August 18, 2026

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It’s Tuesday! Ever wished a robot could manage your calendar? New AI platforms are helping organizations manage day-to-day scheduling, including in complicated environments like hospitals.

In today’s edition:

📦 Copy that

📉 Data debt

🤹 Ch-ch-changes

—Brianna Monsanto, Caroline Nihill

SOFTWARE

Use it or lose it

Illustration: Brittany Holloway-Brown, Photos: Adobe Stock

Like broccoli on a finicky toddler’s dinner plate, AI features in business software are often left untouched.

According to a recent Banyan Software report, 51% of business software operators saw fewer than one in four customers use the AI capabilities that shipped with a software product. The findings are based on more than 260 survey responses from founders and CEOs of software companies that focus on vertical markets (i.e., specific industries).

What’s the cause? Max Risen, Banyan Software’s president of M&A, told IT Brew the low usage rates of AI features likely stem from companies “building for the sake of building and not necessarily building to solve specific problems.”

Risen added, “They’re building things that they think are really cool that customers will want, but more often than not, we found that they’re missing the mark of actually driving customer value.”

User not found.—BM

Sponsored By SentinelOne

Stress-test your stack

Attackers have leveled up. Today’s threats move at the speed of AI with enterprise-grade sophistication—and you’re at risk if your EDR stack can’t keep up.

Tune in as SentinelOne experts Chris Hosking and Anthony La Scala debunk five EDR myths in The Endpoint Stress Test webinar. They’re pressure-testing common misconceptions in endpoint security against what growing organizations actually need.

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what modern detection catches that legacy EDR wasn’t built for
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Modernizing your endpoint infrastructure doesn’t mean increasing headcount. Learn more.

IT OPERATIONS

Debt or alive

Illustration of three arms handing money to a robot hand with

Getty Images

Debt’s no laughing matter—especially when it involves the data a company needs to make decisions and build AI tools.

Aaron McCray, field CISO and executive technology strategist at IT provider CDW, defines data debt as “poorly classified, overly permissioned, and unmeshed data that’s grown exponentially over the years.” When organizations don’t have the necessary visibility and management tools to wrangle their data, that debt can become a serious problem.

McCray suggested that most organizations “typically only use about 30% of their data, and the remaining 70% is often unstructured.” That can sometimes lead to issues for the IT team: Some 94% of organizations are struggling to manage their unstructured data, according to a survey of 1,000 companies in the US, UK, France, and DACH (Germany, Austria, Switzerland) regions by Nasuni.

All roads lead to AI. McCray said that issues with data governance at most organizations extend beyond automated tools and platforms, touching fundamentals such as how an enterprise stores and classifies its data.

Never break the (data) chain.—CN

IT OPERATIONS

AI x PM

Lorilyn McCue

What do aviation and product management have in common? In both cases, you’re trying to keep a complicated thing running.

Lorilyn McCue would know. Prior to her decade-long run in the product management world, McCue started out her career in the US Army, where she flew Apache helicopters all around the world.

“I got to fly around the States. I got to fly in Korea. I flew in Iraq for a year, and that was like a pretty cool job,” McCue said.

McCue—now an AI product manager for AI productivity company Superhuman—said being a pilot and a project manager both have an adventurous feel and evoke the feeling of “going into the unknown.”

Been there, done that!—BM

patch notes

Francis Scialabba

Today’s top IT reads.

Stat: $5. That’s the electricity cost for the first half-hour flight by a battery-electric aircraft the size of a “small regional airliner.” (Ars Technica)

Quote: “In China, these things are just walking around the streets…They have so much more experience than we do.”—Teddy Haggerty, founder of Robo Inc., on the challenges facing US production of humanoid robots (the New York Times)

Read: The US court system will begin publicly disclosing how often judges authorized US government use of hacking tools and spyware in wiretaps—in 2029. (TechCrunch)

EDR that stacks up: Missing alerts and detections? Learn what it takes to modernize your EDR stack in this webinar from SentinelOne. Tune in as SentinelOne experts chat through how to scale without adding headcount.*

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Written by Brianna Monsanto and Caroline Nihill

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