthor of If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, said about the fears around human destruction at the hands of AI (Wired)

Read: Rogue AI agents hate CAPTCHA as much as everyone else. (TechCrunch)

Powered by dreamers: Dreamforce is a three-day virtual event from Salesforce with 400+ sessions, virtual hands-on trainings, and some of the world’s most influential voices. Stream Dreamforce live for free.*

^{*A message from our sponsor.}

Jobs

CollabWORK connects you to the hidden job market through IT Brew and other trusted channels. Browse roles curated specifically for this community by clicking through to the job board.

Share the Brew

Share the Brew, watch your referral count climb, and unlock brag-worthy swag.

Your friends get smarter. You get rewarded. Win-win.

Your referral count: 0

Click to Share

Or copy & paste your referral link to others:
itbrew.com/r/?kid=71df84e8

Written by Brianna Monsanto, Billy Hurley, Caroline Nihill, Eoin Higgins, and Patrick Kulp

Was this email forwarded to you? Sign up here.

Get smarter in just 5 minutes

Tech & AI News: Tech Brew
Markets News: Brew Markets
Real Estate News: The Playbook
Money & Career: Bossy

Take The Brew to work

Interested in podcasts?

Check out ours here.

ADVERTISE//CAREERS//SHOP//FAQ

Update your email preferences or unsubscribe here.
View our privacy policy here.

Copyright © 2026 Morning Brew Inc. All rights reserved.
22 W 19th St, 4th Floor, New York, NY 10011

☕ Inside the castle