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Soon after I started, Heath was ready to move forward with implementing a common product operating model. Parts of Modivcare were using product management best practices, but not everyone was. I presented a proposal with two options: a federated or centralized model, with the pros and cons of each. We went with a federated model where each senior executive would have a product leader, and the product leaders would create a center of excellence (CoE) so we could work toward a standard process for engagement and delivery. Leaders who already had a product leader were happy because little would change, and leaders who didn’t were happy that a CoE would give their new product leader a support structure. At first, progress was slow but steady because product leaders were in high demand across multiple initiatives, making it difficult for them to fully focus on building the new model. Their strong systems thinking skills meant they were frequently sought after for various priorities, which contributed to the challenge of maintaining momentum. Six months later, the organization made the decision to move to a centralized model, consolidating the product teams under my organization. When we made that change, there were concerns the product team wouldn’t maintain their independence and importance when they moved to an organization led by a CIO. I worked to address those concerns head-on by clearly communicating that product isn’t joining technology; Product and Technology is a new organization, with a new culture, structure, and goals. source

Mark Montgomery, senior director at the Center on Cyber and Technology Innovation at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, thinks that if the administration is trying to entice Russia to the negotiating table, “it violates fundamental principles of both international relations and cybersecurity. This is a bad negotiating tactic.” He explains, “You should negotiate with adversaries from a position of strength, not weakness. By effectively unilaterally disarming in the digital domain, we sacrifice our leverage and invite further aggression, not concessions. The administration appears to believe that it will be rewarded with reciprocal restraint. I think Putin’s previous performances call this theory into question.” In addition, all indications suggest that Russian malign activity in cyberspace against the US has continued through at least the end of January. For example, researchers at Volexity issued a report on Feb. 13 saying that starting in mid-January, they had observed the Russian nation-state threat group they call CozyLarch, which overlaps with other Russian APT groups known as DarkHalo, APT29, Midnight Blizzard, and CozyDuke, targeting sensitive Microsoft 365 accounts by impersonating individuals from US government departments, including the US Department of State. source

“But right now, it’s not solving a big enough pain point for most organizations to justify the complexity and cost and hiring people who know how to develop and work with it,” he adds. “Until that changes, companies will keep investing in AI, automation, and tools that drive clear ROI instead of experimenting with blockchain ‘just because.’” Uses behind the scenes Other IT leaders see blockchain benefits right now. Mogul Club, a platform for micro investing in real estate, uses blockchain to track ownership in a property, says Eitan Prince, CTO of the company. In the right scenario, blockchain offers “unparalleled transparency, security, and efficiency” to digitize real world assets, he says. Unfortunately, scammers have given blockchain a bad name, he adds. source

Quantum computing: Banks and investment firms are testing quantum algorithms for portfolio optimization and risk analysis, seeking breakthroughs classical computing can’t achieve. Quantum services are already available via cloud platforms, addressing complex issues in chemistry and logistics.  Biotechnology and synthetic biology: The swift development of mRNA vaccines in 2020 illustrated biotech’s unprecedented speed in delivering transformative products. Pharma and agriculture companies now leverage AI and gene-editing (e.g., CRISPR) for personalized medicine and drought-resistant crops.  Satellite technology: Rapid growth in satellite constellations benefits telecom (remote connectivity), insurance and agriculture (high-resolution crop monitoring and disaster assessment). Even terrestrial industries gain from enhanced communication and data from space.  Advanced materials and energy: Innovations in materials science enable stronger, lighter, sustainable products — next-gen batteries for affordable EVs, improved airplane composites for fuel efficiency and clean-energy breakthroughs like small modular nuclear reactors and carbon capture technology.   Each of these deep tech domains is reshaping industries in ways that drive competitive advantage — either by creating new products and services (top-line growth) or by solving problems that reduce costs and risks (bottom-line protection). Crucially, they often reinforce each other: advancements in one field (say, materials for better batteries) amplify innovation in another (say, more efficient electric vehicles), multiplying the impact on business.  A strategic imperative: Integrate deep tech or fall behind  If deep tech is so promising, why aren’t all organizations embracing it overnight?  Key challenges include cultural resistance to change, talent gap and skills shortage, presence of legacy systems and costs considerations. Overcoming these challenges isn’t easy, but it’s feasible with the right approach.  source

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AI’s transformative potential introduces technological ethical dilemmas like bias, fairness, transparency, accuracy/hallucinations, environment, accountability, liability and privacy. Likewise, behavioral ethical dilemmas such as automation bias, moral hazard, self-misrepresentation, academic deceit, malicious intent, social engineering and unethical content generation are typically out of the passive control of technology. By proactively addressing both the technical and the behavioral ethical concerns, we can work toward a responsible, equitable and beneficial integration of AI tools into everyday solutions, products and human activities while mitigating regulatory fines and protecting the corporate brand, ensuring trust. While AI technology advances at an enormous pace, and preparation for regulatory control of said technology races to keep up, guidance on the “what” and “why” of Ethics in AI abundantly exists. In “AI governance: Act now, thrive later,” author Stephen Kaufman provides prevailing guidance that, “Companies need to create and implement AI governance policies so that AI can deliver benefits to the organization and the customer, to provide a fair, safe and inclusive system that is trusted by the users.” source

Some of the partners for AgentExchange include Box, DocuSign, and Workday, Appiphony, Highspot, Neuron 7, SalesWings, Seismic, Asymbl, Bullhorn, Certinia, FinDoc, and OpenText. Availability, competition and adoption The new marketplace has been made generally available, but the packaging and listing of agent templates will be opened up in April 2025. Currently, partners can list prompt templates and topics, Salesforce said. Although Salesforce competes with a variety of software vendors, such as Google, AWS, Microsoft, ServiceNow, Oracle, and IBM, in the agentic space, analysts believe that the launch of AgentExchange could give the CRM software provider an advantage over its rivals. source

The banking, financial services, and insurance (BFSI) sector is facing a storm. In recent decades, the widespread adoption of the internet and the subsequent smartphone revolution have empowered consumers and businesses to look beyond incumbent providers of financial services. Digital-first startups have changed expectations – fuelling demand for faster transactions and innovative services. These new entrants are no longer on the fringes of the industry but have seized market share and mindshare in what was previously a safe sector for incumbents. One online bank in the United Kingdom has been operating just 10 years but counts one in six of the British adult population as a customer. Forced to respond through rapid modernization of their products and customer experiences, traditional financial enterprises have added complexity to their infrastructures. While some providers initially sought to implement radical transformation to cloud technologies, almost none have been able to replace their legacy IT. Efforts for rapid digital transformation has been additive, and the difficulty of regulating and extending those infrastructures has scaled up accordingly. As a result, many ordinary financial transactions now rely on multiple types and ages of technology. A simple consumer action, such as transferring money from one bank to another using a mobile banking app or filing an online insurance claim, may traverse numerous systems and networks, often spanning multiple corporate entities. A transaction fulfilled in an instant for the consumer may touch multiple technologies across multiple geographies. Even the latest AI-driven front-end experiences will often still touch COBOL running on mainframes The increasing impact of financial regulation CEOs and CIOs in the financial sector increasingly find themselves personally accountable for the resilience of these complex technology structures. Increasingly nervous governments, reeling from major economic shocks and significant banking technology failures, have realized that digital financial systems are of critical national importance. Regulators have become merciless: A month-long series of consumer-impacting outages caused by a technology transformation at a U.K. bank led to debates in parliament, a major public enquiry, and heavy personal fines for the bank’s CEO and CIO. The scale and scope of new and enhanced regulations are significant. The European Union’s Digital Operational Resilience Act, enacted in early 2025, and the enhanced guidance published to scrutineers in the updated Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council (FFIEC) information technology handbook, published in 2024, impose hugely stringent technology requirements (and severe associated potential penalties) on BFSI companies. Enabling a competitive but compliant financial organization In a competitive landscape where technology agility is essential to thrive, BFSI organizations have little choice but to design innovative, technology-driven services. In this situation, complexity will always increase. Meanwhile, meeting the increased demands of modern regulation requires the organization to continuously understand the infrastructure underpinning its services, in significant detail. The FFIEC handbook, for example, requires security analysts to have “an enterprise-wide understanding of the architecture and interoperability of systems and components.” Its guidance on proactive risk management requires a clear understanding of the “products, processes, applications, infrastructure, and interconnectivity” that make up the IT infrastructure and the relationship between that infrastructure and “the enterprise-wide business and strategic plan.” Without a clear, accurate, and up-to-date picture of the topology and health of IT services, it is nearly impossible to meet the needs of these personas. And with complexity driving emergent system properties and rapid change, organizations — which in the past might have managed this information using multiple niche tools or even correlated information manually in spreadsheets — have no choice but to modernize. Today’s financial CIO needs to ensure that their staff are provided with instant oversight across multiple technology structures, enabling them to understand their services in detail even as they rapidly evolve. Tools must be able to discover and map the structure of services across multiple environments but also ensure their operational resilience and health. The organization needs to demonstrate compliance with required capacity buffers, sometimes over a period of years, even as services change. With regulators demanding the ability to respond quickly to outages, CIOs should ensure that their management platforms are smart enough to identify the cause of issues rapidly and accurately and be proactive enough to mitigate preventable issues before they occur. Technical teams must be guided to solutions and enabled to evaluate change risk at a pace that supports rapid innovation – a challenging task, which requires advanced AI analytics to meet the velocity demands of DevOps teams. CIOs who arm their expert teams with the best-quality, holistic tooling, leveraging new technologies such as generative AI can ensure that even long-established financial organizations can meet and exceed regulatory expectations, while driving innovation that meets the demands of the modern customer. Visit here to see how AI-powered BMC Helix solutions enable enterprise-wide IT infrastructure observability and help BFSI organizations maintain secure, compliant, and resilient IT systems, or contact BMC today. source

“The top challenge with agentic frameworks is that each vendor takes a fundamentally different approach to agent architecture, state management, and communication protocols. As vendors push their own frameworks and agents, enterprises will face adoption challenges, including a significant rise in technical debt and maintenance overhead,” Liddle says. “I don’t see a single framework emerging to unify all agents, making this complexity an ongoing reality.” Meanwhile, enterprise vendors who are rolling out agentic AI services as part of their flagship offerings make their pitch for a platform-based approach to managing agents. “Managing agentic AI at scale is a multidimensional challenge. To break it down, it is a governance, operational, ethical, and integration challenge all at once,” says Chris Bedi, chief customer officer and enterprise AI advisor at ServiceNow. “To manage agentic AI, one needs a platform that can unite AI agents, data, and workflows, with a single data model, which brings AI to every corner of the enterprise and addresses all these challenges.” source