July 22, 2026

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Hello, it’s Wednesday! Forget snacking: late-night impulse purchases are the new norm. Hope that explains your 12 a.m. purchase of coasters that look like 3.5-inch floppy disks.

In today’s edition:

🤏 Teeny-tiny

👍 Standard issue

🧱 Solid foundation

—Brianna Monsanto, Billy Hurley

IT STRATEGY

Tiny but mighty!

images of workers at a table together working on computers

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Software engineering teams are slimming down.

According to Gartner, six in 10 companies will adopt smaller software engineering teams at scale by 2029. The research firm refers to these leaner crews as “tiny teams.”

Small world. Gartner Principal Analyst Aliyah Camacho credits the emergence of tiny teams to AI taking away the grunt work from engineers, allowing for the compression of different roles.

“For example, software engineers or developers can take on more product management or product ownership type of roles,” Camacho told IT Brew. “That’s one example of roles that we see coming together, and as a result, we’re seeing that the size of teams will get smaller, hence the tiny teams.”

Is your company well-suited for tiny teams?—BM

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IT STRATEGY

Standard practices

Photo collage of an AI icon in between two hands pointing at each other contained within abstract shapes.

Illustration: Morning Brew Design, Photos: Adobe Stock

How is maintaining data standards like listening to a server recite the specials at a fancy restaurant? Sometimes you get more information than you need.

That happens in Kyle McCluskey’s line of work as a lead AI solutions engineer at business-strategy partner TXI. Recently, McCluskey helped a railcar leasing company comb through a mountain of repair-related report data—3 million records—so that employees could gain AI-powered insights for questions like: How much should this job cost? And, who should pay for it?

Even structured data sets like railway service forms and specific jobs like a ladder replacement—with established codes and fields—can be the “wild west,” according to TXI CEO Mark Rickmeier; some codes entered by repairers, for example, are inaccurate.

“What was the invoice? Where did the shop come from? Who is the person that did it? That’s all kind of noise that doesn’t help our model,” McCluskey told IT Brew.

One IT pros’ non-negotiable data-governance standards.—BH

IT STRATEGY

Back to basics

Chris Caldwell

Chili’s is making some big changes to their stores, and we’re not talking about menu items.

For the past two years, Chris Caldwell, CIO of Brinker International, which oversees the Chili’s brand, has been cooking up a digital transformation across the country. But instead of a flashy, AI-centric initiative, Caldwell has focused on fixing the IT basics that have burdened Chili’s team members, like outdated point of sales (POS) and kitchen display system (KDS).

“We’re chasing fundamental, foundational problems within our business that are going to improve the experience, improve food service or atmosphere in our restaurants,” Caldwell said. “That’s our guiding principle.”

Caldwell’s tips for knowing when to ditch legacy tech.—BM

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patch notes

Francis Scialabba

Today’s top IT reads.

Stat: $185,000. That’s about the average salary of an AI security engineer, according to SANS. (ITPro)

Quote: “Situations are almost always more nuanced than a ban accounts for.”—Andy Maus, head of cyber recovery services at DriveSavers, on why banning ransomware payments to attackers isn’t a silver bullet (Financial Times)

Read: Computer science enrollment has dropped for the first time in two decades. (Business Insider)

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Secret ingredient: AI

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Learn how IT professionals in the restaurant industry are aiming to clean up their kitchens tech stacks to support AI agents.

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Written by Brianna Monsanto and Billy Hurley

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☕ Tiny teams!