Thinking about turning that intranet FAQ into a frequently asked chatbot? Microsoft wants to make the process easier.

This week, the company announced its Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat, which offers access to “pay-as-you-go” agents—a feature that Gartner analyst Larry Cannell sees bringing some respectability to those task-specific automation bots we’ve been hearing about lately.

“When Microsoft says something, it legitimizes an approach or a market segment, without question,” Cannell, research director in the Gartner for Technical Professionals Collaboration and Content Strategies service, told IT Brew.

What is an agent? Microsoft defines AI agents as chatbots, copilots, or digital AI assistants that “perform specific tasks, answer questions, and automate processes for users.” With Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat, consumers can use natural language to create a task-automating agent.

When Cannell thinks about agents, his mind goes to Microsoft’s content-sharing platform SharePoint, and ways to provide up-to-date fix descriptions for field-service engineers or turn FAQ documents into chatbots.

Read the rest here.—BH

AI is helping site reliability engineers do their jobs, but the reality of working in the sector continues to expand their frustration.

A new site reliability engineering (SRE) report from Catchpoint involving the feedback from more than 300 professionals in the field found that although the industry is experiencing an increase in AI adoption, the amount of “toil” is increasing. While somewhat paradoxical, it makes sense, Catchpoint CEO Mehdi Daoudi told IT Brew.

“The resources are really spread very thin,” Daoudi said. “Then everybody wants to jump on the bandwagon of automation and AI, and therefore there is more going back and fixing things and dealing with systems that are a little bit outdated.”

Old tech, new tech. Outdated infrastructure—the kind that’s 20 or 30 years old—is a problem for SREs, especially in the banking industry, Daoudi said. Dropping in AI is often expected to solve problems, but the issues often remain because change happens over time, not immediately.

It’s a familiar story. Staff gets new tech, management urges implementation, and existing issues remain unfixed. When it comes to SRE, as with other tech sectors, the free time opened up from using AI for automated processes can instead end up filled with “toilsome tasks,” as the report said, though it emphasized this was only a hypothesis. Laura de Vesine, a senior staff engineer at Datadog, said in a comment for the report that “manual supervision of AI systems…can easily raise the operational load of a team for both day to day work and incidents.”

Read more here.—EH

Enterprises can secure themselves by helping their employees secure their personal lives—that was the message from hardware authentication device manufacturer Yubico at CES 2025 in Las Vegas.

At the company’s booth at the consumer tech show, Yubico Chief Brand Advocate Ronnie Manning argued enterprises should encourage employees to use their work-issued hardware authentication devices to secure their personal accounts and data as well.

In fact, that’s increasingly becoming a trend as organizations realize compromised personal accounts can lead to breaches at work, Manning told IT Brew. For example, a 2023 survey by security and compliance firm Agency found 97% of executives access work accounts from personal devices, which are generally outside their organization’s control.

“If within the organization you’re teaching good security hygiene, and because there’s no shared secrets on the YubiKey itself, we do see a lot of customers who suggest to their employees to actually utilize the YubiKeys on their home accounts, as well,” Manning said.

Since employers can simply revoke work credentials and YubiKeys have such a low price point—their basic NFC key retails for $25—there’s not even much of a reason for them to ask departing employees to turn them in.

Keep reading here.—TM

Once a powerhouse behind Fortune 500 IT operations, Boole & Babbage led the charge in enterprise software—until it vanished. From Star Trek ads to mainframe dominance, discover how this trailblazing company shaped IT before being absorbed into tech history.

This is one of the stories of our Quarter Century Project, which highlights the various ways the industry has changed over the last 25 years. Check back each month for new pieces in this series and explore our timeline featuring the ongoing series.