Suzanne Livingston has worked at IBM for 19 years, most recently in the role of vice president overseeing product management for the IBM watsonx Orchestrate AI agent platform. She says enterprises must strike between AI governance and trying to force every workload into one platform – or to be agentic at all. Going forward, managing AI agents will require new kinds of human-to-AI and human-to-human collaboration, according to Livingston, that the industry is just learning about.

Featuring: Suzanne Livingston, Vice President, IBM watsonx Orchestrate

In today’s episode, we’ll cover…

• Watsonx Orchestrate support for third-party AI agents
• Unsolved AI security problems
• How IBM customers are approaching AI governance
• AI's influence on the future of work

and more!

References:

• AI security worries stall enterprise production deployments
• DevSecOps AI agents add platform context, woo enterprises
• AI Agent Frameworks: A Guide to Evaluating Agentic Platforms

To learn more about software development and platform engineering, check out Search IT Operations.

To watch clips from our podcast, subscribe to our YouTube channel, @EyeOnTech.

Renowned public speaker, industry commentator, technologist and open source ambassador Kelsey Hightower describes himself as an AI skeptic, but warns that platform engineers should take the threat of AI to their jobs seriously. In this episode, he explains the skills IT operations leaders must emphasize as they prepare for the question: "What value do you bring over the machines?"

Featuring: Kelsey Hightower, technologist, speaker and open source ambassador

In today’s episode, we’ll cover…

• AI's "Bridge building problem"
• Why AI is a surface-level technology
• A coming salary correction for some IT pros
• "Training your replacement" vs understanding systems

and more!

References:

• DevSecOps AI agents add platform context, woo enterprises
• Cloud-native platform engineering in the enterprise
• Kubernetes AI progress in 2025 and the road ahead
• GitHub Universe: Large IT orgs share AI automation gains

To learn more about software development and platform engineering, check out Search IT Operations.

To watch clips from our podcast, subscribe to our YouTube channel, @EyeOnTech.

Last year in AWS with Corey Quinn

To paraphrase David Letterman, this next guest needs no introduction, at least for many people in the cloud computing world: Corey Quinn is the Chief Cloud Economist at Duckbill, where he specializes in helping companies improve their AWS bills "by making them smaller and less horrifying," according to his website bio. He also hosts the "Screaming in the Cloud" and "AWS Morning Brief" podcasts and curates the weekly newsletter "Last Week in AWS." In this episode, he shares his thoughts on the biggest and most overlooked AWS stories in 2025 and his outlook for 2026.

Featuring: Corey Quinn, Chief Cloud Economist, Duckbill

In today’s episode, we’ll cover…

• The ways AWS "got its mojo back" in 2025
• Ongoing security issues with AWS CodeBuild
• Amazon Bedrock vs "overconfident and also wrong bots" in customer service
• Why IT buyers should beware the "AI tool"

and more!

References:

• Critical flaw in AWS Console risked compromise of build environment
• AWS AI IDE, AgentCore throw down gauntlets for Microsoft
• AWS CloudOps hones multi-cloud support for AI, resilience
• What Amazon Q prompt injection reveals about AI security

To learn more about software development and platform engineering, check out Search IT Operations.

To watch clips from our podcast, subscribe to our YouTube channel, @EyeOnTech.

Brett Smith, distinguished software developer at AI and data management software and services company SAS, has spent nine of his 13 years with the company focused on software supply chain security, managing DevSecOps and compliance for a 3,000-developer organization. He shares the good, the bad and the ugly of the journey to date, and his outlook for the future.

Featuring: Brett Smith, distinguished software developer, SAS

In today’s episode, we’ll cover…

• Focusing on software artifacts to secure the supply chain
• Getting developer buy-in for cybersecurity
• The role of Executive Order 14028 and the road ahead in compliance
• AI and "security amnesia"

and more!

References:

• Black Hat 2025: Navigating AI and supply chain security
• Software supply chain security tools take on toil for users
• Software supply chain security AI agents take action
• IT pros revise pipelines for software supply chain security

To learn more about software development and platform engineering, check out Search IT Operations.

To watch clips from our podcast, subscribe to our YouTube channel, @EyeOnTech.

You might recognize Rob Strechay from his appearances on TheCube livestreaming videos during industry conferences, but he's worn many hats in the industry over the years. In this wide-ranging discussion, he looks back at how AI data management evolved in 2025, and predicts that AI "governance, security and data quality are going to be all the rage in 2026."

Featuring: Rob Strechay, managing director and principal analyst at TheCube Research

In today’s episode, we’ll cover…

• The Open Semantic Interchange (OSI) project
• AI data management, data gravity and the persistence of data silos
• AI security, governance and sovereign AI
• AI agents and the future of business workflows

and more!

References:

• New consortium to aid AI by standardizing semantic modeling
• MCP OAuth update adds security for personalized AI
• Nutanix sovereign cloud hits Broadcom with multi-cloud hook
• 2026 will be the year data becomes truly intelligent

To learn more about software development and platform engineering, check out Search IT Operations.

To watch clips from our podcast, subscribe to our YouTube channel, @EyeOnTech.

As it rolled out AI and AIOps, Salesforce shunned the cloud repatriation route and instead expanded its public cloud presence with Hyperforce. Paul Constantinides, an engineering leader at Salesforce for more than 21 years, currently leads engineering for Hyperforce. In this episode, he details the evolution of the Salesforce internal platform over the years, what was behind the decision to launch Hyperforce, his team's extensive use of AIOps and his "NoOps" goals in the age of AI agents.

PROGRAMMING NOTE: IT Ops Query will be on a holiday break the next two weeks, returning Jan. 8 with all-new episodes.

Featuring: Paul Constantinides, executive vice president of engineering, Salesforce

In today’s episode, we’ll cover…

• Trust as a core value in infrastructure management at scale
• How cloud-native principles improve resilience for AI applications
• How internally developed AIOps tools perform automate incident remediation and response
• The role for human engineers in a NoOps future

and more!

References:

• What Salesforce’s AI agents can do for nonprofits
• A+E Global Media boosts AIOps with deterministic AI
• GenAI tools set to exceed past waves of AI automation
• Salesforce workflow automation tools, Hyperforce debut

To learn more about software development and platform engineering, check out Search IT Operations.

To watch clips from our podcast, subscribe to our YouTube channel, @EyeOnTech.

Rob Hirschfeld is the CEO and co-founder of RackN, founded in 2014, focused on "addressing the messy challenge of operating at scale in physical data centers," according to his LinkedIn profile. Hirschfeld has had a front-row seat to the last decade of conversations in enterprise IT ops about bare-metal server operations and cloud repatriation, topics that remain hot as some enterprises look to move AI inference workloads on-premises.

Featuring: Rob Hirschfeld, CEO and co-founder of RackN

In today’s episode, we’ll cover…

• The recent history of cloud repatriation
• The VMware factor in enterprise bare metal decisions
• How generative AI workloads change the dynamics of self-hosted infrastructure for enterprises
• Why going back to self-hosted infrastructure in 2025 doesn't mean going back to 2005 IT management practices

and more!

References:

• AWS AI Factories target hybrid cloud AI infrastructure | TechTarget
• Top 9 bare-metal cloud providers of 2025
• New VMware private AI infrastructure rethinks Tanzu, again
• Cloud repatriation vs. multi-cloud: IT seeks cost relief

To learn more about software development and platform engineering, check out Search IT Operations.

To watch clips from our podcast, subscribe to our YouTube channel, @EyeOnTech.

Yuval Fernbach has more than a decade of hands-on experience in the realm of data and machine learning, and served as the co-founder and CTO of Qwak from 2020 until it was acquired by JFrog in 2024. Fernbach is now vice president and CTO of JFrog ML, a subset of the JFrog software supply chain management toolset focused on AI and machine learning operations, or MLOps. In this interview, he discusses the unique challenges generative AI poses in software supply chain security, and what enterprise developers and platform engineers need to know about this new frontier in technology.

Featuring: Yuval Fernbach, vice president and CTO of JFrog ML

In today’s episode, we’ll cover…

• Increased risks and governance issues due to generative AI's widespread use among software engineers
• JFrog's platform extensions for managing AI models and Shadow AI detection
• The importance of maturing AI adoption practices
• JFrog Fly, an agentic artifact repository designed for small teams

and more!

References:

• JFrog integrates with Hugging Face, Nvidia; intros JFrog ML
• JFrog extends DevSecOps playbook to AI governance
• JFrog connects key software supply chain management dots
• JFrog buy bolsters MLOps combo with DevSecOps

To learn more about software development and platform engineering, check out Search IT Operations.

To watch clips from our podcast, subscribe to our YouTube channel, @EyeOnTech.