Don’t let anyone tell you that software-as-a-service (SaaS) is just some dull cloud-distribution model that solely sends company tools to employee PCs.

No, no. SaaS has high drama. What if your favorite chat tool disappeared (gasp)? What if your email suddenly gained a new GenAI feature (double gasp)?

An attendee of our recent IT Brew event asked: When a new tool is introduced, how do you overcome the emotion?

What kind of emotion exactly? For Dave Wagner, senior research director at Avasant, there are two questions that employees want answered: Am I going to lose my job? And is this going to make my job harder or easier?

“If you don’t answer those two questions very fast in the process, that’s when you’re going to lose the emotional battle,” Wagner told us.

Keep reading here.—BH

Calling all CEOs, CISOs, CIOs, and other senior executives that hold an unwavering spot in the C-suite club. Make some room at the table, because most chief data officers (CDOs) believe their role is here to stay, even if it still has some maturing to do.

According to the Data & AI Leadership Exchange’s 2025 executive benchmark survey, 70.8% of senior data and AI leaders from Fortune 1000s and top global organizations said that the CDO role will become a permanent C-suite position.

The finding comes even as less than half (47.6%) of respondents said that they felt the CDO role is “very successful and well-established”—a slight downtick from 51.0% in 2024. The same proportion, however, said that the role is “nascent and evolving.”

New kid on the block. Randy Bean, senior advisor, founder, and CEO at the org that has been conducting this survey since 2012, told IT Brew that there is still a significant challenge for the CDO role—which he noted is relatively new—even as the position continues to show up more and more at organizations.

“It’s a new role. It means different things in different organizations. The reporting relationships are all different,” Bean said.

Read the rest here.—BM

Lean and mean is how some see the latest major AI platform, and it could lead to a change in perspective when it comes to AI and energy use.

With the advent of Chinese company DeepSeek’s open-source AI platform, the US tech industry momentarily panicked. Big Tech stocks slid after the news that DeepSeek was opening its tech to the world, for free, as well as the claim that the company was able to develop its model cheaply and efficiently.

Dan Ives, a senior analyst at Wedbush, is bullish on tech stock, and downplayed the stock market jitters and pointed to the potential for the future of AI that the new model could mean.

“Open source is a healthy thing, because eventually LLM models are going to be monetized,” Ives said. “The spending is in the data, the algorithms, and the ecosystem; this is just part of a broader technology innovation curve that’s happening.”

With ease. One point of innovation—efficiency—could have ramifications for the US economy far beyond the tech sector, Shane Buckley, Gigamon CEO, told IT Brew, but not necessarily at the cost of consumption.

Read more here.—EH