It’s been a rough stretch for the software engineer who listens to podcasts.

This month, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on The Joe Rogan Experience that the company will probably, in 2025, “have an AI that can effectively be a sort of mid-level engineer that you have at your company that can write code.”

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said in a December episode of the The Twenty Minute VC podcast that the company’s business plan, at least at that time, involved “not adding anymore software engineers,” due to productivity gains from AI tools.

If that’s not enough for an engineer to hit the “go back 30 seconds” button forever, a recent study from software-delivery platform Harness claims that 90% of a surveyed 500 engineering leaders and developers “are concerned that AI tools will replace developers.”

Analysts of the software market that spoke to IT Brew, however, aimed to put developers’ minds at ease. AI assists with tasks like automatic code completion, but the technology sometimes misses on tasks like bug reports; three pros who spoke to us told engineers to stay calm as execs catch up on AI’s strengths and weaknesses.

“[Executives] still, I think, have a higher expectation of what AI will deliver than what developers have found that it does deliver,” Andrew Cornwall, senior analyst at Forrester, told us.

Read the rest here.—BH

A change is gonna come to the cloud strategy of most organizations in the next few years, according to a recent Rackspace Technology report.

According to the report, which came out earlier this month, 90% of IT leaders say they will make “significant changes” in their cloud strategy within the next two years.

The survey, which was conducted by global market research agency Coleman Parkes Research and commissioned by the San Antonio, Texas-based cloud computing company, queried 1,420 technology decision-makers across 10 sectors, including retail and financial services.

Marc Kermisch, CTO of Emergent Software, told IT Brew that the widespread desire among IT leaders to refurbish their organization’s cloud strategy is likely fueled by cost concerns among these enterprise organizations.

“What they’re finding is they’ve gone into cloud compute and they’re seeing an uncontrollable growth of their cloud spends,” Kermisch said, adding that in some cases, organizations are seeing their cloud spend 100% or 200% over budget.

Anand Babu Periasamy, co-founder and CEO of MinIO, an AI object storage provider, added that the desire to have control over data in the era of GenAI is another catalyst for cloud strategy revisions.

Read more here.—BM

And just like that, 2024 is over.

That means it’s time for us to turn our attention to 2025 and what’s cooking in the IT world for the next year. There’s a lot to cover—and many opinions on what will be changing—but here are three that caught our eye over the last few months.

AI gets real. After two years of the AI explosion, we may now be in a place where the technology can be looked at more realistically. Currently, it’s all about deploying software robotics and automated systems.

That change is due, in part, to the way executives have imposed unreasonable expectations on the technology. These views on AI, Expereo CIO Jean-Philippe Avelange said, have led to tempered realities—even as they’ve opened the door to more innovation.

“I think there is a disproportionate excitement and, maybe, a misappreciation of the timelines and the effort that it takes to put the team in place to start discovering and really validating and testing,” Avelange told IT Brew. “But at the same time, I think it is a good thing that we are talking about it, it’s got everyone back on their toes and thinking, ‘Okay, we cannot miss that change at that revolution.’”

Generative AI has settled into reasonable use cases. Businesses are now deploying it to assist in daily operations and to manage data. There’s also a place for it in cybersecurity in 2025, Blackberry VP of Threat Research and Intelligence Ismael Valenzuela told IT Brew.

“Everybody has access to pretty much the same technology—it’s the way you use it, and being able to anticipate, to prioritize, and to be able to implement a defensible secure architecture,” Valenzuela said.

Keep reading here.—EH