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Jason Hood 1. Assess: Listen more than you speak  Your first 30 days are for discovery. Your mission is to understand the landscape, not to change it. Schedule meetings not just with your peers, but with the senior engineers who hold institutional knowledge, the sales leaders who hear client complaints and the finance partners who understand the real budget pressures.  I learned this lesson on a major lab transformation. The official documentation was a waterfall-style mess — pristine on paper but hopelessly outdated the moment it was approved. The real source of truth? It wasn’t in a binder. It lived in the heads of three people: a lead architect, a senior developer and a key operator from the business side. So I didn’t spend my first week huddled with VPs. I spent it at a whiteboard with that trio, teasing out what was really going on. And the breakthrough didn’t happen in isolation. It came when we brought IT and business perspectives together in the same room. Those sessions didn’t just give us a map — they built a bridge between two groups that had been working at arm’s length. That bridge saved us months of missteps down the road. 2. Align: Find the ‘burning platform’  After you assess, your next job is to find the one or two “quick wins” that solve a real, recognized pain point. Don’t invent a problem to solve. Find the “burning platform” that everyone already agrees is on fire. Is it the slow development environment? A buggy checkout process? A manual report that takes three days to run? By aligning your first actions with an existing, acknowledged problem, you aren’t asking for trust — you are earning it by being a practical problem-solver. source

The EU AI Act, the European Union’s artificial intelligence regulation, had worldwide impact when it entered force on August 1, 2024. But we’re only halfway through this act: another wave of its provisions take effect this weekend, with more to come next year. The act imposes prohibitions or conditions on AI systems depending on whether their impact is considered unacceptable, high, limited or minimal, with a gradual rollout schedule for the rules. The prohibitions on unacceptable risk AI systems have been in effect since February 2, 2025. On August 2, 2025, measures relating to governance standards, general purpose AI (GPAI) models, and the sanctions regime, among others, will be activated. Certain exemptions mean that full implementation of the law won’t happen until 2030. A quiet beginning While some of the act’s measures — including the ban on unacceptably risky AI systems, the opening of the European AI office, and the provision of guidelines for GPAI models are already technically in effect, they have been largely invisible, according to Víctor Rodríguez, senior lecturer in the Department of Artificial Intelligence at the Polytechnic University of Madrid (UPM). “Since sanctions don’t start until August 2, 2025, we haven’t seen examples with ‘media impact.’ We will see them soon,” he said. Rodriguez alluded to other factors with an impact on regulation, such as the arrival of a new Trump administration in the White House, which may have impacted how the EU’s regulation is perceived. “The European Commission wanted to repeat the success of the Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which served as a beacon for a world that largely tried to replicate the regulation, but this so-called ‘Brussels effect’ may not happen this time,” he says, citing tech giants’ division over the EU’s General Purpose AI Code of Practice that Google agreed to sign but Meta refused. source

“The days are over when hiring is planned way in advance — knowing exactly what each person will do,” Kornfeld says. “An individual is in lower demand if they are an expert at one thing — front end, UI, cloud, database, mobile — instead of being able to contribute in multiple different disciplines.” And there’s potential in nimble generalist groups partnered with AI, argues First Student’s McCormack. “We’re going to start seeing increased demand for those who can navigate across disciplines and integrate capabilities across data, legal, finance, engineering, and marketing,” McCormack says. “In the future, smaller cross-functional teams, supported by AI agents, will be able to deliver outcomes that once required large, siloed departments. I think specialist roles will start to be less critical because AI now offers immediate access to deep domain knowledge.” source

Recently, I had the pleasure of speaking with Tiernan Ray for The Technology Letter, where we discussed how observability is transforming and how Dynatrace is navigating industry changes. I wanted to take a moment to expand on the key themes we touched on in our conversation. Observability is no longer just for IT Ops Observability is no longer just about monitoring IT systems. It’s about understanding and automating the entire digital ecosystem. From developers leveraging platform engineering tools to optimize application performance, to Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) ensuring resilience, and executives gaining critical business insights, observability increases the velocity of innovation across every level of an organization. Today, observability is integral to the entire software development lifecycle. It’s not just for IT Ops but a critical capability for platform engineering, SREs, developers, as well as business and IT executives. In fact, Observability for Developers was a major focus for us at Perform 2025, and will continue to be an area of investment and value to our customers. Developers are increasingly embedding observability directly into their applications, allowing them to analyze performance in real-time and optimize accordingly. This shift is driving increased adoption of the Dynatrace platform, as our customers leverage our unified observability solution—powered by Grail, our hyperscale data lakehouse, designed to store, process, and query massive volumes of observability, security, and business data with high efficiency and speed. At Perform 2025, we showcased how real-time observability empowers developers to shift from reactive troubleshooting to proactive performance optimization. By embedding observability into their applications, developers can improve performance, reduce downtime, and enhance user experience—all before issues impact customers. Customers win with consolidation The observability space has seen significant consolidation in recent years. While market shifts can create uncertainty, they also provide customers with the opportunity to simplify toolsets, reduce operational complexity, and increase visibility across teams. In today’s AI-powered world, businesses can no longer afford siloed visibility. A unified observability platform analyzes every transaction, automates responses at the speed of AI, and enables innovation without limits–helping teams move from reactive remediation to proactive optimization. Leveraging a single source of truth for IT, security, and business insights allows teams to shift focus from managing multiple integrations to performance optimization and driving the business forward. This consolidation also drives innovation in the observability market, as fewer, stronger providers invest heavily in enhancing capabilities, automation, and AI-powered insights. Customers benefit from platforms that are more robust, interoperable, and capable of delivering end-to-end visibility across their environments. AI and intelligent automation Looking ahead, we are laser-focused on AI-driven operations and cloud automation. As organizations accelerate AI adoption, they need reliable ways to monitor and optimize AI workloads. One of our customers, Northwestern Mutual, recently shared that using Dynatrace helped them accelerate AI workload performance by 60%, which is a testament to how observability is enabling the future of IT. A final thought The world of observability is evolving rapidly, and we are excited about the road ahead. As market dynamics shift, Dynatrace is uniquely positioned to help organizations drive efficiency, automation, and performance at scale. A big thank you to Tiernan Ray for the insightful conversation and for covering our journey at Dynatrace. To learn more about Dynatrace, visit here. source

Today marks an exciting milestone for Cloudera and for the future of data management and AI. Taikun, a leading platform provider for managing Kubernetes and cloud infrastructure across on-prem, edge, and multi-cloud environments, is now officially part of the Cloudera family. This acquisition is a strategic step forward, reinforcing our commitment to delivering the most robust, secure, and simplified platform for data and AI workloads across any environment. In today’s complex digital landscape, organizations face increasing challenges in managing data and applications across a patchwork of infrastructures, from on-premises data centers to multiple public clouds, as well as sovereign and air-gapped environments. This fragmentation drives up operational complexity and costs while limiting the agility needed to deploy and scale critical data and AI initiatives. Too often, businesses are forced to compromise on where workloads run, losing control over their data estates, or they restrict their analytics and AI systems to only a fraction of the data available to them. Systems and AI agents that can only access data in a given cloud, customer information from a vendor, or federated data that can’t be consolidated easily. Our long-term vision is to fix that, enabling data anywhere and powering AI everywhere with our industry-leading Data Services, data, and AI platform. The integration of Taikun with Cloudera furthers those efforts, allowing organizations to regain full control of their data estates. Taikun brings an advanced compute platform that seamlessly delivers Kubernetes distributions and end-to-end applications across on-premises and multi-cloud environments. This allows customers to deploy data and AI applications consistently through a unified interface and control plane, regardless of where the data resides. Through the Taikun integration, Cloudera extends its capabilities across the stack to provide a truly unified, cloud-like experience in any environment. It streamlines deployment, upgrades, and maintenance, while enabling fast, atomic updates and easy integration of new engines and databases from our broad partner ecosystem. What does this mean for your business? The impact is profound: Uncompromised flexibility: By leveraging the new capabilities through Taikun, customers have the freedom to run applications and data wherever it best serves their business. This includes highly regulated environments such as GovCloud, Sovereign Cloud, and air-gapped data centers. With this flexibility, Cloudera delivers best-in-class solutions for data management and private AI, ensuring business value and intelligence everywhere. Reduced total cost of ownership (TCO): By harmonizing a Kubernetes-based compute layer directly into the platform and extending the cloud experience to where data resides, Cloudera simplifies deployment, upgrades, and maintenance across the entire stack. This streamlined approach reduces operational risk, increases efficiency, and significantly lowers the TCO for large-scale data platforms covering both storage and compute. Accelerated innovation: By using our unified platform, customers can quickly adopt new engines and databases from both Cloudera and our broad partner ecosystem. The world of data today is exponentially more complex than a decade ago. Unique use cases require unique engines and solutions that are easy to deploy and support. This “bring your own engine” approach makes it easy to integrate Cloudera Data Services and popular open-source technologies like Spark, HBase, Ozone, Kafka, and Trino, as well as third-party databases and tools. By reducing infrastructure complexity, organizations can focus on generating insights and value rather than managing the underlying systems. Future-proofed strategy: By preserving choice and expanding deployment options through a cloud-anywhere architecture, Cloudera ensures long-term flexibility and alignment with customer needs as business mandates evolve. This acquisition is a proactive strategy to vertically integrate the data and compute stack, enabling Cloudera to deliver a consistent cloud experience no matter where an organization’s data lives. With Taikun, we are strengthening our ability to offer data and compute capabilities seamlessly across on-premises, public cloud, private cloud, and highly regulated environments. Leveraging Cloudera’s vast experience in exabyte-scale clusters and bringing the convenience of the cloud into any environment. To learn more about this news, click here. source

TCS, Wipro, HCLTech, and Tech Mahindra have collectively laid off over 25,000 employees in the first half of 2025 — despite stable revenues and healthy margins — sending a signal CIOs couldn’t ignore. These weren’t routine job cuts. They reflected a deeper structural shift in India’s outsourcing model, shaped by pandemic-era overhiring and investor pressure toward AI-led delivery. If we consider workforce reduction by Indian IT services firms over the past 18 months, we are staring at staggering 80,000 pink slips. TCS announced layoffs last week, with plans to cut 12,200 jobs by March 2026. Infosys shed 25,994 employees in FY24 and then terminated another 700 trainees in 2025. Wipro eliminated 24,516 roles in FY24, plus hundreds of mid-level positions recently. Tech Mahindra cut 10,669 jobs with 1,757 more departing in Q4 FY25 alone. While the job cuts could bring cheer for investors, for CIOs, the fallout is far from cheerful — longer incident resolution times, fragmented delivery teams, and fewer experienced hands on complex accounts. Several outsourcing relationships are showing early signs of stress, particularly in security, application modernization, and high-stakes digital programs. source

In many cases, leaders are advised to bypass the deeper systemic issues by standing up new teams or structures to drive transformation separately from the existing business, rather than embedding it within the way work gets done. But without changing how the organization operates at its core, those efforts become expensive, slow-moving, and disconnected from measurable results. Instead of transformation taking hold, the operating model stalls, teams get overwhelmed, and the work meant to move the business forward ends up stuck in neutral. Now you’ve added even more teams pulling on the same resources, stretching them thinner, and forcing them to navigate competing priorities across multiple delivery systems. Why transformation keeps failing Treating transformation as a short-term push or isolated project will always fall short. If the way the business runs doesn’t change, the transformation won’t either, no matter how strong the vision is. To get different results, you need to work differently. That means building a new way of operating, one that aligns strategy with execution, prioritizes the right work, and creates space for real change to take hold. Not as a one-time event, but as a new rhythm for how the organization delivers value. source

Keith Shaw: Hi everybody, welcome to DEMO, the show where companies come in and show us their latest products and services. Today, I’m joined by Robin Bunevich, she is a Product Marketer at Zoom. Welcome to the show, Robin. Robin Bunevich: Thank you! Excited to be here. Keith: All right, so a lot of people know about Zoom — or hopefully they do — but what are you going to show us today? Robin: Yeah, today we’re going to walk through a day in the life of a product marketer using Zoom AI Companion to get through their day. That day is filled with meetings, follow-ups, and finding focused time to complete deep work. Being a product marketer myself, I know how it feels — it’s stressful. It’s hard to get everything done and remember all the tasks that come out of meetings. With Zoom AI Companion, we like to think about the full meeting cycle: before the meeting, during the meeting, and after the meeting. Keith: Right. Robin: A lot of people think of Zoom as just that link they click to join a meeting, but really, there’s so much more. We have chat, whiteboarding, phone systems — it’s a full work platform with AI at its core. Keith: And I think a lot of people just assume they only need Zoom during the meeting. They don’t realize how helpful it can be before and after the meeting, too. Robin: Absolutely. It’s really for anyone who wants to show up at their best every day. Whether that means creating content, writing documents, building great relationships with colleagues and customers, or finding focused time to do impactful work — this is for you. Keith: As you were developing these features, did you realize there were problems people were already struggling with — like wasted time or cognitive overload? Robin: Sure. It’s not hard to see that people are stressed at work. The pace is increasing, there’s more to do, and we’re juggling a lot of tools. People want to streamline their day and automate routine tasks because that cognitive overload is real. Employees want to do their work faster, attend meaningful meetings, and not worry about the follow-ups — they want AI to handle that. Keith: And on the other side, IT leaders have to decide which tools to deploy. Robin: Right. They’re under pressure to prove ROI, reduce change management, and minimize the learning curve. They want tools that streamline workflows and make work enjoyable — not just administrative. Keith: And if companies don’t take advantage of these tools, they’ll just be stuck in a loop of repetitive meetings. Robin: Exactly. We use the phrase “conversation to completion.” Every meeting generates action items, and Zoom AI Companion helps close that loop — simplifying your day so you can focus on what you love to do. source

“SmartRecruiters already serves a robust customer base of over 4,000 enterprises, including Amazon, McDonald’s, and Visa,” he said. “They possess best-in-class AI-driven capabilities via their Winston AI companion in the areas of talent match, chat, and talent screen. With hundreds of pre-built integrations to third-party applications and the ability to work natively via local environments such as Slack, Microsoft Teams, SMS, and WhatsApp, the potential to streamline the underlying talent acquisition workflows and client interactions for SAP customers is material.” Still, Mike Tucciarone, VP analyst in Gartner’s software and cloud negotiation practice, warned that “SAP’s acquisition of SmartRecruiters could signal significant changes for customers, especially those already invested in SuccessFactors HCM suite.” “The big question now is how SAP will integrate SmartRecruiters’ technology,” he said. “Will its capabilities be merged into the existing SuccessFactors Recruiting module, or offered as a separate product? This is particularly relevant in light of SAP CEO Christian Klein’s recent Q2 2025 earnings call comments emphasizing the company’s goal to increase prices to drive long-term margins and profits. If the SmartRecruiters acquisition is merged into the existing SuccessFactors Recruiting module, it could provide SAP with another lever to justify price increases.” source

The Premier League’s Summer Series kicked off in the US on Saturday with matches between Everton and AFC Bournemouth, and Manchester United and West Ham, both at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey. The matches were also a way to showcase the League’s new AI capabilities, the first efforts of a five-year strategic partnership with Microsoft, inked at the beginning of July. The Premier League is the highest level of the interconnected leagues in the English Football League (EFL), consisting of 20 clubs. It’s the world’s most-watched football league, reaching 900 million homes in 189 countries, and this new partnership with Microsoft represents one of the most significant technology transformations in its 33-year history, says the League. “Historically, the mandate of the Premier League and the role has been to run the competition in terms of media sales and a small, central sponsorship program,” says Alexandra Willis, director of digital media and audience development for the Premier League. “Therefore, we haven’t needed to have technology, a technology architecture, or a technology stack to service our global fan base.” source