Like the youngest sibling in the family, AI-related initiatives are getting whatever they want—which, in most cases, is a budget to get the job done.

According to a December report by Emburse, which builds expense and travel management software, 58% of surveyed US and UK business leaders believe AI-related purchases are the easiest to approve. And business leaders are using this information to their advantage: More than six in 10 (62%) claim to have linked at least one software purchase to an AI initiative to get budget approvals.

Fast pass. Michele Shepard, Emburse’s CRO, told IT Brew that while AI projects may have initially gotten easy approvals as companies bought into industry hype over the technology, business leaders are now funding projects because of their long-term benefits.

“Initially…it was, ‘Oh, it’s the next cool thing,’” Shepard said. “But the reality is, it is driving significant cost benefit, ROI, real efficiency savings for organizations.”

However, one pro begs to differ.—BM

Will IT pros lose their jobs to a swarm of chatbots?

The short answer: not yet. But with agentic AI rapidly evolving, there’s the possibility that IT pros could find themselves out of the loop with their own workflows, especially if they don’t upskill.

Very few companies “have gone all in yet [on agentic], because it is still an immature market, it’s a nascent space,” said Robert Barton, a distinguished AI engineer at Cisco. “It’s developing fast, but you definitely expect it to do things much faster, much quicker than you ever could in the past.”

While few are convinced that AI will replace the existing professionals within the industry, experts like Ketan Babaria, chief digital and AI officer at eHealth, told IT Brew that he expects his IT team to change because of agentic integration.

Read how experts are leaning into agentic.—CN

Executives and identity and access management (IAM) practitioners aren’t on the same page when it comes to their organizations’ ability to keep tabs on machine identities.

Eight in 10 C-suite and high-level executives believe they tracked dormant or orphaned machine identities in a comprehensive manner, according to a recent ManageEngine report. Despite that confidence, only 50%–70% of surveyed mid-level managers and IT pros confirmed machine identities were monitored thoroughly within their company.

The kicker is that just 15% of junior managers admit their organization doesn’t track privileged accounts (i.e., accounts with above normal permissions and access) at all.

Is your team overconfident about managing machine identities?—BM

The feeling of getting a 5/5 on the Brew’s weekly news quiz has been compared to getting a company-wide shout-out from your boss. It’s that satisfying.

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