Pivoting to AI? Here’s what to look at as an IT pro in the transition

It’s been four years since OpenAI released ChatGPT to the world, kicking off a revolution in AI development that’s accelerated the tech industry.

Organizations across the globe continue to adopt the technology and incorporate it into the tech stack. For IT pros, their company making the pivot to AI can introduce a number of complications, both for their own responsibilities and their oversight of company tech.

Gareth Davies, CPO for Auth0 at Okta, told IT Brew that AI is being aggressively used for building and deploying software within enterprises. The technology is ubiquitous, he added, so the question is less whether or not companies will adopt AI and more about how they do so.

“The maturity levels are very different,” Davies said. “There are some teams and some organizations that have fundamentally rebuilt their entire software development process and have built in a ton of automation and orchestration, they literally have armies of AI.”

Developmental. For those who are still planning out the process for a full transition, there are real questions about how things might play out. Prioritizing what works might differ from company to company—and that’s okay.

“Each organization is going to have a different set of points of friction that are novel,” Davies told IT Brew. “But once they’ve defined the goal and they’ve analyzed where the gaps are, they can say, ‘Okay, now what tools or processes are we going to change?’”

AI usage will continue to spread across the tech sector, as will an increase in AI tool development. But as John Pettit, CTO at Promevo, told IT Brew, those tools are no substitute for the hard work of software engineering.

Blending production priorities in a way that works is key for IT pros making the pivot, he said, and requires effective controls.

“AI brings speed, but speed without guardrails is automated technical debt,” Pettit said. “The key in being successful rolling out AI, and I think why you see people who start and maybe restart a few times as they adopt AI in their organization, is they need to put in place the proper automation and rigor.”

Working the refs. The impact AI is having across the economy means IT pros managing deployment and implementation must handle a wide range of responsibilities, said AWS Senior Principal Engineer of Agentic AI David Yanacek. Often, a hands-on approach is most helpful.

“Just by using it, you start to develop an intuition around what else it could do for you, and what it does and what it doesn’t do,” Yanacek said.

Finding a balance between oversight and workforce efficiency is key when you’re dealing with how staff are safely and effectively utilizing these tools, Yanacek told IT Brew. There’s a danger of micromanaging staff that leads to oversaturation.

“If you bombard people with ‘yes’ or ‘no’ questions all the time, people will get approval fatigue and just start not thinking about it,” Yanacek said.