Software developers will AI anything once, and according to Arun Chandrasekaran, a distinguished VP analyst at Gartner who was fielding questions at the company’s IT Symposium/Xpo in Orlando, Florida, last week, they’re “driving the adoption of AI in most enterprises today.”

Chandrasekaran offered up two main reasons why: Software developers are frequently eager to try new tech, and software development still has plenty of confidence-inspiring humans involved in enterprise coding scenarios.

“When AI is being used to generate code, you still have a developer that is looking at the code and saying, ‘Hey, this is good code and this is bad code,’” Chandrasekaran said.

What makes you say that? A Jan. 2024 Gartner webinar polled its audience of 1,299 attendees and found that 17% of respondents said software teams adopted or intended to adopt a GenAI tool. Software development usage surpassed all other business-function deployments, including customer service (16%), marketing (14%), and sales (12%).

Additional Gartner surveys found 60% of surveyed CIOs are being tasked with an AI strategy, and half of enterprise GenAI deployments are “focused on augmenting employees to increase productivity.”

Read the rest here.—BH

The Big Apple is a lot to handle—and no less on the cybersecurity side, with around 80-to-90 billion attacks every week.

That’s where Kelly Moan, head of NYC Cyber Command and CISO for the city of New York, comes in. A mayoral appointment, Moan manages the cyber threats to the city and directs a team in the hundreds on how to address attacks and vulnerabilities.

Backstory. Moan didn’t come to cybersecurity through a traditional route. An undergrad focused on international studies and Russia, she gradually found herself gravitating toward the tech sector over time. Eventually, after working with the federal government, she got certifications in security and woke up one day as a security engineer.

“It’s been really exciting to transfer those skills that I was using in the federal government, most recently, the Department of Homeland Security, to such a large ecosystem like the city of New York,” Moan told IT Brew.

Big time. In her work for the city, specifically Cyber Command, Moan is responsible for “over 100 city agencies, 300,000-plus city employees.” That means maintaining control over a huge number of people and institutions, the kind of work that’s often reserved for bureaucracies more federal in nature.

Read more here.—EH

Data centers are ravenous for power—and increasingly, there’s not enough to go around.

According to the Washington Post, the International Energy Agency estimates data centers sapped 4% of US power in 2022 and will suck up 6% by 2026. It’s only expected to go up after that, especially with the surge in power-hungry AI operations.

Hubs like Northern Virginia, Atlanta, and Salt Lake City are turning to tactics like rationing electricity, halting new data center construction, and building new transmission lines. Analysts at Fitch Ratings, however, have pointed to the possibility that utilities could overestimate demand and overbuild, “given inconsistent methodologies for forecasting load.”

Shalini Mahajan, managing director at Fitch and deputy head for its North American Corporate Ratings Group, talked with IT Brew about why it’s so hard to pin down this “unprecedented” market.

Why are there so many issues with forecasting demand for the utility companies?

Typically in past years, you would get maybe a handful of such requests, and you’re talking smaller megawatts. Now, utilities are getting inundated with numerous requests, which can range from a few hundred megawatts to as much as a gigawatt or even larger. It’s hard for utilities…to distinguish between just indications of interest, where you can imagine a tech company which is desperate for power could be reaching out to multiple utilities at the same time, not sure which utilities have the capacity or ability to service them—and speak to market is critical.

Keep reading here.—TM

Explore the most pressing cybersecurity questions at our event this Thursday, Oct. 31! With AI tools proliferating in what feels like a “gold rush,” our expert panel will dive into the real risks and must-know strategies to secure AI deployment across your organization. Learn how leaders can protect against vulnerabilities, manage data risk, and track which AI tools are used—a critical step in today’s fast-moving landscape. Grab your ticket now!