It’s a question that’s been around as long as lunch money: Do you pay the bully?

Companies impacted by ransomware face this tough decision. Business leaders have to quickly understand factors like downtime and data backups, all while a deadline to pay approaches.

A reader asked during an IT Brew live event in April: When an attack hits and the clock is ticking, who owns the decision to pay—IT, legal, the CEO? How does that actually get decided?

We talked with legal and risk pros about who usually makes the call, and where the IT pro fits in the payment plan.

In the room. When it comes to ransomware, the decision-maker can vary between organizations. Anna Rudawski, privacy and cybersecurity partner at global law firm A&O Shearman, sees the choice to pay or not pay often coming down to some combination of the CEO, CFO, and COO.

What to consider before opening your wallet.—BH

Can you “vibe code” your own QuickBooks or TurboTax?

Go ahead, Alex Balazs said. He’s the CTO of Intuit, the parent company of those financial tools. If a business builds interfaces with any of the major LLM services, they can still tap Intuit’s tools for tasks like invoicing or tax services through integrations with those AI platforms.

Deals with the likes of Anthropic and OpenAI are part of how Intuit is rethinking its business for a post-SaaS-pocalyptic world. Like other business software platforms, Intuit’s stock has cratered this year amid an investor sell-off spurred by advances in coding and agentic AI tools.

We spoke with Balazs about what he thinks this narrative gets wrong, how Intuit is testing new pricing models, and how to market tax services to AI agents.

Is the SaaS-pocalypse nigh?—PK

SaaS (Software as a Service): Software-as-a-service (SaaS) is a cloud-based software delivery model in which third-party vendors make applications and services available to end users via the internet, usually on a subscription basis. Learn more.

Docs and development are why IT pros are turning to AI and automation, according to an IT Brew survey.

Our State of Automation and AI report, released in April, found that 63% of surveyed IT practitioners said they’re actively piloting or adopting generative AI techniques for code generation and documentation.

We pulled together our notes and spoke with IT pros about what that looks like in practice.

Code generation. While Mike Toole, director of security and IT at Blumira, won’t be using AI to code sophisticated projects like an EDR or a firewall anytime soon, he’s found ways to use workflow automation platforms to construct slightly simpler assets and internal tools. For example, he built an employee-meetup tool, dubbed “Coffeebot,” by using plain-language prompts, necessary API calls, and data sources.

How IT pros are automating their workflows.—BH