August 31, 2026

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It’s Monday! On this day, in 1798, the US had its first bank robbery—a heist of $162,821 (which was ultimately foiled, apparently, when the thief tried to deposit the money at that bank). There’s an IT lesson here, believe it or not: Keep your physical access controls strong and any lock combinations to yourself.

In today’s edition:

🔐 CSO journey

🤖 Tokenomics 101

⌨️ Bug spray

—Eoin Higgins, Patrick Kulp, Caroline Nihill

IT STRATEGY

Opening doors

Anthony Moisant

For some lucky people, their career is also a mission—for Anthony Moisant, Indeed CIO and CSO, his path began as a young person experiencing homelessness and a high school dropout in Chicago.

His nontraditional journey gave Moisant a perspective on the need for community—and for opening doors.

“Coming out of Yale, coming out of Princeton, coming out of Harvard and Stanford, you have some opportunities that are just green lights for you,” Moisant told IT Brew. “When you’re underprivileged, when you’re a dropout, and you don’t have those green lights, you’ve got to work really, really hard—it’s imperative that people help you and open the doors.”

Forward path. Moisant joined the Navy in 1993, a decision that he said saved him from going down a bad path. An early interest in computing gave him a leg up and offered a different future.

“I had taught myself how to code early on when I was 11 years old, so I was very adept from a technology perspective—and when I joined the military, not a lot of people were,” Moisant said. “It was one of these things where I had just a tremendous amount of opportunity simply because I had fluency over technology.”

The next stop for Moisant? Silicon Valley.—EH

Sponsored By SentinelOne

You can’t secure what you can’t see

Teams are adopting AI faster than they can secure it. Shadow AI, leaky prompts, and exposed infrastructure are the new blind spots. SentinelOne’s Securing AI Bootcamp was created to help support the security pros tackling the security gap.

Join the free virtual event on Sept. 29–30 for sessions covering everything from employee AI usage and shadow AI to cloud + AI infrastructure security and threat intelligence. Plus, you can earn free CPE credits for every session you attend.

Want a sneak peek at the speaker lineup? Day 1 includes four keynotes on the AI threat landscape, emerging security frameworks, + more. Day 2 is full of live global workshops about applying security frameworks and guardrail techniques in practice.

Save your spot.

IT STRATEGY

Token aback

J.R. Storment

Whether token-maxxing or token-scrimping, it seems everyone in the industry would like clarity on what exactly a token is worth.

Companies like JPMorgan Chase, Accenture, Oracle, SAP, IBM, and many others have signed onto Linux Foundation’s new effort to create standards and best practices around assessing the cost and value of AI.

The Tokenomics Foundation’s debut comes after months of evolving business attitudes toward AI spending. Many companies were previously shelling out with abandon to spur adoption. But extravagant token bills have prompted more prudence.

One problem, though, in the words of Tokenomics Foundation Executive Director J.R. Storment, is that “a token is not a token is not a token.” It’s difficult to pin down the value of a token—which technically means a discrete unit of data processed by AI—across different tasks and models.

We spoke with Storment about how his experience heading up the similar cloud spending-focused FinOps Foundation prepared him for this role, how to plan an AI budget, and whether tokenomics is a long-term job in most companies.

Storment shares his advice for CIOs taking on tokens.—PK

WORD OF THE WEEK

Cloud automation aims to reduce the need for manual provisioning, configuration, and maintenance of cloud infrastructure and services.

Cloud automation: As organizations’ cloud setups grow more complex, even the largest IT teams increasingly need automation tools to ensure that clouds keep operating, scale as appropriate, and remain secure against internal and external threats. Learn more.

Sponsored By Bitwarden

Hacker history meets open source. The free and virtual Open Source Security Summit goes live Sept. 17 with cybersecurity journalist and Cult of the Dead Cow author Joseph Menn cracking open hacker history. Explore how hacker culture has shaped today’s security world. IT pros can plug in, geek out, and save a seat.

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7 questions to see if your current tech matches up to modern PCs

Don’t stress the stress test: How to achieve a smoother peak season with plenty of time to fix what breaks

patch notes

Francis Scialabba

Today’s top IT reads.

Stat: 32%. That’s the proportion of people who have told a chatbot something they’ve kept from close friends, family, or medical professionals, according to a research survey of 1,944 US adults. (DuckDuckGo)

Quote: “By the time you’re looking at the bill, you’re dealing with token consumption, cloud infrastructure, multiple AI models, governance tooling, integration work, and increasingly autonomous agents making decisions across systems.”—Shane Cronin, head of FinOps and ITAM services at systems integrator SHI, on the challenge of calculating AI’s total cost of ownership (CIO)

Read: Need a change at work? See if any of these 23 desk accessories do the trick. (PCWorld)

Close security gaps: Security teams can’t protect against threats they can’t see. Join SentinelOne on Sept. 29–30 for Securing AI Bootcamp. Attendees will get the scoop on emerging threats, security frameworks, + guardrail techniques. RSVP here.*

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Written by Eoin Higgins, Patrick Kulp, and Caroline Nihill

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