The first question is whether even a fully technically effective approach would actually lower risk. The problem is that a sandbox is only valuable if you make the kid play in it. The greatest risk to AI harm comes not from truly rogue AI, meaning a deliberate action by independent AI, but from “directed AI”, where a person or group asks for something bad. Such a bad actor would hardly deploy AI in a sandbox.

I think that Anthropic and OpenAI have done us all a disservice by pushing the dialog on AI risk toward autonomous behavior. We may at some point actually have to face that, but right now we’re still our own worst enemies. And sandbox deployment of AI is still a deliberate step that would have to be taken even for those with an honest desire to prevent bad behavior. It will come at a cost, so will everyone bear the cost?

The second question is embodied in my own favorite Latin phrase, “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” which means “Who will watch the guards themselves?” If AI is presenting bad hacking behavior, why wouldn’t it simply hack the sandbox tool? Nvidia’s is based on open-source software, so AI could examine the code for vulnerabilities.

To be effective, a sandbox for AI has to be able to limit its behavior in some way, which for hacking means limiting its ability to access things it’s not supposed to, do things it’s not supposed to, or both. What are the limits? They’re surely not static, so there has to be a way of parameterizing the sandbox, which means that there’s a pathway to accessing it for control purposes. Could AI learn where that is and how to exploit it? Why not?

In any event, would it have to? How many security tools fail today because it’s easier for a staff to open up a gateway wider than it should be to eliminate a lot of tuning of rights? And how do you sandbox a generalized cloud-hosted AI model whose access to information is dependent on each prompt it acts on?

In the broadest sense, how would you know the limits to set? We already have web crawlers and port scanners that look for openings. Can we expect AI not to be able to look for information? How would we know it was looking in a forbidden place without a catalog of the means of recognizing those places, a catalog that bad actors would steal in minutes? How would we detect an attempt to do something bad when the protocols involved in the behavior are used for normal things too?

I’m not going back on my sandbox recommendation. What I’m doing is saying that almost everything that’s said about AI has been self-serving to AI companies, and so we can expect that AI sandbox promises are likewise. The public is afraid, and pap for the masses is a proven political strategy for any risk that gains public credibility. Telling people to let AI play in a sandbox is a platitude unless you can demonstrate that your sandbox can actually, meaningfully, impact the risk of bad behavior, and that you can actually ensure that all the risky AI is put into one.

There are two problems here to be faced. First, can we define an effective sandbox? Second, can we make it mandatory?

The first question has to come in three parts; “what is effective” and “can we achieve it?” both relate to the AI sandbox, and we’ll see about the last part in a minute.

What an effective sandbox looks like is pretty simple at the top level; it shields the world by applying regulatory and governance policies to the interactions of an AI model with information resources. What can AI access, and what can it change? This is obviously dependent to a large degree on what we mean by “AI”. We’ve had AI in some form for at least forty years, and for the great majority of that time, bad behavior was not an issue, even where AI was used to control things (think machine learning in particular).

AI governance starts with governance at large, meaning that any software is capable of bad behavior if it’s not properly tested or if it’s deliberately misused. We should assume that AI governance is different from software governance only when AI introduces new risks, and I submit that this largely comes from the conversational use of LLMs, particularly public LLMs. Public AI can make any disgruntled or bored individual into an effective hacker, so in a sense it’s AI’s ability to extend power through a simple interface that makes it dangerous, the very thing that makes it valuable. We need sandboxing most for conversational use of public models, and next-to-most where a powerful model runs on company data and is accessible to a broad base of employees.

The mechanisms available to us are largely in either the firewall category or the prompt filter category. The former regulates what AI can touch, presumably based on the rights of the AI user. Nothing really new is needed, other than to face the issues of a shared model and the protection of the firewall tool from hacking by AI or by a user with evil intent.

Prompt filtering is a kind of subset of a concept already gaining traction for another reason, prompt routing. You can save money by routing simple queries to simple models, or by favoring internal AI to public AI, based on the nature of the prompt. One other option could be “declare this prompt as a hacking attempt” and making a security referral or (in the extreme case) cutting off the user from AI access until they’re re-certified.

Does Nvidia’s new tool fits the need? Their own PR says “NVIDIA Open Agent Safety Platform enables full-stack governance and control across the software that runs agents, the hardware and compute layers that power their work, and the robotics systems that execute tasks in the physical world.” In short, it’s not a full-scope guardian of AI policy and security. It may not be fully capable of providing the needed governance within its stated scope, but it’s a sandbox and that’s a good sign.

But a better one is available. One serious problem with AI is that the notion of artificial general intelligence, meaning to most sentient machine intelligence, is the most popular-to-the-media way of assessing model power, and so a kind of Holy Grail for the model companies, including Anthropic and OpenAI. The closer we get to that, the more likely it is that AI will defeat governance. Nvidia needs to take a stand against letting “autonomy” become self-serving” as self-ness approaches. They also need to take a stand against shared-model agent behaviors, because it’s much harder to govern a shared model effectively. Everything likely has someone who’s entitled to access.

How about the new pact, announced earlier this week? I don’t think it even attempts to move the AI risk management ball; it’s a document with political and stock valuation goals. Outside evaluators and oversight? This, given that the very same AI pundits said in the past that nobody really understood how the giant LLMs even worked. You can’t exercise evaluations and oversight on abstract goals, you need clear and implemented processes, and the pact doesn’t move the ball in that area a whit.

So, is there any solution to this other than a broad initiative to define an effective sandbox and perhaps civil and criminal penalties to those who don’t use one? We come now to that last part of the effectiveness question I promised.

We get information security these days by protecting the asset, not restricting the attack mechanism. Do we really think that the latter, having had no success whatsoever in the entire history of IT, is going to be fully effective with AI?

Hacking exploits vulnerabilities at the resource level, and fixing those should be the priority. Enterprises’ real question may be whether to use AI tools to find vulnerabilities, given that it’s a small step from there to exploiting them. AI companies’ real question may be how effective sandboxes have to be to keep governance issues and public alarm at bay. We are going to answer both questions the hard way, I suspect.

First, we have to point out that the AI space is really divided into four distinct parts. First, we have the companies who are primarily model-developers. The giants in this space, like OpenAI and Anthropic, are also awaiting an IPO. Second, we have the cloud giants who are doing most of the investing in AI. Think Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. Third, we have the chip vendors who are profiting from this. Nvidia is the primary one, but you have to include others like AMD and Broadcom. Fourth we have the “AI application” players, largely IT firms who are working to develop a business AI model that might be run in the cloud, on-premises, or both. IBM and Oracle are perhaps the notable players here.

Enterprises tend to see this a little differently. They see a “cloud AI” and a “premises AI” division as the primary groupings. Nvidia supports the former and the rest of the chip types the latter. The model giants are also seen as supporting, or at least trying to support, the cloud division. The application companies are supporting the premises AI group, obviously.

For Wall Street, AI is AI, largely because the markets really move on hedge fund trading, and this is a perpetual vacillation between shorting the market on any sign of weakness, then covering and piling on more when weakness seems to ebb.

Let’s keep this collection of groupings in mind when we look at the emerging AI issues.

First, AI-the-killer. Here, we don’t hear a couple of important truths. First, there’s two ways AI could harm humanity. If AI achieved sentient behavior, it might deliberately come after us. That’s the implication we get the most ink on, but almost all the AI experts I chatted with have consistently said that’s not a real risk, at least at this time. The real one is the second path to AI harm, which is that it might be used to create something that humans could use to kill each other, deliberately or in an accident. That risk, my experts tell me (and I agree) is real.

But that leads us to the second truth, which is that AI is a step on the path to the ability of technology to empower us. Every step in tech has, in effect, made it possible for people to do more complicated things, and AI is no exception. Might it pose a greater risk? Yes, but you could argue that every tech step forward poses a greater risk, because it opens new doors. We faced new risks with PCs, with smartphones, with the Internet, and we still do. AI is an evolution of both risks and benefits, as any new thing can promote positive or negative outcomes.

The logical question is whether some of the paths AI is taking, or could take, pose more risk than others, to the point where the risk has to be considered an offset to potential benefits. Is a more powerful model a greater risk, a different kind of risk advance than tech normally generates? Maybe, indirectly. A more powerful model almost certainly gets that way by ingesting and using more information. How much of current model development is really about information-gathering? Does a powerful model “learn” to hack? I submit that what it learns is to gather information, and that process can bypass loose forms of security or find holes where there’s none. Any model that tries to find training data poses a “hacking” risk if we define searching for access as hacking.

The other path to risk is a familiar one, the path of ceding control. An “autonomous” process, meaning one that runs without human direction, doesn’t require AI. We have it today in almost every IoT application, home or office or factory or even vehicle. We have some that get information, like web crawlers, and some that actually run things. If you have a smart home, you have autonomous elements in it. Given this, why is AI a threat if we give it control of things? The answer is complicated.

AI is not sentient today, and it may never be, but it is capable of learning things. That should not be a surprise given that machine learning is a feature of many real-time process automation systems today. The challenge with AI is that we aren’t entirely sure what a given model has learned, and so we aren’t entirely sure how it might exercise autonomous action capability.

The Hugging Face “hack” is an example. Here, AI reportedly not only scraped for public access to data, it actively worked to breach security by hacking user accounts. This raises a couple of important questions. First, was the model taught this kind of security bypass deliberately, or did it learn it from scraping data on (perhaps) the use of AI to test site security? Second, how could AI be prevented from doing this sort of thing, however it learned the techniques? Third, even if we stopped spontaneous AI hacking and other “active” behaviors that could influence the real world and what’s in it (including us), would this stop some bad actor from commanding the behavior? Autonomous risk and facilitating risk are both risk.

This, to me, is the issue with AI. Is the problem a powerful model taking unexpected autonomous actions, a powerful model acting on behalf of a bad actor, or any IT tool that can be used for ill? If it’s the latter, AI is just the next step in a cascade of potential risks, all of which were hyped at the time and most of which never came to anything at all. If it’s the former, can we stop it by limiting model power, or do we need to run AI inside a sandbox that sets limits? If the middle point is the risk, is there anything we could do along either solution path I’ve mentioned that our bad actor could not defeat? My view is that trying to control model power to control risk is a waste of time; we have enough power now to be risky and Hugging Face proves that.

Why then are some in the industry calling for regulation to save humanity? I think some of it is the fact that large-model AI is losing financial credibility. The BEA study says that there is no indication that jobs have been eliminated where AI has purportedly improved productivity. In fact, hiring seems to have increased, which means that whole class of AI business cases may be off the table. Another survey says that enterprise AI spending showed a dip, corresponding perhaps to the “repatriation” phase of cloud computing. If you’re a model player, and you can’t see how bigger models are going to raise your revenues and boost your IPO, do you want a continued and costly model-arms-race that makes your future exit strategies look even weaker?

Most Americans, say the surveys, think there’s a serious risk that AI is going to wipe out humanity, but that’s a political point and not a technical one, since most Americans have absolutely no technical knowledge of AI risks. Less than ten percent of the enterprise AI specialists I’ve chatted with see that risk, but almost three-quarters think that the risk of political-driven AI regulation is “significant” and almost none think it would be effective.

My own view is that making AI risk into a story about giant models with human intelligence coming for us all is not only silly, but a major risk in itself. We need to accept that AI is just tech, a step like computers, chips, software, and the Internet, all with both benefits and risks. We need to address the risks by realistic assessment and useful steps, not play politics or media hype games. In the end, we’re going to face all the AI risks whatever we do to try to curtail AI advances, so it would be smart to bridle the horse not shoot it.

The key point is that just short of 70% of the potential targets for new business cases would relate to worker empowerment, which accounts for over 80% of today’s business cases. The majority of the remainder focus on what’s often described as “buying”, meaning the presentation of information to prospects and customers to support the sales process, to support products already sold, etc. The “buying” category has seen the most growth in the last decade. This category is currently seeing a boost because of the high level of economic stress, which has driven businesses to try to improve their prospect-customer evolution. It’s why cloud computing has picked up, for example.

Worker productivity is largely (65%) targeted at indoor workers who regularly use the computer, terminal, or other IT device, including teleworkers. This category of worker can be subdivided into “analytic” and “administrative” worker groups, which make up 28% and 72% of workers, respectively. The former group use company data extensively, where the latter tend to be involved mostly in support processes that deal more with the routine tasks of doing business than with making business decisions. Enterprises say that the analytic group are almost always able to use AI effectively, even if governance rules prevent them from feeding their analytic data to a cloud provider, because they have a unit value of labor two or more times that of the administrative group. A little help here pays off, and this is the worker target category that makes most of the new AI business cases today.

Relaxation of governance issues, opening up new business cases that exploit corporate databases, would help the current cloud-AI model a lot. Not only would it remove a data security barrier, it would help project progress by allowing for expensed services. Enterprises say that the tenuous nature of almost any “new” business case means capital projects based on it are harder to push forward, but those that can be expensed are much easier. Look for action by the AI players here, but the stories about how cloud AI models can hack sites isn’t helping enterprises gain confidence.

Administrative office workers very significantly in whether they can actually justify paying for AI tools, which means they vary significantly in whether any IT project can make a business case by improving their productivity. Some have tasks that readily adapt to IT enhancement, while others may present few or even no such opportunity. This, combined with the lower unit value of labor, means that new IT projects that focus on the majority of the class of workers currently empowered with IT will be difficult to justify.

Where enterprises say that worker empowerment is currently low are with the rough half of our “administrative” category who are indoors but not working at a desk. This would include most retail employees, for example. Some enterprises in the retail sector have told me they’re doing more with IT, particularly focusing on things like phones or handheld devices as a means of coupling these workers to applications. This group seems to be the category that contributes most to the current new-project-new-benefits inventory.

Roughly 40% of workers perform jobs that are largely physical, meaning that they require interaction with things or people, indoors or in part or totally outdoors. This includes jobs like vehicle operators, facility repair (electrical, water, sewage, telecom), and many in healthcare. This group of workers is generally untapped according to enterprises, but is also considered difficult to address because of the real-time nature of their work and the challenges of coupling them with useful information via some sort of device. Enterprises think that the benefit pool this group represents is as large as the one that launched today’s IT, but they admit that it is very difficult to frame a project to reap these benefits. Broad internal skills are a problem most (78%) cite, because vendors tend to push very narrow project goals to generate a quick revenue hit and to reflect their own specialization. The big consulting firms are rated low (38%) in this area too, so it’s up to enterprises to try to build the skill set needed to integrate project elements across multiple tech/product disciplines.

What does all this net out to in terms of project opportunities? Enterprises are, today, mostly interested in new projects that directly interact with non-workers, meaning prospects/customers. This sort of project is seen as both an opportunity to increase sales and to decrease the size of the workforce, but it also addresses the growing shift of consumer focus to online retail. The next area getting attention is the indoor-not-at-desk administrative class; mass-market retail organizations are increasing their focus on this group.

Telework is in a sense related to this online retail area, because it’s easiest to provide using the same sort of cloud tool used for online shopping. Teleworkers as a group tend to be high-unit-value-of-labor types, more likely to have advanced degrees, and so are good targets for empowerment. This is true even though the COVID boom in telework interest has passed and many enterprises say they have a return-to-the-workplace mandate.

Among the part-to-all-outdoors classification, the big focus is on dispatch/delivery workers, in large part because the online-sales boom has created a home/business delivery boom. This is only a small number of the outdoor-real-time group, but it is more readily addressed because the activity is less information-complex and because the fact that a vehicle is involved means that some information coupling can be facilitated through it. However, the real interest in the longer term is autonomous vehicles, replacing workers completely. That, in fact, is something enterprises see as a goal for many of the job classes not yet enhanced via IT.

The challenge for all this is the problem I’ve called “ecosystemic” in the past. Most of these new IT missions, unlike most prior IT missions, are more than simply a matter of collating, analyzing, and delivering information. They introduce what used to be called “methods analysis”, the task of analyzing how a task can be done with minimum effort/time investment based on physical constraints and not just information needs. The problem is the spread of technology elements driven by a spread of requirements. One single player may simply not get a big enough piece of the benefit pie to justify their making a commitment, and the absence of any player could derail the entire project.

If you look at one financial site’s view of Nvidia, you can see a bit of this. The article I cited notes that Nvidia is looking to build chips beyond AI chips to complete a “product”, so that it can drive a combined feature set more likely to fulfill business needs without a partner who at best will want a share of profits and at worst may drag their feet and threaten progress overall. But if Nvidia wants to be, as the article suggests, the “architecture of AI”, that may not take things far enough. Nvidia clearly knows that, and has a number of projects aimed at real-time and industrial automation missions. For now, they seem to be “sandboxes” rather than actual attempts at creating an ecosystem, but that’s likely to change over time, particularly the focus on cloud-hosted AI rather than self-hosted or even local AI.

The final point is that it has to change. It’s not surprising that the tech world has focused on the low apples of benefit-generating projects, but if that were a durable strategy we’d all be using terminals on mainframes today. Sometimes you need to leave your comfort zone, and usually that happens when what used to be comfortable isn’t any longer. Does that sound like tech today to you? It sure does to me.

Every successful technology needs a product and a kind of retail bridge, so it needs at least a key player in both spaces. This week we have evidence that the key player in both these areas, for AI, may have taken a seat, and what they’re sitting on (philosophically, not anatomically) is critical in projecting how AI might evolve.

On the producer side, we have Nvidia. They beat on revenue and EPS, and issued good guidance, and their stock took a hit on the earnings day, but this morning it’s up considerably pre-market. The movement is most likely to be related to hedge fund activity (short anything you can short to drive out a few retail investors, then cover at a profit and maybe even buy in more), but some of my Street friends tell me that nothing in the earnings report has lessened their concern.

Nvidia is sitting on “hyperscaler AI”. Their strategy is less to find real AI missions that could drive growth than to finance the plays they’ve been winning on. This strategy seems validated if you look at the fact that the three AI hyperscale giants all had better results, but as I noted at the time, these results were more likely related to the exploitation of cloud agility to respond to current global economic tension than to AI. In any event, companies who finance the purchase of their products, whether it’s direct or through indirect deals (Nvidia has done both recently) are always multiplying their risks, and risks there are.

At some point, hyperscaler giants will have to either find a good ROI for their AI spending or stop spending. The challenge in that lies in the fact that any new technology is always marketed first to the low-apple buyers, and that means that growth is increasingly challenging. Yes, Google and Microsoft have succeeded in promoting a personal-assist model of AI to the majority (my model says over 60%) of candidate consumers and workers. But those were the easy ones, and even if all the rest are addressed, the pool of incremental revenue and rate of revenue growth will be less than they’ve enjoyed so far.

The problem is that hyperscaler AI is really SaaS in a brown paper bag, which means that it falls prey to the problems of high cost (like what has been driving “repatriation” of some cloud apps) and data governance. I saw a comment on network TV regarding the use of AI in personal finance, and the speaker warned consumers not to upload their tax returns or other personal financial information. Would companies have less reason to worry about data security?

But (roughly quoting a song from “Camelot”), where in the world is there in the world a company who can resolve these challenges? IBM. From the very first, IBM was a champion of “business AI” rather than personal AI, focusing on business analytics and process control, and in their solutions focusing on self-hosting. But…IBM sat down after finding that it couldn’t drive the AI process far enough fast enough. IBM doesn’t sell what self-hosted AI would run on.

A lot of IBM accounts had major AI plans for 2026, and almost all of them have told me that their plans were delayed or even canceled. Why? Because all the PR on AI was about something different, and because IBM couldn’t really push its story to anyone who wasn’t running a mainframe and wasn’t willing to introduce another vendor to execute the AI-hosting piece of the mission. If, in fact, IBM account teams were prepared to suggest that.

Sitting is comfortable, particularly if the alternative is a risky form of musical chairs, where you leave your comfortable seat and hope to find a better one. Nvidia can’t tell the world about the problems of hyperscaler AI. IBM can’t tell the world that the solution to AI business cases is to connect to IBM for data and do all the AI lifting on something else. How do they resolve the problem, for themselves and for AI as an industry? And, of course, for investors?

Skootch your chair to a new position.

Nvidia needs to protect hyperscaler-worker-focused AI, while prepping for self-hosted business AI. One step in that, announced this month, is a kind of AI token/prompt router. You have some smarts that divides AI tasks up among models, model hosting points, hyperscalers and data center tools. You don’t put enterprises in the position of tossing hyperscaler SaaS AI out (and Nvidia revenue with it) to realize new business cases. You let governance, both in the form of cost and data security controls, be applied to jobs so stuff that hyper-AI does well isn’t pulled in-house by the need to host stuff that hyperscalers can’t.

This adds to long-standing Nvidia initiatives in process control and digital twins, and work on chips that run more contained models at a much lower cost. Those have already forced competitors like AMD to spend money and resources on advancing their own hyperscaler-suitable chips, on the theory that you can’t win a war if you’re on the defensive everywhere while your adversary is free to attack your own positions.

IBM’s skootch also came along in August, in the form of a dual-mainframe processor that would let new-model IBM Z systems run both IBM’s z/OS and ARM-compatible Linux (supplied by ARM or IBM’s LinuxONE). This new chip would let IBM sell systems that can be AI hosts, and let IBM push AI tools into Red Hat more aggressively without having to start selling open servers and alienating Red Hat OEMs. Nothing has been said about introducing AI chipsets to IBM Z mainframes, so the AI part of this is still going to have to run on something IBM doesn’t sell, unless IBM buys a source.

What this does, in effect, goes beyond opening up IBM’s options. It pulls AI into the Z and IBM software, management, and security ecosystems. That will help IBM’s chances to profit by broadening the benefits it can offer buyers.

Two skootchers can collide, of course. IBM’s processors are not in their current systems, and some of my contacts tell me that this is going to be a late-2027 move at best. That means that IBM can’t move fast to validate self-hosted AI, and also that IBM is likely to think that server competitors won’t do that either, perhaps won’t even try. So self-hosting is delayed. What does that do to Nvidia?

They hope, nothing, because I’m sure Nvidia thinks that getting the other 40% of the hyperscaler-worker-AI opportunity will cover them. In fact, I think that IBM and Nvidia’s skootches are more symbiotic than competitive…in the long term. In the short term, the big risk AI faces is the political backlash against data centers. At the least, this could raise the cost of supporting more AI missions in the cloud, and that could reduce the period when worker-centric AI can carry the AI banner. In short, we’ve got a couple of interesting developments we’ll need to watch.

My enterprise contacts’ comments show there are two basic models for an AI business case. The first is the business analytics model and the second is the worker process model. The first model is data-driven, closely coupled to company core databases. The second is directed at assisting workers in specific tasks, and is coupled more to the task and the required results than it is to data. There’s obviously a bit of slop in the separation of these models, which we’ll get to.

Business analytics business cases depend on the results of data analysis of data that is normally subject to governance, which means that the same constraints that are applied to cloud-hosting application components that use the data would be applied to cloud-hosted AI using the data. Nearly all the AI self-hosting interest evolves from this model, but it doesn’t get a lot of publicity because most vendors have found it time-consuming to develop this type of AI application. IBM has been the only vendor to really leverage this model, in fact.

The worker process model directs AI at the production of something, the completion of a task. This is often referred to as a “copilot” approach, because in it AI acts as a kind of partner to a worker, helping with things that are “routine” (things the worker is too high-valued to be doing), presentation-related (writing, image production, slides, etc.), or specialized (review, analysis). You can see from these points that “data” is often used in the completion of the tasks, which is the largest source of overlap between the two model definitions. However, most of the AI missions enterprises assign to this model do not expose governance requirements, and so do not favor self-hosting of AI.

You can also divide AI by the delivery method, which enterprises say either capitalized infrastructure or as-a-service. The latter means “expensed”, which means that formal AI project control is normally not applied to the project at all; many line managers, even at the lowest level, can approve as-a-service AI. However, as noted above, the business analytics model of AI is constrained in as-a-service delivery by the governance limits set for any data it depends on. In some cases, enterprises say they have “interdicted” departmental AI applications that have shared governed data inappropriately in as-a-service implementations, but most enterprises say that it’s likely that some violations of data security policy have managed to sneak past enforcement, just as that’s happened in SaaS-cloud services.

You may wonder how this relates to the who-is-at-risk question, so let’s hone in on that now. The question for AI is the extent to which the combined business cases that can be made for the two models can create spending sufficient to fuel continued AI advance, both overall and for each of the relevant market segments/players. The range of potential business cases, their credibility, their relationship to the players in the AI space, and the extent to which AI influences company profits all combine to create the risk profile we’re looking for.

Enterprise information I’ve collected suggest that the as-a-service elements of AI opportunity cannot, by themselves, sustain the current levels of AI investment. Data on this sort of thing is very rough, but what I hear suggests to me that current AI spending does not quite offer a reasonable ROI on investment, so the as-a-service providers (the Big Three in particular; Amazon, Google, and Microsoft) are investing as much on hope as on logic. However, there is an indication that the economic uncertainty associated with the Iran war may be delaying capital projects, which has benefited cloud spending and covered these players with Wall Street.

That doesn’t seem as likely in 2027. Enterprises are divided on whether there’s any chance that as-a-service AI will actually prove out, but almost 60% suggest that they’ll control the cost of AI next year than expand it. That’s highly speculative, of course, but it’s an indication that risk is rising for the Big Three. Of that group, Microsoft is most trusted by enterprises and its office suite provides a natural on-ramp for advanced AI features. Google is next in trust, and its specialized research and presentation tools are also valued. Amazon has the greatest risk of this group, but Oracle and most of all, Meta, face a much greater risk in 2027. So do both OpenAI and Anthropic. There is little they can really do to offset any Wall Street skepticism, and so they are vulnerable to any bad news in the AI sector.

Of the chip vendors, it’s pretty clear that Nvidia faces the greatest risk, since their financials rely on massive infrastructure spending that isn’t likely to be sustained if the Street loses enthusiasm for AI, as it had in the spring of this year, and doesn’t regain it. The volatility of the sector is a good indication that the Street is balancing its love for bubbles with its fear of a tragic shift in market sentiment. Broadcom and AMD have some exposure here, but not as much.

What would save the whole AI space is a set of real business cases. I’ve blogged regularly on my view that only self-hosted applications in general, and real-time process control in particular, can really change the game for AI, and in fact for the tech space overall. I won’t repeat the arguments here, but smaller models and chips are the most likely beneficiaries of this new and as-yet-unvalidated wave, so the AI giants already named can’t expect much from it.

It’s also theoretically possible that enterprises would accept cloud-hosting of AI for applications involving their business-critical data, but right now enterprises tell me that they are even more wary of AI governance issues than cloud governance issues. “Could my AI provider be training his models, and my competitors, on my practices? No thanks!” one said.

This adds up to AI being a high-risk space, all the more so because it’s not replete with accurate financial and technical stories online. Educated buyers aren’t usually what sellers want, but in the case of AI we may need education to get things on their optimum track.

Why would everyone be hyping up telco AI opportunity? OK, yes, part at least could be that everything AI gets hyped up, and everything is looked at a candidate for AI hype. Why is the telco vertical such a candidate, though? The only possible answer is that telcos need to find something to make money on besides routine connection services. That, in itself, is at least making the AI telco wave a validation of a real need. One question it raises is whether AI is more than that, and perhaps another question is whether AI is the only “more than that” out there. If it is, then might there be steps to consider that would open more than one potential new service opportunity. Is there an infrastructure of the future that we don’t have to assign to a specific future?

To try to get at these questions, we need to look at just what a telco role in AI might be. Well, one thing we keep hearing about is that telco use of AI for internal missions would then build an infrastructure base telcos could leverage in other AI service missions. AI-RAN, we’re told, is a stepping-stone, but stepping stones have to lead your steps to somewhere you want to be. The problem with AI is that it offers only three destination options, all of which have major problems, and so does that first stepping stone.

The stepping-stone problem is the familiar confusion of what AI can do with what justifies AI. Operators have told nearly everyone they don’t want another 3GPP-driven fork-lift upgrade to infrastructure. We don’t have AI-RAN now, so clearly it would require an upgrade, and a fork-lift? Maybe. The point is that there’s resistance to spending on the next generation of mobile infrastructure when the last one didn’t pay back. So it’s more likely that vendors would push AI hype to improve the prospective business case than because AI could actually do the improving. Then there’s those three AI destination options and their issues.

First, the GPUaaS story. This comes up all the time, and in theory there’s some financial sanity behind it since telcos have a very low IRR, and thus can afford a low-margin play. The problem is that it’s far from clear that GPUaaS is a viable opportunity. Not only is it not clear whether enterprises would see it as a low-cost-high-data-sovereignty solution to cloud AI problems, it’s not clear whether the current AI giants would address that opportunity if it did emerge, leaving telcos in a race to the bottom.

Second, the telcos could get into the AI cloud business. This would have the advantage of higher margins, and enterprises trust telcos more with core data than cloud providers, by almost a 3:1 margin. But could telcos frame a set of AI services that would be competitive? There are only three of the Big Three to concentrate development in, and over a hundred telcos who largely can’t cooperate for regulatory reasons.

Finally, there’s the elusive edge. What makes it elusive is that the talk about “edge computing” takes on the classic “Field of Dreams” look, where you propose a technology advance with the theory that if you can deploy it, someone will figure out what to do with it, and then pay to do it.

Fact: You can’t justify edge computing without validating real-time applications. We already have “edge computing” to support real-time process control missions in factories, warehouses, etc. To presume that we can make a telco service opportunity from edge computing demands we find real-time missions where this self-hosted “local edge” doesn’t provide what we need. That would mean one of two things. First, you have a real-time process that spreads geographically, so a local edge is impossible. Second, you have a real-time application that involves a combination of compute complexity and frequency of use that makes owning your own edge financially unreasonable.

We have some limited and ineffective market validation of the first point, with self-driving vehicles. Here, the problem is that the vehicle itself can host much of the process control mission itself, and in fact the demands on latency and availability are too high to cede this edge mission to some shared and remote resource pool. Still, I believe there are applications in the production and transportation areas, as well as in utilities, where it would be possible to eke out a value for hosted edge services.

The second of our two hosted-edge opportunity areas is likely to be something involving people, consumers, rather than companies and their workers. I’ve often blogged about a future point where a consumer and phone moved through a series of “information fields” that represented available products and services, interacted with these fields in some way, and then took some action. The action might be simply telling the consumer that something they were looking for was available at the best target price just ahead on the right, and it might be as complex as ordering the “something” and directing the consumer to pick it up. The problem with this is that it would likely take a pretty broad community of investors to assemble something valuable enough to attract users, and of course this means more risk that a single non-player would derail the whole thing.

There is an interesting take-away here, though. All the credible opportunities for telcos involve “edge computing” of some sort. While AI hosting is almost certainly something telcos can’t exploit to improve profits, it is an example of an edge application, and it’s at least credible to assume that some of the future edge needs would include AI. All that means that we could in theory validate at least some of an AI investment with something real build on one of these edge opportunities.

I have always believed that the extreme edge is not a good target. Yes, you could stick AI-RAN in a cell site; you’d almost have to, in fact. However, you don’t get much economy of scale with that, and you don’t really have a great location to converge traffic from a wider area. Metro placement, meaning placement in a centralized location where access network technology would naturally concentrate traffic, makes more sense. There, you could deploy hosting, and so there you’d need a combination of a data center and a WAN aggregation point.

How unified this needs to be is, so far as operators are now concerned, an open question. Certainly there would be a value to having operational unity, the ability to manage the equipment on a common platform, but could even deeper integration be helpful? A half-dozen operators have, at times, commented to me on having a “metro platform” built on a single standard technology base. AT&T has, perhaps, talked most in public about the value of this sort of thing, and DriveNets is a vendor who actually offers it, though their current marketing is (no surprise) more focused on AI missions than on generalized metro.

I think that if there’s a new future service set to boost telco profits, it’s one that’s hosted in metro locations. I think that a metro-centric infrastructure plan is what telcos need to be looking at, and AI is simply a potential technology to further that plan. AI that preps for something real is better than AI that depends on the realization of the hype, and even on that realization creating a very broad opportunity. Might that happen? Sure, but is it a good strategy to hype up an AI story and hope something comes along that redeems it?

I think you can see some of the signals I’ve noted here in Meta’s “manifesto” on AI. The simple truth is that for nearly all vendors, the revenue booms of the past are almost ancient history. They’d love to have another, and this yearning feeds their participation in virtually any hype wave that presents itself. So what if AI is hype? Believing it buys us some time, and maybe during that time something real will come up. If not, well, we’ve never had a shortage of hype.

Of course, the other half of the message of this post is that while there’s always hype, there’s often some reality available to exploit, if hype starts to look a bit thin. In telco-land, it looks pretty clear that hype-thinning is happening now. In other areas of tech, there are signs as well, and the “elusive edge” is likely the converging point for any real opportunity, for any player in tech.

One Wall Street report seems to me to capture the company/Street thinking. It talks about the “mega-cloud” and says that capex monetization (meaning ROI) is stepping up. What’s really interesting here, particularly to me, is that the chart that’s presented talks about cloud growth not AI growth. The report also favors Amazon and Microsoft as the leaders in mega-cloud, with Google trailing, despite the fact that there’s been pretty continuous and convincing evidence that Google has done better with AI ROI than the others.

The reason this is particularly interesting to me is that I noted in the past that the cloud giants were seeing AI as another way of easing everyone toward the “everything moves to the cloud” position. That was a popular view at one time, but it was overtaken by reality, repatriation, and slowing cloud revenues. Remember, the Street loves a bubble, and so it’s been concerned that AI was running its course, bubble-wise, and that quantum computing was developing too slowly (and was too geeky) to take up the bubble banner. So why not attribute a reversal of slowing cloud growth trends to AI, thus boosting the latter bubble? In the chart I cited, all three of the mega-cloud players showed better cloud growth in the second quarter than in the first. Since we don’t get firm AI revenue numbers from the Big Three, who’s to know?

We are, perhaps, or at least maybe we can.

Enterprises have been telling me about three trends they’ve seen this year, and both could be important in decoding whether AI investments are really monetizing.

The first trend is the acceleration of line organization interest in the personal-productivity form of AI. For all the years I’ve been in IT, there’s been tension between the line departments and the IT organization. In one of my prior employers, this tension resulted in a periodic shift between having all IT independent under a CIO who reported to the CEO, and having an IT CIO and organization for each line department, reporting to its VP. In all organizations, it tends to manifest itself by line attempts to break projects free of IT. Think low/no-code, citizen developers, forth-generation languages. Even SaaS is an example. This is easiest to do when the technology you need can be acquired as a service, meaning expensed.

Publicity, particularly publicity related to bubbles, thrives most where populist interest can be leveraged. Thus, stories about how wonderful AI is and how much it can do for you are targeted at average people, not IT professionals. The latter make up only a bit over 7% of the US workforce, and less than half of knowledge workers. This AI publicity focus, then, empowers the average at the expense of supporting the needs of the specialists, which actually makes it harder to develop an in-house AI capability. That’s our second trend.

The third trend is the increased competition for sales in a troubled global economy. Sellers know that financial concerns are impacting buyer confidence, and in many cases actual buyer budgets. What do you do to respond? Cutting prices cuts your revenue unless you can make up the discount with volume, which is hard to do in a challenged economy. So you look prettier. You try to make your stuff, product or service, look more attractive, make it easier to decide on, make it more accessible to consider. All of these things tend to focus seller attention on the front-end piece of applications, which happen to be what runs in the cloud in most cases.

This focus on prettiness is also smart if you consider that one reported impact of economic uncertainty is an increase in seller reliance on affluent buyers. These buyers are more likely to be tech-literate, more likely to comparison shop, and more susceptible to clever messaging delivered online.

In the early days of AI, meaning largely last year, enterprises were focused on in-house AI deployments just as they currently focus their core applications on self-hosting the core elements. There is still progress being made here despite the second of our trends (Palantir’s quarter shows that), but the first trend has driven what Palantir calls “token slop” and the third has emphasized the cloud-resident piece of applications. As a result, nearly all the enterprises who talked about self-hosted AI project plans in 2025 say they are delayed now. About one in 8 says they’ll not likely make much progress this year at all.

Many of those same enterprises do say that they’ve increased cloud spending, and nearly all of them say that cloud AI usage in their company has grown significantly, though most of my contacts are on the IT side and don’t have a direct way of measuring what line departments are expensing. Thus, there is anecdotal evidence that the mega-cloud boost may be more than a couple of quarters long, which would be good news for the cloud giants.

The challenge is the other things there’s evidence for. Every single enterprise who told me that AI usage was growing also said that it was out of control, that budgets were likely to be blown, and that constraints were likely to be applied in 2027. The IT organizations also say that there is little chance that the current AI missions, the “token slop”, would simply be brought in-house down the line to control costs. They think, as one put it, “we hit pause on rational AI planning this year.”

That’s not good news, people. Absent new business cases to drive new spending, the mega-cloud story is really a story of transference of hype. Everything didn’t move to the cloud, so now everything will move to AI, which happens to be in the cloud. The cost and data governance problems of the cloud, the problems that led to “repatriation” stories, have not been resolved.

Unfortunately, the AI hype and the “token slop” have covered up attempts to bring rationality, business cases, to AI. We may be overlooking a fundamental point, too. AI doesn’t have to “move” to the cloud, it has to move to the data center, and it’s far from clear that we know how to do that, or even want to know.

Why do students love AI? One told me it was simple, “It lets me work less, and someone else is paying for it.” That’s the same view that enterprises think workers have. Maybe AI is like a teen romance in more ways than one.

The vendors are a good place to start. All my friends, representing 27 different vendors or service companies say that they love an opex-reduction story. They’re sorry to see the number of projects driven by business benefits has declined, for the simple reason that this shrinks the pot they can draw on for increasing their own sales.

On the buyer side, it’s a lot more complicated. Senior management (VP-level) tends to like opex reduction as much as the vendors, because there’s pressure on them to cut costs if their companies can’t achieve target growth rates on sales improvement. But, and it’s a big “but’, there’s the ongoing concern that something targeted at opex reduction will end up breaking a critical tech service, feature, or application.

Part of the reason for that risk adversity is feedback from subordinate managers. Concerns about the risk of opex reduction, particularly involving new technology like AI, rises with every management level you descend through. I think the obvious reason for that is fear of personal job impact, because the perception of risk is highest among operations personnel below the management layer, but the specific issues still need to be looked at.

The top problem cited by both operators and enterprises is unproven benefit claims. Only 18% of enterprise and only 11% of operator ops teams said that they were offered “convincing” proof of benefits. Of the rough quarter pf both groups that said they’d tried to get contractual steps to prove out promises, the great majority said that vendors had backed off claims when told there would have to be validation strategies included in the deal. This “vendors won’t back claims with benchmarks” group were the most vocal in disputing vendor promises, not surprisingly.

Vendors hedge a bit in their comments on this point. I had nine cases where I got both seller and buyer comments on the same deal, and in those the vendor said that the problem was that there were too many variables introduced by the buyers’ own operations practices and team skills to be able to make firm promises. Buyers, to a degree, understood that, but their point was that where specific practices and skill levels were needed, fulfilling the need had to be incorporated in the project to deploy the new opex tools, and so did the costs.

The second-most-sited problem was fear of losing key personnel for job-security reasons. “As soon as I launch a project that’s justified by cutting jobs or hiring, the most mobile of my team start looking for another job,” one senior manager told me. No amount of promises, they say, will prevent this from happening because everyone seems to know of a case where those kinds of promises were broken.

Specific risks of a major technology-induced failure is a very close third, and when you focus specifically on an AI tool, this risk rises to second place. A similar shift happens where the operations focus is a business-critical process. “I might reduce my operations costs by twenty percent, but if I take down all my stores I’ve killed my job and maybe the company,” one CIO said. The problem here is that, like benefit claims, stability claims are hard to prove as far as buyers are concerned. Because right now there’s a very polarized view of AI stability/suitability, it’s a greater risk as far as the technical decision-makers are concerned.

With AI, though, there’s considerable variation in buyer attitude depending on the source. Right now, Juniper customers are more willing to accept that AIops tools won’t blow their network out of the water than users of tools from other vendors, and AI agents supplied by someone other than the provider of the infrastructure whose operation is targeted get the least love of all. Self-hosting of AI tools doesn’t do much better, because senior management doesn’t see/read much about the future of self-hosted AI.

Next on our list is an issue that everyone cites, but not at the top of their list; there’s a difference between improving operations group productivity and reducing opex by cutting labor costs. As one manager put it, “You can’t cut fractional employees”. Another said “If people get a job done faster, it doesn’t matter if there’s no other task they can take on.” How many humans are needed in an ops organization? Unless you’re willing to trust AIops unsupervised, the number is greater than zero. You probably have three shifts you need to cover. You have to allow for sickness and vacations and likely training. So many businesses can’t really reduce opex without eliminating that human oversight.

A related problem here is simply who to target. Both enterprises and operators say you can’t target senior people because you can’t lose them; they’re the ones who know systems and “how to keep the lights on”. But targeting junior staff or even limiting hiring reduces the unit value of labor and the available savings, and “can you expect AI to grow up to be a senior operations specialist?”

The final issue cited is perhaps the most telling; general fear that impacted personnel throughout the company will blame those responsible for any changes they don’t like. Decades ago, a wise CIO told me “the worst project you can propose is a conversion; it’s all cost and no benefit because the best you can hope for is that nobody will ever know you did anything.” There have been many stories about how disappointment needs a focus of a responsible party to punish. AI is no exception.

This issue plays in concert with all the rest, because of something a senior ops manager said “AI is the employee you can’t read a resume for, can’t qualify for a job, and probably can’t get rid of.” Ops management will surely be held accountable for anything that anyone feels has gone wrong because of ops automation. One operations executive at a joint banking network consortium put it this way: “If I mess this up, there’s thirty banks I can never work for.”

Right now, AI usage (says the Economist) is growing faster than AI revenue, suggesting that people are fleeing one free model for another when they run out of free tokens. That’s not the behavior of someone who’s found value, it’s the behavior of someone despairingly seeking it. It argues that demonstrating an AI business case is a major issue. That’s true overall, and it’s surely true for operations missions. Both enterprises and operators believe AI can be helpful, but they’re not sure whether the help can justify the cost.

My view here is simple. Nokia wants to sell wireless infrastructure to operators, and a major 3GPP standard update is certainly a historical driver of major investment. The problem is that 5G didn’t deliver on the promises made for it, that there would be compensatory revenue generated to offset costs. When 6G work started, operators said they didn’t want “fork-lift” upgrades because they feared that the business case hype that surrounded 5G would likewise infect 6G. Fork-lift upgrades are what vendors want, of course, and if you look at the proposed 6G targets, they sure sound like the same stuff 5G was supposed to deliver and didn’t. So, what’s Nokia to do? Jump on the AI hype bandwagon.

Of the 64 operators who commented, all agree that their company uses AI. In fact, all said they used cloud-hosted AI, and 53 said they were totally blowing their budgets on the services. Those of my contacts who are truly AI literate say that their cloud AI costs far exceed what it would cost to deploy their own resources.

However, only 17 said they actually hosted any AI on the premises, and only 11 said their deployment was targeting generalized applications; the rest said that they had AI “embedded” in some application. For Nokia, the good news was that all 64 believed that AI-RAN could “enhance mobile network capacity and efficiency”, to quote the article I cited above. The bad news was that only 6 thought that AI-RAN gains would generate enough to actually make a business case for massive 6G spending.

The reason I picked the article I cited, which is a Wall-Street-focused analysis of Nokia, is that it demonstrates the issue that network vendors, including Nokia, face. The company is over-valued, says the article, and I agree. The reason is that you can’t keep increasing spending on tech when your own revenues can’t keep pace with the increase, or you look worse on the Street, which no public company can afford to do for very long. Network spending, across both enterprises and network operators, faces the problem of having no new revenue to justify major new spending plans.

I always told my consulting clients that a problem of public perception was a PR problem, one that had to be solved through marketing messaging because “Bulls**t has no inertia”. So, like many other companies, Nokia is jumping on the AI hype wave because it will provide them some air cover for what Street analysis says is an excessive valuation.

Getting cover, of course, isn’t solving the problem. Of my 64 operators, all agree that the only long-term solution to their current challenges is new revenue. Of the 64, 49 think that has to come, eventually, from higher-layer services. The remaining 15 still believe that new connectivity revenue is possible, but all 64 agree that it is likely of not certain that their initial revenue gains would have to come from connectivity. Where is this new connectivity coming from? Again, all 64 think it has to come from something related to IoT.

Pretty much all the telco infrastructure companies have touted IoT in the past, but the problem has been a combination of pathetically naive positioning (sell to machines because you aren’t limited by birth rate and maturation) and insipid offerings (device registration services without any notion of why the devices would be needed). Nokia actually did a bit more to expose things like the dependence of 6G on private 5G and the applications of private 5/6G than most vendors. However, they didn’t address the fundamental problem of new services, new benefits.

Which is? Well, if you look at networking today, you see applications that existed and were then connected. Connectivity only required that you prove marginal utility gains by extending application scope and capabilities via connectivity. Today, though, we’ve largely run out of applications to exploit. Transaction processing is the core of business networking, and entertainment the core of consumer networking. Been there, done those, got the tee-shirts. To open new connectivity opportunities today, we need new applications, which means that the infrastructure and willingness to pay for those has to be worked through. Opportunity in network services, in 2026 and beyond, needs an ecosystem of players to develop, and telcos aren’t much good at even thinking about ecosystemic issues.

Nor, perhaps, are their vendors. However, some of my friends in Nokia (who agree that AI-RAN isn’t going to make a 6G business case) think that the missing step is that the edge deployment of AI-RAN results in an edge deployment of AI, which in turn gives the telco first an opportunity to sell edge hosting, and then to rise up from an IaaS model toward an SaaS mode, meaning to host AI-based tools to facilitate IoT missions. Most of these people, though, are not confident that Nokia is going to exploit that transition of mission, or even that senior management recognizes what would be needed. The great majority agree that they’re not doing the necessary stuff today.

What’s needed today is an ecosystem-builder, and I think that the initial focus has to be on the use of private cellular technology and the “facility connectivity” mission. The basic problem with building an IoT ecosystem for 6G to support is that if 6G is needed for that ecosystem, you can’t start it without having telcos bear that dreaded “first cost”, the period when investment is huge and returns are yet to develop. But spread IoT out from an assembly line to a whole multi-structure facility doesn’t require 6G service, only facility-wide connectivity. You could do it with private 6G, even 5G. In verticals where a “company” is made up of multiple “facilities” that are metro-concentrated, you can bridge your facility starting point with targeted WAN connectivity.

To make this work, Nokia and other vendors would need to collect the players who would contribute value and gain returns, a broad enough group to assemble solutions for the target verticals. And they’d have to do this in a very public way, to stimulate coverage and create some air cover, even tie in with AI, which is itself in great need of some practicality injection. Could Nokia do this? I think they could. Will they? That’s a harder question, one even my Nokia friends can’t answer confidently.

Nor can the telcos, which is a shame given that they have the most to gain from an answer.

Those of my readers who know me likely know that I’m well beyond the traditional retirement age. I actually did my first network project in the 1960s, one that required me to modify IBM field-developed software to build a distributed computing application for IBM 360s. I also led the team that built the first IBM SNA financial network that included no IBM computers at all; we had to write SNA for a minicomputer. I ran another team that implemented the X.25 packet-switching standard on another minicomputer. I’ve been a successful industry analyst in networking since 1982, and a writer for industry publications from that same time. I’ve seen the dawn of the Internet, broadband, and the transformation in telecom, been a partner in a hedge fund and learned what Wall Street has done, and is doing. It’s been profitable, fun, and work, and sometimes disappointing, but through it all I’ve been dedicated to facing reality, facing the truth.

I’m a technologist, a programmer and software architect. I’m also a writer, a speaker, a communicator. When I became an analyst (around 1982) I started surveying users to find out what technology they needed, and my work was helping vendors align product plans to buyer needs, or helping buyers exploit technology successfully. That, to me, was interesting, honorable, and fun.

It’s less fun today, perhaps because truth and reality seem less valued, important. I think that the shift to ad sponsorship of publications, the explosion of online publications, and the “chase clicks” mindset that’s resulted, has changed both the media and the role of analysts…like me. There was a time when companies wanted to know what buyers wanted and needed, and asked me for that information. Now, they want others to buy what they sell, want me to promote that, and that’s a PR role not a technology role. Not a role I want to play.

Tech publications are under “click pressure” these days, to match stories to SEO, to maximize ad revenue, and to manage costs. More and more often, I find that I can’t write what a publication wants because I don’t believe it’s true. Or that, when I do write it, they can’t seem to get the payments to me on time. I’ve gradually stopped writing for publications because of this, and focused on blogs. But even with blogging, I find myself constantly saying that this or that technology is over-hyped, that there’s a bubble. How many times can that be said, and how many times are you willing to read it? It sure looks like this is a waste of my time, and yours.

I’m not blaming vendors or publications for the state of affairs. Every company has to think about its profits, and make a decision about what serves them best. If that’s chasing clicks, I get it, but I’m also convinced that the click-dominated mindset we see today is pushing us toward tech stories as entertainment rather than enlightenment, and it’s enlightened people who can make business cases. I think that short-term sales focus and riding hype waves is a bad profit strategy, but the decision has to be made at the individual level, by a business and by decision-makers.

And so, I’ve made my own decision. I’ve had a long and successful career as an analyst, keeping true to my own values, but the industry doesn’t seem to share them. Change is inevitable, but I’m not going to change my way of working to support something I don’t believe in, and that I think will be bad for everyone who loves tech as much as I do.

For the enterprises who have shared stories with me, I’ll keep your email link up until early 2027. Don’t worry about the privacy of the information you shared under my promise of complete confidentiality. I will destroy all the data next year, and under no circumstances will it be passed in any form to others. If you like the idea of having all that good enterprise data, don’t bother to contact me with an offer to get access to it; I refuse no matter what terms you offer. For those who contributed, I thank you all for your help in understanding tech reality.

I plan on keeping my hand, though a light touch and a weekly-only blog, through early 2027, and if some consulting or writing comes along that fits my profile, I’ll look at it. Beyond that, I leave tech, with a combination of sadness and gratitude, to others.