From cybersecurity and big data to cloud computing, IT Brew covers the latest trends shaping business tech in our 4x weekly newsletter, virtual events with industry experts, and digital guides.

IT Brew

Eoin Higgins

itbrew.com

Two people in an office sit on opposite sides of a desk.

Tech unemployment jumps as sector jobs slow down

Despite the decline in the tech jobs market, employers across the economy did add 185,000 new tech postings.

Tom McKay

RTO mandates don’t help businesses succeed, but decimate staff morale, study finds

“If you look at all these RTO firms, most of them did have a stock market price crash,” says the University of Pittsburgh’s Mark Ma.

Billy Hurley

An close-up of a computer screen showing a cursor and the symbols for lock and home.

How to handle test accounts

Checks on test accounts are essential, but there are often too many reasons for IT pros to go around them. 

Former admins talk test accounts (and how to handle them) 

IT Operations

Caroline Nihill

It’s not easy pricing a new AI product. Given all the work involved in creating an LLM or AI tool that actually functions well, it’s tempting for companies to charge as much as humanly possible. However, companies that want to actually make a profitable buck need to take customers into account when building a pricing model.

The biggest players in the space offer some idea of what to charge for a do-it-all LLM. Currently, ChatGPT’s pricing ranges from $20 for the Plus version to $200 for the Pro version of the model. Others, 

, are sitting at $17 and $100 for Pro and Max versions respectively. 

 is available for customers to purchase for $249.99 a month.

 the sausage’s price tag get made, especially with more specialized AI tools?

Michael Friedman, SVP and head of finance at GenAI provider ASAPP, said that his company sticks to “codified industry best practice,” which is a three-pronged approach to pricing: customers, competition, and costs.

But the customer part of that framework is getting even more attention these days, both from Friedman and other AI company founders.

“When you price based on value in a construct that helps your customer realize a rapid payback, rapid cash flow, positive return on their investment, and quick time to value, you have alignment there,” Friedman said. “The thing that’s easy to forecast is the thing that you probably have the most consistency on.”

Customer research takes place across finance, market research, sales, marketing, and more to see how they’re feeling about the return on investment for other vendors and market pricing at large.

Cosmin Ene, the founder and CEO of AI pricing infrastructure company Supertab, said that to make pricing appealing to customers in the market, he prioritizes choice. That means pricing becomes granular and gives people what they want, “but at a price at which it becomes not economical anymore if they do that repeatedly.”

“The past has shown that people usually go for the low-friction model, and once they become loyal customers, once they understand the value of the service, some of them will become subscribers,” Ene said. “You cannot lose a subscription that you will never get, but you can make money with 98% of people [who will never] subscribe.”

Arjun Pillai, CEO and co-founder of AI platform Docket, said while he sees AI companies making the most of their money through using consumption models, he doesn’t believe subscription models are eliminating any choices from the customer.

For example, Microsoft provides users with a “

” model for Copilot, in efforts to allow administrators to “better manage costs” and provide users with features of the model “as needed.” The company also wrote on its site that the plan “allows administrators to enable usage-based billing for specific Copilot scenarios, providing users with the ability to use Copilot features without committing to a full license.”

In addition, Copilot is available to users in a free, limited version, as well as one that costs a monthly 

“For most of these cases, we see that the subscription-based pricing is hitting a ceiling,” Pillai said. “Pricing is actually enabling more people to choose more things, and that is what is creating this competition and innovation. Because if ChatGPT fails tomorrow, I go to Claude. It’s the same.”

Friedman told IT Brew that it’s critical to talk to existing customers to understand the value of a product when they use it at scale. He said that, based on that feedback, the company can work to “quantify the value” and begin to research “how can we structure financial models to turn their language and their ways of buying into [return on investment] calculations.”

Illustration showing a close-up of a price tag attached to a UI AI 'Generate' button.

How tech leaders are incorporating customers into their pricing models

While the AI market continues to change, the need to appeal to customers is the one thing that stays the same. 

Digital employee experience, or the quality of employee interactions with digital tools, is important in the workplace—and employers are failing the test, new research from Ivanti shows.

 found that digital employee experience (also known as DEX) often falls short exactly where most employees need it most: the help desk. Over half (52%) of employees surveyed feel that improving the help desk is a priority—the highest single improvement noted in the polling, even ahead of AI adoption and cybersecurity.

Overall, employees graded their help desks a “B.” That could hint at bigger problems for how IT manages tech assistance for employees; it could also reflect the reality that there’s only so much a help desk can do in the face of bugs, cyberattacks, and the occasional hardware failure. It could be like giving an Uber driver five stars, Ivanti CSO Daniel Spicer told IT Brew.

“They know that the person is trying to help them,” Spicer said. “The Uber driver isn’t at fault because there is traffic.”

This “B” attitude could also have to do with how employees manage their own IT issues; nearly 40% reported solving the problem on their own because it’s faster than waiting on the desk to report back. That’s called “shadow IT,” Spicer said, and it can cause problems of its own as employees take matters into their own hands.

“Shadow IT comes from the desire to do my job, that I am not enabled to do my job, and so I need to either come up with my own work around, or go and find another solution, because it is not being provided to me,” Spicer said.

There’s a lesson here for IT pros: As confidence in the help desk slips, security suffers, which in turn degrades trust further. It’s a vicious circle. Permiso Security Threat Research Manager Isuf Deliu told IT Brew attackers have been utilizing spoof attack emails from the help desk for years in order to target employees. Hacker group 

“Even though they were controlled by those threat actors, they looked legit in order to increase their likelihood of success,” Deliu said. “They created Teams accounts and then initiated chats with their victims, pretending to be the help desk.”

For organizations facing the possibility of help desk spoofing—effectively any organization that could be the victim of an attack—eroding trust increases the attack surface. Help desk staff reach out to employees regularly, Permiso CTO Ian Ahl said, making it a rich threat vector.

“The help desk does ask you to install things at times, the help desk does ask you to take some actions, so you’re a little more likely to trust that,” Ahl said.

There are ways forward. Ivanti suggests deploying AI and other automation solutions, noting that roughly one-third of help desks report they are slowed by repetitive tasks, long resolution times, and limited resources. Some 36% of employees surveyed reported they’d be just as happy with a chatbot answering questions, and 66% said a hybrid solution to help desk issues would be welcome.

“I think this is really doable, I think it’s actionable,” Spicer said. “I don’t think it actually requires a ton of effort.”

An employee at an office desk with mouse clicker arrows pointing in different directions with highlighted text boxes. 

Help desk concerns, security issues top of mind for employees and professionals

“Shadow IT comes from the desire to do my job,” Ivanti CSO Daniel Spicer tells IT Brew.

AI is having a huge impact on pretty much every part of the economy—and the environment. 

 expect the AI industry to consume at least 10 times the amount of electricity it demanded in 2023 by 2026, which is leading to big questions about the technology, energy-related emissions, and climate change.

In looking for ways to decrease that potentially massive carbon footprint, experts have championed solutions like optimizing workflow, using sustainable hygiene (like not running things the enterprise isn’t actively using), and even using AI itself to monitor emissions.

, a nonprofit spearheaded by tech execs, are aiming to set standards in the IT industry for best practices and provide training in order to reduce AI’s environmental impact.

Individual companies, like the multicloud and AI solutions company Rackspace Technology, have set sustainability goals. Rackspace aims to become 90% net-zero in carbon emission by 2045, with 50% net-zero emissions by 2032.

Ben Blanquera, VP of tech and sustainability at Rackspace, told IT Brew sustainability actually centers on optimizing teams’ workload. He suggested fundamental hygiene for ensuring sustainability and reducing environmental impact includes asking if the programs running are actually needed, because that translates into less energy usage

“When you talk about the impact of AI, you can get caught up by that, but you actually have to start with the basics of architecting what you need from a workload, minimizing the starting point of the resources you’re using, and that’ll get you 80–90% of the way there,” Blanquera said.

Brigit Hirsch, the Environmental Protection Agency’s press secretary, provided IT Brew with a statement saying the agency recommends data center owners and operators,consult with state and local air permitting authorities for information about the Clean Air Act requirements.

The EPA “regulates air emissions from different types of sources, which could include data centers” under the Clean Air Act.

Sustainability, sustainability, sustainability. 

Right now, too much of the IT market is not looking at sustainability in the long term, according to Forrester Senior Analyst Abhijit Sunil. He said that many organizations are considering the short-term gains of emerging technologies like AI while not always considering “negative impacts that might catch up” with them.

“There will be a scramble for green energy, the power purchase agreements, all those different types of things,” Sunil said. “As a framework for IT leaders to look at these technologies, it will be really specialized in terms of what they’re looking at.”

 in July detailing how technology leaders can use AI to guide sustainability—along with AI’s need for computing power, materials, and scale that could offset the benefits of innovation.

The study showed that advanced data centers can use sustainability technologies like advanced cooling and heat reuse to help save energy and boost efficiency. While the efficiency benefits can offset the savings through encouraging higher demand, Forrester recommended that data center operators choose modular and durable infrastructure equipment to encourage a sustainable IT life cycle.

Sunil said, “Even as an IT leader, if they’re taking a decision on their data center expansion or things like that, they can leverage some of these analytics solutions that will help them make better decisions, that will enable them to have better business resiliency.”

One choice for an IT leader to make is how to leverage an AI solution internally to help make better decisions.

According to Sunil, IT professionals can use models like GenAI to assist with measuring and reporting emissions through their implementation in a climate risk analytics software solution.

“AI can help with not just the assessment of various risks and making it easily accessible for various leaders within [a] company, but also to be able to make the data more accurate, the analysis easier for multiple personas within the organization to read and use,” Sunil said.

Rackspace has implemented an AI process that takes invoices from facilities around the globe and puts the data into an inventory of usage metrics. The technology pulls out the information from the invoice and categorizes it.

Blanquera explained this solution arose from a need to have complete and accurate data.

“We know that’s not sexy, or pretty, but it works,” he said. “We have put in our basics to make sure you can run with AI down the line. Without the basics, all those fancy algorithms, AI really don’t work.”

A view of Earth from space with red warning triangles floating around it.

How to make your AI products and services more sustainable

As demand for AI grows, some experts say the solution to environmental impact lies in the workflows choices of IT leaders. 

 difficult to navigate? The experience could be made worse with the influx of IT workers jumping from the federal government, either voluntarily or by reductions in force.

 affected or targeted by the widespread layoffs, a significant portion of them worked in IT–and some could consider the private sector for their next gig.

However, Joe Scheidler, the CEO and co-founder of Helios, a seed stage startup specializing in AI for government and policy, said that it’s unclear if the layoffs from the federal government will lead to people flooding the IT industry.

Helios builds an AI-native operating system for public policy, regulatory, and legal professionals to track changes and augment workflows.

“There’s always going to be a little bit of both. I think the pendulum will always swing one way or the other,” Scheidler said. “We’ve probably seen the majority of the federal government’s slim down effort. I would consider it to be in the rearview at this point.”

The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Why were you interested in getting Helios off the ground?

I would say that the impetus moment snowballing toward wanting to start Helios came when I was at the State Department, leading legislative affairs and congressional engagement on a G7 initiative.

A big part of my role was working to coordinate the interagency engagement strategy with [Capitol Hill] to ensure that we were appropriated and resourced in a sufficient manner to meet those goals. I was using a lot of the legacy policy research tools on the market and looking around for an AI-native solution as a one-man band that would enable me to spend a lot less time on the research and monitoring and writing processes that are just so intrinsic to day-to-day work and free me up to go grow relationships on the Hill. DC is super relational, and that’s really how you drive progress in a lot of ways, and I just spent a lot of time doing the former.

When I really wanted to build the prototype, [I] teamed up with the two other co-founders. We went out to San Francisco for the first time, full time, as a group in early March and made a ton of progress building…a very robust data corpus, fine-tuning models, and getting a lot of great feedback from folks across the public and private sectors, leading into the seed round raise. Now, today, [we’re] scaling the team and moving quite fast in a number of directions.

Can we flesh out the differences between the government and industry in the IT space?

The commercial side just moves a lot faster…The Valley is the cradle of innovation, and we saw that when we went out to San Francisco. You can stand up and ship product way faster in a startup environment than you would be able to even in a “startup team” operating within the government. You’re just able to move more freely in getting a prototype working. Obviously, when you start selling to government entities or Fortune 500s, you have to meet the same compliance thresholds that you would if you started out building in government. But I think [speed is] really the main difference.

You can just start building something, get it to a point where you can get early feedback from industry experts and pressure test your hypothesis: Is this really useful? Is this something people want? Then, if it is, buckle down and actually ramp up toward a proper go-to-market industry when you become compliant with…standards. Then move from there. That’s the approach we took. It’s something that you fundamentally aren’t really in a position to do if you’re working within the government.

Do you anticipate that these reductions in staff will affect the tech sector and flood the industry with people looking for a change?

We’re seeing folks start companies, start consultancies, start small businesses, and enter service in other ways, like going back to their home states and trying to bring that efficiency mentality to local county governments. I think that’s helpful. I do think there will be people who left government or were let go who may bring a really helpful perspective to their communities, private industry, some of these government affairs teams. I think a core tenant of American competitiveness, looking more globally at China, Russia, Iran, the [United Arab Emirates], those friendly competitors and adversaries who are leaning into AI adoption and digital transformation probably a little more than we are at the moment. Bringing an inside-government perspective to industry can be helpful in harmonizing public-private interaction. That’s going to be needed to compete and lead on the world stage over the next five to 10 years.

I’m not advocating for state-owned enterprise, which I know is a flash point right now…but I do think there is a real opportunity for the public and private sectors to work more efficiently together in America. AI can be a helpful tool in that effort, but the institutional knowledge and perspective that a lot of folks carried from their service in government will be another driver of that effort.

Cloud hovering over an employee working on a laptop. Credit: Anna Kim

What one government IT worker turned AI entrepreneur thinks about government IT hiring

A former govtech official turned startup founder said it’s unclear if massive federal layoffs will result in people flooding the IT industry.

According to CompTIA’s analysis of numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, tech unemployment ticked up to 3% from 

 (and June’s 2.8%). Total jobs in the sector declined and postings fell precipitously.

It’s a situation that has challenges, but is “not all doom and gloom,” CompTIA Chief Research Officer Tim Herbert said in a statement.

“Hiring intent data continues to show employers pursuing tech talent across a range of disciplines, from AI and data science to tech support and cloud engineering,” Herbert said.

Tech jobs in the sector fell by a net total of 2,311 positions, driven in part by losses of 3,300 in IT and custom software services and system design, 2,100 in PC, semiconductor, and components manufacturing, and 700 in telecommunications. That was partially offset by gains of 2,900 in information services, search, and platforms, and a bump of 100 positions in cloud infrastructure, data processing, and hosting.

Job postings, on the other hand, were almost universally down. CompTIA found drops of 6,322 postings for software developers and engineers, 2,181 for systems engineers, 2,077 for tech support specialists, 1,752 for network engineers and architects, and 1,724 for cybersecurity engineers and analysts.

Top metro areas all saw declines in total postings. For Washington DC, postings dropped by 98, New York by 514, Dallas by 192, Chicago by 266, and Boston by 312.

There were also large declines in the top states. The top five for total postings saw contracting numbers. California went down by 764, Texas by 1,968, Virginia by 2,600, New York by 2,235, and Florida by 1,224.

The top states with the best job postings numbers had double-digit gains, with Maine increasing postings by 97, Delaware by 32, and Idaho by 19. Positions four and five were held by states with only small losses: Vermont with a loss of 27 and New Hampshire with a loss of 33.

Tech unemployment ticks up slightly in volatile economy

The tech jobs market is unsteady, but still outpacing the national rate. 

While FEMA terminated dozens of employees, including its CIO and CISO, private companies spent August snapping up IT execs. You win some, you lose some.

Two dozen FEMA employees, including CIO Charles Armstrong and CISO Gregory Edwards, were fired over their failure to manage security, allegedly leading to a breach.

In an August 29 statement, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem claimed the action was taken because the employees “brazenly neglected basic security protocols” and put Americans at risk. The press release added that the hackers were caught before any sensitive data was extracted.

“These deep state individuals were more interested in covering up their failures than in protecting the Homeland and American citizens’ personal data, so I terminated them immediately,” Noem added.

Armstrong and Edwards are both relatively recent hires at FEMA. Armstrong’s federal career began in 1983. He served as CIO for Customs and Border Protection from 2008 until 2016, when he joined the private sector as a consultant; he returned to government in this role in November 2022.

Edwards came on board at FEMA in July 2020 after spending 2014 to 2019 working as the NATO Communications and Information Agency director of infrastructure services and service operations. Prior to his role there, he spent nearly four and a half years in executive roles at the Defense Information Systems Agency, following a 26-year career with the Air Force as a communications and computer systems officer.

Two IT execs join grocer firm SpartanNash

Bag it and tag it: Michigan grocery firm SpartanNash has brought on two executives in advance of its acquisition by C&S Wholesale Grocers.

Ed Rybicki, the company’s new SVP and CIO, comes to SpartanNash from Ontario, Canada-based Mastronardi Produce, where he most recently served as CIO. Rybick, picked to drive innovation, operational efficiency, and growth strategy, has worked for a variety of companies, including Volkswagen and Delphi, over the course of his nearly three-decade career.

Brett Hoffman, new VP and CISO, will focus on cybersecurity. His career started in 1992 and saw him spend over a decade at Spectrum Health (now Corewell Health), where he ended as director of information security. Most recently, he served as VP of enterprise security solutions and CISO at Inspire Security Solutions.

C&S plans to acquire SpartanNash by the end of the year.

Pendo gets a new forward-thinking IT exec

Software firm Pendo has a new chief development officer. Saurabh Sodani, a 25-year industry veteran, joined the company mid-August.

Sodani comes to Pendo following a nearly four-year stint at Salesloft, where he most recently was CTO. Prior to that, he was at Oracle for six and a half years. Other experiences include Yahoo, Datalogix (now Oracle Advertising), and Symantec.

In a LinkedIn post, Sodani cited Pendo’s company culture and AI preparedness as motivating factors for his move.

“The key to building indispensable AI agents lies in data and context—and Pendo already has the instrumentation in place to capture usage across SaaS, AI, and agentic applications,” Sodani wrote. “We’re now focused on turning that data into action—powering insights, automation, and agent-driven experiences that create measurable business outcomes for our customers.”

Tech’s C-suite had a bumpy ride in August

Two dozen IT professionals at FEMA, including a CIO and CISO, were fired. But private industry is snatching up executive IT talent. 

Every IT professional knows the absolute dream: to be invited to yet another meeting.

But a pricing meeting isn’t your typical corporate get-together; it comes once the company is ready to release a product or service that the team has spent months, maybe even years, building. Those who built the product must now help determine its value…and its price.

Some executives would prefer if IT professionals weren’t in the room for those kinds of conversations.

“Whoever is working in a company, I wouldn’t worry about [ pricing]. I hate to say it this way, but it’s not in their pay grade,” Arjun Pillai, the co-founder and CEO of AI platform Docket, said. “It’s just too much variable for them to worry about. The people who are heading the company, those are the people who should worry about it.”

But other experts, like Guy Marion, chief marketing officer at Chargebee, and Wade Foster, CEO and co-founder of Zapier, believe that assigning value to a product is a cross-company exercise.

“Pricing and packaging is a multi-disciplinary effort,” Foster said. “You’re trying to figure out what is the best way to deliver value to customers…I tend to find that you want anyone who has a good point of view on those things at the table.”

Historically, a company’s finance teams and CFO have been widely seen as responsible for determining pricing for a new product or service.

But as technology such as AI becomes more complex, according to Marion, there’s a rising desire within businesses to involve technical staff and others in pricing meetings.

“We’re seeing the rise of the empowered RevOps, the empowered CIO, the empowered IT leader who thinks about pricing as a product,” Marion said. “When you think about pricing as a product, you think very differently. You need to build in agility. You need to have the ability to automate everything to begin with.”

Against the backdrop of these changes, Marion said Chargebee recently created an internal SVP of corporate IT role, which oversees the interplay between finance, billing, CRM, taxation, and other software.

While Chargebee wants IT in the room to the very end of a release cycle, Foster said that sometimes those conversations are above an IT professional’s pay grade.

In deciding who should be at the table for a pricing conversation, Foster said that he likes to put aside titles and instead focus on skills and tasks required. If there isn’t an understanding of the cost to deliver a product, “you’re going to end up losing money per every transaction you have, and that’s a problem,” he said.

“You want your folks in your organization to have good instincts on: What are the customer problems? How does the customer value these things?…Generally, that requires a well-rounded perspective,” Foster said.

If IT is bringing perspectives that the company needs, they should “unequivocally have a seat at the table,” he said.