September 26, 2026

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Saturday! It’s also the end of Q3, which means it’s time for our quarterly review. Some of our biggest stories from the past few months featured IT lessons from Walmart, looked at the rise of open-source and open-weight AI, and more.

In today’s edition:

🛒 Scan do attitude

🤖 Open-weight lifting

🏢 Unhoused to C-suite

—Brianna Monsanto, Patrick Kulp, Eoin Higgins

IT STRATEGY

Tagging along

A collage of different steps of the Walmart supply chain process: a crane loading goods onto a truck, the facade of the Walmart office building in Silicon Valley, and a person looking at logistics on an iPad.

Illustration: Morning Brew Design, Photos: Adobe Stock

You don’t need to be a tech-savvy retail giant to act like one, at least when it comes to IT.

At this year’s Walmart Associates Week in Northwest Arkansas, tech took center stage. IT Brew’s walkthrough of a working Walmart Supercenter during the conference not only peeled back the curtain on the tech enabling Walmart associates to serve customers more efficiently, but also highlighted lessons small retailers can borrow from the retail giant’s IT playbook.

Store run. Our June trip to the Walmart Supercenter wasn’t your average grocery run. While there, we heard from Brooks Forrest, VP of associate tools at Walmart, about the rail-based digital shelf labels (DSLs) that allow select stores to update item prices with the touch of a button.

Forrest said DSLs have been implemented in more than 2,300 Walmart stores today, with plans to expand: “We’ll be at Walmart US as a full chain by the end of this year, so it’s a really sizable rollout for this, and we’re really excited about seeing the benefit already.”

More on Walmart’s playbook.—BM

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IT STRATEGY

No token expense

Collage showing a locked padlock on the left side with tech-y looking lines trapped inside the keyhole. On the right, the padlock is unlocked and the tech-y lines are free flowing in the background.

Illustration: Shannon May, Photos: Unsplash

For the last year or so, Fitz Nowlan watched with interest as Chinese open-weight models narrowed the performance gap against those offered by big-name labs.

The VP of AI and architecture for IT software company SmartBear, Nowlan said there are big potential draws to these free-to-download models, like Z.ai’s GLM-5 or DeepSeek v4: cost-efficiency, lower latency, and avoiding the risk that a lab could create a competing software product.

Now he’s undertaking an extensive experiment to see where these models might make financial sense.

“We’re in the throes of that investigation now,” Nowlan said. “If we have the cost-benefit in our favor, we can start routing some of those prompts to the open-weight model.”

Weighty decisions.—PK

IT STRATEGY

Door opener

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.

Always on the rise.—EH

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patch notes

Francis Scialabba

Today’s top IT reads.

Stat: 974. That’s how many fixes for CVEs were listed in Microsoft’s September 2026 Patch Tuesday release, a new record. (Infosecurity)

Quote: “The world is still doing security at human speed.”—Jeff Williams, founder of Contrast Security, on the need to patch cybersecurity issues discovered by AI scanners (Dark Reading)

Read: How junior software engineers are evolving to work with AI. (IEEE Spectrum)

Focus time: Scaling your team? Learn how to give them time back for deep work in Hubstaff’s Technical Leader’s Productivity Playbook. Get the scoop on detecting bottlenecks early, leveraging workforce data, + more. Download your copy.*

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Written by Brianna Monsanto, Patrick Kulp, and Eoin Higgins

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