November 04, 2026

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Wednesday! It’s also National Candy Day, so set out a giant bowl of leftover Halloween candy on your desk. That might buy you a lot of goodwill the next time you need to subject everyone to an unscheduled software update.

In today’s edition:

📝 Best-laid plans

🪙 Token payment

🤖 Agent in charge

—Caroline Nihill, Eoin Higgins

CLOUD

Big plans

Illustration of a yellow diamond-shaped traffic sign that says

Niv Bavarsky

For many organizations, IT modernization feels like ascending Mt. Everest: a steep climb that must be completed in too little time, with dangers at every turn.

Rather than panic, experts suggest, organizations should clearly define the scope for any modernization project, and ensure that new IT projects are helping increase business value.

Derek Hanson, field CTO at Yubico, told IT Brew that teams starting on a modernization project should ask themselves whether they are upgrading infrastructure for new business capabilities and an improved experience, or just upgrading services for the “sake of IT.”

“When evaluating when to do an IT project, it needs to be a situation where the scales are heavily tipped in favor of either reducing risk or improving the actual business outcome of the IT system,” Hanson said.

Planning for the future.—CN

Sponsored By Softr

AI builds faster than IT

Business teams can now spin up AI agents and internal apps with startling ease. Governance, meanwhile, is still looking for their invite. 84% of CIOs say employees are creating agents and applications faster than IT can govern them.

The result can be an inheritance of apps to secure, maintain, and support, even when IT didn’t build them.

The guide, From Shadow AI to Governed Vibe-Coded Apps, explores how CIOs can give teams room to solve problems with clear guardrails. It also shows how IT can maintain visibility into applications, connected data, users, and permissions, then apply shared governance controls without rebuilding them for every app. That way, employees keep creating and IT keeps its weekends.

CIOs can explore how business teams can build useful tools without making IT the default support desk. See how your company can benefit when you download the guide.

IT STRATEGY

Token effort

Collage illustration showing a set of four tokens in three-quarter view and overlapping each other - each one is a different color, orange, blue, pink, purple, and each has an abstract futuristic pattern on it.

Nick Iluzada

Like open-mic nights, it can sometimes seem like anything goes when it comes to AI companies pricing tokens.

Some organizations are pushing for more standardization around token costs. For example, as IT Brew has previously reported, the Tokenomics Foundation has been trying to “standardize” the value of AI.

Kirstie Tiernan, a principal and national AI lead at BDO, a national advisory firm, said that without a predictable, reliable cost structure for AI spend, finance teams and chief financial officers can become confused. This is potentially compounded by the sheer amount of AI vendors to choose from, as well as a lack of education around tokens and pricing.

“[Vendors] should be competing on their quality, on the accuracy, on the availability and the reliability at which they’re providing their services,” Tiernan said. “Without that level of standardization, it’s just so hard.”

By the same token.—CN

IT OPERATIONS

Mind the (agent) gap

Toy robots sticking up out of holes as in the game Whack-a-Mole

Illustration: Morning Brew Inc., Photos: Adobe Stock

AI agents have been a hot topic for IT teams this year, and as they rise in importance, more companies are issuing tools to manage the secure deployment of the technology.

A recent survey from Optro found that implementing AI agents comes with negative effects. Around a third of organizations (34%) said they had acted on improper information from an agent. But stats like that aren’t necessarily impacting how agents are set loose in the organization, as 45% of respondents reported they know or suspect that deployment is often done “without formal approval or review.”

Optro GM of AI Governance Guru Sethupathy told IT Brew that as agents connect across products, compliance networks, and risk frameworks will require layering governance. Confidence in guardrails is key; developers are often faced with a proliferation of agents both inside and outside the enterprise.

In the driver’s seat.—EH

patch notes

Francis Scialabba

Today’s top IT reads.

Stat: Every 14 seconds. That’s how rapidly AWS installs new AI accelerators (i.e., a specialized piece of hardware for AI workloads) in its datacenters, according to Amazon CEO Andy Jassy. (The Register)

Quote: “We didn’t want to be beholden to any given model.”—Hari Gopalkrishnan, chief technology and information officer at Bank of America, on the bank’s decision to build an orchestration layer that sends queries to cost-effective AI models (CIO Dive)

Read: What happened when a journalist used AI to generate a scientific research paper? (IEEE Spectrum)

The new app rush: Teams are building new apps faster, yet 84% of CIOs say employees outpace IT’s ability to govern. This guide shows how teams can build apps with clear guardrails.*

^{*A message from our sponsor.}

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Written by Caroline Nihill and Eoin Higgins

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