China has created an international organization to set standards and introduce regulation for AI, inviting 28 other countries to join — but the US, a leading AI powerhouse is not part it.

The World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization (WAICO) was established by 29 countries, including China, Russia and Brazil, at a ceremony in Shanghai, China, on July 16. Notably absent are the US, the European Union and its member states, the UK, Japan and South Korea.

Chinese AI companies have made a concerted effort to provide an alternative to US dominance. While the US is clearly ahead, Chinese enterprises are looking to narrow the gap in various areas: the open-weight model market, AI cyber protection and open source AI.

WAICO has been some years in development and has been designed to set some universal guidelines in AI. Researchers say WAICO differs in three ways from other initiatives to create global AI organizations: membership open to any sovereign state, there is no regime-type test for entry, and its agenda is built around development and the global capability divide.

The signing ceremony to create WAICO comes just days after Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind, called on the US to take a lead in global AI regulation. “The US is well-positioned to take the first step in developing such a framework. It could establish a new Standards Body modelled on a federally overseen public-private partnership or self-regulatory organization, much like the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), with a board that includes independent leading technical experts and open-source representatives,” Hassabis wrote.

Microsoft’s big lead over AI competitors like Google and others has vanished, and the company is now playing catch-up. As a result, Microsoft’s stock has tanked in the last year — down roughly 23% compared to a year ago, due mainly to its massive AI spending and an inability to monetize Copilot. 

The company clearly needs to do something. And last week it did, though not what you might expect. It laid off 4,800 people, a little more than 2% of its worldwide workforce, with its Xbox division hit hardest. And it’s not reducing its massive spending on AI data centers or other AI-related costs.

The New York Times explained the cuts this way: “It is Microsoft’s latest employee culling as it plows tens of billions of dollars into the infrastructure for building artificial intelligence.”

Was cutting back on gaming (while still going all-in on AI) the right move for Microsoft? To answer that, let’s take a look at the details of the company’s July layoffs.

A year of layoffs

The recent cuts come in the wake of larger Microsoft workforce reductions over the last year or so. In May 2025, the company laid off 6,000 employees, about 3% of its workforce. Then a few months later, it laid off 9,000 more, about 4% of its workers. In both rounds of cuts, the company’s gaming division was hit — though it wasn’t the primary target.

This year, in April and May, the company rolled out its first voluntary retirement program for US employees. Approximately 3,000 people took the money and ran.

Then came last week, when Microsoft primarily targeted gaming. When the cuts take full effect over the next year, 2,850 gaming employees will be let go. In addition, Microsoft is cutting loose several of its gaming studio brands, which will become independent companies or be sold to buyers.

The layoffs hit the two remaining gaming studios, Activision Blizzard, which makes the big-selling games Call of Duty and Candy Crush, and ZeniMax Media, which publishes series including Fallout and The Elder Scrolls. Three years ago, in 2023, Microsoft bought Activision Blizzard for $69 billion. That followed its purchase of ZeniMax Media in 2020 for $7.5 billion. Both seemed like sizable acquisitions at the time. 

Compared to Microsoft’s AI spending now, they’re chump change.

Follow the money

A memo sent to employees about the July layoffs by Amy Coleman, Microsoft executive vice president and chief people officer, made clear the layoffs were more about AI than they were about gaming. 

Of the cuts, she wrote: “The “why” is this: our business is changing because the world around it is changing. The way technology is built, deployed, and used is transforming faster than at any point in my time here. Our customers’ needs are shifting, the business models that serve them are shifting, and that means the work itself — what we do, where we focus, and how we’re organized — has to transform, too.

“Our customers are navigating this same shift, and they’re counting on us to help them through it.”

That last sentence is an oblique reference to the early July launch of the Microsoft Frontier Company, which will embed 6,000 engineers inside customers’ businesses to help them more effectively deploy AI. The cost: $2.5 billion.

That sounds like a substantial amount of money. But it’s only a drop in the bucket of how much money the company plans to spend on AI. In April, Microsoft told investors it would spend $190 billion on data centers and other AI infrastructure this year, a 60% increase over what it spent last year. At the same time, Microsoft said it would shrink its workforce.

Its latest layoffs are clear-cut evidence of that. It’s also evidence that the company recognizes how badly Xbox has performed, and that it needed to do something about it. 

In early June, Microsoft sent a memo to everyone in its Xbox division entitled “Next 100 Days: XBOX Reset.” The memo laid out the problems with its ailing game business and pulled no punches. It noted that beyond the $69 billion the company spent three years ago to buy Activision, “Over the past five years, we have spent over $20 billion on ongoing investments in our content, platform, and hardware subsidy, but our annual revenue has declined nearly half a billion during that time. Going forward, this cannot continue.” 

The layoffs and spinoffs were the first steps. They won’t be the last.

There’s no doubt this is just the beginning of Microsoft’s disinvestment in gaming. The issue isn’t just that the company’s investments haven’t paid off. It’s that Microsoft’s AI ambitions are so large and expensive that it can no longer afford to seriously fund gaming.

Ultimately, it was the right thing to do, at least from a business perspective. The future is AI. It’s not in gaming.

So, for the foreseeable future at Microsoft, when it comes to AI — the sky’s the limit. But when it comes to gaming, things look much less rosy.

It’s been several years since generative AI and large language models (LLMs) took the world by storm. LLMs surpassed earlier natural-language systems at generating text, while diffusion models enabled generating images, music, and videos.

These generative AI models work well in the digital world, but on their own, they have limited capabilities to comprehend the three-dimensional physical world and other spaces. This includes the objects occupying an area, how they relate to each other, tracking movement, and answering complex questions requiring an understanding of dimensions, distances, motion, and collisions.

Spatial intelligence is an AI capability that allows models to reason about three-dimensional space. These models can generate 3D scenes of the world and other spaces. This content can then be displayed through traditional renderers, game engines, or AR/VR systems that use spatial computing techniques. But it’s the spatial intelligence model’s ability to connect natural language with 3D models that has the most applications in robotics, manufacturing, construction, and other physical environments.   

Dr. Fei-Fei Li, often called the godmother of AI, published a manifesto on how spatial intelligence is AI’s next frontier, contrasting it with LLMs. “While current state-of-the-art AI can excel at reading, writing, research, and pattern recognition in data, these same models bear fundamental limitations when representing or interacting with the physical world,” wrote Dr. Li. “Our view of the world is holistic—not just what we’re looking at, but how everything relates spatially, what it means, and why it matters. Understanding this through imagination, reasoning, creation, and interaction—not just descriptions—is the power of spatial intelligence.”

The concept of spatial intelligence isn’t new and was described in Howard Gardner’s book, Frames of Mind, in 1983. Recent breakthroughs, including the launch of World Labs’ Marble and its $1 billion funding round, and competing approaches from Google’s Genie 3 and Nvidia Cosmos, should put spatial intelligence and world models on more R&D road maps.

What are spatial intelligence models?

It’s important to develop AI literacy and understand the terminology and concepts related to the physical world and 3D AI technologies: 

• Spatial intelligence encompasses specialized approaches such as geospatial models for mapping the physical world and building information modeling (BIM) for modeling physical structures. It also extends to generative 3D, robotics, and physical reasoning applications.
• World models are a class of neural network architectures and are currently a prominent approach to building spatial intelligence.
• Digital twins are live, virtual replicas of physical assets that combine 3D models with real-time sensor data. Spatial intelligence, an emerging capability of digital twins, adds natural-language prompting, generative scenario exploration, and physics-aware reasoning.
• Spatial computing refers to digital content anchored in and interacting with physical space, sensed and rendered in three dimensions and delivered through AR/VR and mixed-reality systems.

“Spatial intelligence models go beyond pixels to understand the 3D structure of the world—how objects are positioned, how they move, and how they interact,” says David Fattal, founder and CTO at Leia. “This enables applications like more realistic video generation, spatial computing interfaces, and AI systems that can reason about physical environments. As real-world 3D data becomes more available, these models will become foundational to the next generation of visual AI.”

Monitoring the built environment

To better understand spatial intelligence, let’s consider physical infrastructure such as bridges and buildings. The American Society of Civil Engineers estimates a $9.1 trillion investment is needed from 2024 through 2033 to achieve a state of good repair. When maintenance and monitoring lag, it can lead to major failures such as the 2022 collapse of the Fern Hollow Bridge in Pittsburgh.

Spatial intelligence and the development of digital twins may help identify issues earlier and prioritize where investments are needed. “Spatial intelligence models serve as the 4D digital blueprints for our built environment, allowing us to visualize and predict the complex interactions between aging assets and the shifting ground beneath them,” says Patrick Cozzi, chief platform officer at Bentley Systems. “By synthesizing disparate geospatial data into a living digital twin, these models provide the foresight necessary to mitigate the hidden risks of structural fatigue and subsurface instability.”

There’s a significant challenge in bridge health monitoring and transitioning from manual, infrequent structural inspections to leveraging sensors, digital twins, and spatial intelligence. Cozzi adds, “This integration of continuous field data moves beyond static documentation, empowering agencies to evolve from reactive repairs to proactive, resilient asset management that safeguards the long-term integrity of our most critical public systems.”

Avoiding collisions

Bridges are largely static, but the real world is increasingly being occupied by autonomous systems such as self-driving cars, robots, and drones. And where there are moving systems, there is a risk of collisions.

“Spatial intelligence models are AI systems that reason about the physical world by combining vision, sensor data, and contextual cues to understand space, motion, and object relationships,” says Sudeep George, CTO at iMerit. “The value of spatial intelligence models lies not just in perceiving an environment, but in enabling machines to act within it safely and in real time. That is especially important in robotics and autonomous systems, where decisions must be made in complex, multimodal, fast-changing settings.”

To see one example, this tutorial for simulating robotic environments combines Nvidia Isaac Sim, an open source robotics reference framework, with spatial intelligence in Marble from World Labs. 

Today’s collision detection systems, such as those used in autonomous vehicles, typically rely on modules for sensing, perception, planning, and control. Spatial intelligence models may offer improvements by assessing the collision risks of unidentified objects or by tracking objects that move out of sensor view. For example, Waymo’s World Model, built on Genie 3, is a simulator that generates complex weather conditions and other critical safety events.

For an out-of-this-world example, James Urquhart, field CTO and technology evangelist at Kamiwaza, has delivered several examples of spatial intelligence applications, including one for satellite collision detection and conflict analysis. Urquhart says, “Models that specialize in these types of data sets, as well as the physics and geography of the real world, enable faster and more accurate decision-making for tasks that depend on them.”

Applying spatial intelligence

Recent spatial intelligence announcements include creating 3D worlds from image or text prompts with Marble and simulating water physics, lighting, weather, and animal behavior with Genie 3. But difficulties remain in bringing spatial intelligence to physical-world use cases.

“Spatial intelligence and world models are laying the groundwork for future AI agents that will be able to interact in and with our physical world,” says Jason Corso, cofounder and chief scientist at Voxel51. “These models are significantly more challenging to develop and test, largely because the data underlying their development is complex, and it’s hard to handle all of the combinatorics involved in the physical world.”

In addition to learning the models and prototyping with them, development and data leaders need to review the data assets that will feed spatial intelligence models. “Spatial intelligence models translate location signals into a structured understanding of the real world, but they’re only as reliable as the data beneath them,” says Dan Adams, executive vice president and general manager of Enrich at Precisely. “The real unlock isn’t the model—it’s the reference layer with persistent identifiers, confidence metadata, and source lineage that lets AI reason about places, not just match strings.”

Even once applications are developed, there will be infrastructure challenges in deploying them at the edge. Ali Kayyam, principal research scientist at BrainChip, says, “The key to unlocking spatial intelligence at scale is having the low-power, event-driven hardware that can run it at the sensor in real time where it matters most.”

Where to get started

My suggestions for developers looking to get hands-on with spatial intelligence and world models:

• To try out Marble, review their API documentation and case studies, and then experiment with a developer-focused React application.
• Review the Nvidia Cosmos developer hub, documentation, and cookbook of case studies and learning paths.
• You can get an overview of Genie 3, but access is currently restricted through Project Genie, which requires a Google AI Ultra subscription.

The model of the forward deployed engineer is sweeping through enterprise IT like a gold rush, and I’m concerned that many companies don’t understand what they’re signing up for.

Let’s start with the headline numbers. AWS announced a $1 billion investment in a new Forward Deployed Engineering organization. Google Cloud committed $750 million to expand similar programs. Microsoft has been running Azure-focused embedded engineering teams for years, including partnerships with Accenture to scale forward deployed engineering practices. All three are pitching the same story: We’ll send engineers to work directly with your teams, help you deploy AI, and accelerate your digital transformation. You get top-tier technical talent for free, and we get to partner with you on your journey.

It sounds reasonable on the surface. It sounds collaborative, even generous. But I’ve been in this industry long enough to know that when a multi-billion-dollar company offers you something for free, they’re sure to get much more than they give.

What you actually get

The forward deployed engineer model isn’t new. The consulting industry has been doing some version of it for decades. What makes this different is the scale and the direct financial incentive behind it.

These engineers work for the cloud provider. They’re not your employees. They’re not independent consultants. They’re technically excellent professionals who are being paid to solve your immediate problems while simultaneously building relationships and architectures that favor their employer’s ecosystem. Think about it from their perspective. Those forward engineers are evaluated on whether customers succeed with their employer’s platform. They’re rewarded when enterprises adopt more services from that platform. Their career advancement depends on making AWS, Google Cloud, or Microsoft Azure the obvious choice for all of your technical decisions.

This isn’t a criticism of the individual engineers. Many of them are genuinely talented and genuinely want to help. But they’re operating within a system that rewards specific outcomes, and those outcomes align with the vendor’s financial interests, not necessarily yours.

The problem no one talks about

Here’s what I see happening at enterprises right now. A company decides they need help deploying AI. A cloud provider offers to embed engineers at no additional cost. Those engineers work alongside internal teams, make architectural recommendations, and help build out systems. Six months later, the company has a production AI system running on a single cloud platform, built by people with deep expertise in that specific platform.

The problem? Nobody evaluated whether that platform was actually the best choice for the business. Nobody looked at alternatives. Nobody asked whether a multicloud architecture or best-of-breed approach might deliver better results at lower cost.

The engineers embedded in these programs are not going to recommend that you split your workloads across providers. They’re not going to suggest you use open source tools where they make sense. They’re not going to point you toward a competitor when their employer’s solution will work well enough. That’s not how these programs are designed to function. What you’re getting is optimized architecture for a single cloud brand, not optimized architecture for your business.

The financial reality will hit

The bills are going to come due, and they’re going to be painful. I’ve watched this pattern play out before. When enterprises lock into a single cloud provider through these embedded engineering programs, they often discover two or three years later that they’re paying premiums that their more independent-thinking competitors avoided.

The reasons are straightforward. When you’re architecting systems around a single platform, you naturally fall into usage patterns that favor that platform’s pricing structures. You use their managed databases instead of portable alternatives. You adopt their AI services instead of evaluating third-party options. You build workflows that only work within their ecosystem. And when it comes time to renegotiate or benchmark against alternatives, you find that migrating would cost more than accepting whatever pricing they offer.

I’ve spent the past decade helping companies untangle from these situations. I’ve seen organizations with cloud bills 15 to 20 times higher than they should be, unable to migrate because their entire AI infrastructure is built on proprietary services that only work on one platform. The forward deployed engineer programs are accelerating this problem. They’re making it easier to get into these situations and harder to get out.

Think before you commit

Before you accept one of these programs, consider these three recommendations.

First, require independent architecture oversight from day one. Hire or engage architects who work for your company, not for your cloud provider. They should evaluate every recommendation made by embedded engineers against business requirements and compare options across providers. This isn’t about being suspicious of the engineers. It’s about ensuring that decisions are made with your interests in mind.

Second, demand a clear exit strategy before you begin. Ask the cloud provider to document which proprietary services you’re using, what migration paths exist, and what the cost would be to move to an alternative platform. If they can’t provide that information, or if the migration costs seem impossibly high, that’s a sign that you’re building technical debt that will be very expensive to service later.

Third, benchmark your costs continuously. Set up internal processes to compare your cloud spending against industry benchmarks and against what your competitors might be paying for similar workloads. Don’t wait until your contract renewal to discover that you’re paying premium prices. Monitor expenses from the beginning, and be willing to challenge your cloud provider if you’re not getting value that justifies the cost.

The bottom line

The forward deployed engineers are solving real problems. Enterprises genuinely struggle with AI deployment, and having experienced engineers available to help is valuable. I’m not suggesting these programs are fundamentally bad. However, they’re being marketed as neutral partnerships when they’re actually strategic sales programs designed to lock enterprises into specific platforms. The helpful engineers showing up at your office are building dependencies that will be very difficult to break. The “free” technical assistance is being funded by margins on services you’ll be buying for years.

Go in with your eyes open. Use these programs but add your own independent oversight. Build architectures that you could leave if you needed to. And don’t let the immediate satisfaction of having problems solved today blind you to the financial consequences that will arrive tomorrow.

For all its potential, generative AI, on the whole, churns out a lot of junk.

Yet employees are becoming ever more reliant on this “workslop” masquerading as high-quality material, says a recent Harvard Business Review blog. They become lazy and less productive, quality control goes off the rails, and integrity and trust begin to erode.

Experts urge enterprises to act now, before they lose control entirely.

“When slopification happens at scale and in sequence across a business’s processes, those processes themselves — and their outputs — start to deteriorate,” Matthias Holweg, professor at the University of Oxford’s Saïd Business School, and analyst Thomas H. Davenport argue in the post. “Eventually, people start to lose trust in the processes that they rely on to do their jobs.”

They call this organization-level phenomenon “knowledge decay.”

Three key challenges

Holweg and Davenport identify three key challenges to address when it comes to AI-generated content in the workplace, to ensure knowledge decay isn’t occurring: verification, validation, and entropy.

Verification requires “disentangling” authentic human content from AI-generated content that could contain glaring errors, they note.

This can be time-intensive and involve critical thinking and additional research, and in many cases the effort negates the gains gleaned from AI use. In the case of hiring, for example, in addition to using AI to write their resumes and CVs, tailoring their prompts to the AI ranking algorithms to ensure they rise to the top of the queue, some candidates are getting crafty, using AI clandestinely to generate responses to interview questions in near-real time.

All this taken together can result in candidates who are subpar or simply not a good fit for an organization. As a result, recruiters may then have to spend more time doing on-site interviews where AI access isn’t available, Holweg and Davenport contend.

Another issue is knowledge validation: confirming how and where humans have provided real value when AI is used in a workflow. For instance, a consulting firm can easily use AI to create standard written reports and PowerPoint slides, while their clients are paying for expert human insights.

“Human experts now have to justify not only the quality of the output submitted, but also that actual human intellectual work has produced it,” Holweg and Davenport emphasize.

Finally, knowledge entropy is like a “risky AI-based game of telephone”: As knowledge is passed through an AI again and again in an iterative process, it moves further away from the original “ground truth” data that was used to create it in the first place, they point out.

“The greater the number of iterations of content through an LLM, the more it will depart from the original,” Holweg and Davenport note. LLMs are probabilistic, “context-agnostic” statistical models that provide next-word-prediction outputs. They have “no conception of fact or truth and simply predict the most likely outputs,” they write.

And when, in some cases, large language models (LLMs) are trained on synthetic data created by other models, the authors write, bigger problems emerge. When this manufactured data subsequently repeatedly goes through the model, it can affect the its accuracy and variability. This is known as “generative inbreeding” or model collapse.

Steps enterprises can take to prevent AI slop

The two experts, therefore, argue for a “fundamental step change” in the ways models are architected, as well as in establishing explicit rules around how they are used.

Naturally, one of the first, and potentially the hardest, steps is restricting employee AI use: It should only be applied to scenarios where it truly adds value, the authors advise.

For instance, when employees or job candidates are allowed to freely design their CVs, they’ll likely use generative AI to “optimize” their work. To prevent knowledge decay, recruiters should rely on structured documents that require factual responses that an AI can’t generate, for example, asking a candidate about a specific role, projects completed, team members involved, suppliers served, and budgets managed.

When generative AI use is allowed or unpreventable, organizations should define what value is being added and establish clarity around the implications, Holweg and Davenport emphasize. “Content does not need to be entirely human-created, but if AI is being used, be clear why and how,” they write.

In one beneficial scenario, AI such as Copilot or Gemini embedded in standard office software makes it “virtually pointless” to manually create more versions of the content of reports and PowerPoint slides, Holweg and Davenport write.

In another example, in performance evaluations, managers can gather specific, detailed information from team members and customers, then use AI to synthesize that material, rather than generating a “tick-box report” of generic bullet points.

Enterprises should also consider how individual AI use impacts an overall process. For instance, in an interorganizational flow like a revenue cycle, everyone involved should know about and agree on how AI would be used and at what steps in the process. It’s not a question of whether AI is better at a given task, as it increasingly is in some scenarios, but whether it is taking over a task to make things more efficient, Holweg and Davenport write.

Ultimately, however, they posit, public LLMs add “little to no real value,” because they are generic and often contain mistakes. On the other hand, small language models (SLMs) and proprietary models trained on company-specific data can augment human work.

From an architectural perspective, enterprises should track the history of both structured and unstructured data and understand “ground truth” information. Materials like customer interviews provide critical facts, emotions, and context; if AI is used to alter or summarize these, enterprises must identify and record the underlying ground truth data and point back to verifiable, authentic content.

In the end, Holweg and Davenport emphasize, enterprises should establish pragmatic practices now, lest they repeat the mistakes of the past.

“If we fail to address the uncontrolled proliferation of generative AI in our business processes, we are likely to see a rerun of the ‘productivity paradox’ observed with the growth of corporate computing half a century ago,” they write.

Blending ‘human capital’ and ‘token capital’

Other experts also agree on the importance of blending the best of humans with the best of AI.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella describes this model as the incorporation of “human capital’ with “token capital.” The former is the human “knowledge, judgment, relationships, ingenuity, and pattern recognition,” while the latter is in built and owned AI capabilities. The opportunity is in melding the two in a learning loop.

In this loop, humans will guide AI systems, set goals, and identify patterns, so AI isn’t “running in circles,” Nadella wrote in an X post. Internal evaluations can determine whether AI is improving when measured against company-specified benchmarks, thus creating institutional memory that is “query-able,” using fewer tokens and saving enterprises money.

Nadella noted: “Every improved workflow generates a better training signal, which accelerates the accumulation of tacit knowledge unique to the firm.”

This article originally appeared on CIO.com.

Enterprises implementing agentic AI face a challenge: Which tools should they allow their agents to use, where can they be found, and how can they be used safely? A new protocol, Agentic Resource Discovery, or ARD, aims to let agents answer those questions for themselves. Behind it are Google, Microsoft, Cisco, Nvidia, Salesforce and others.

ARD aims to standardize the way that tools and services are shared across systems within a corporate domain. For example, when investigating a production problem, an agent may want to query engineering documentation and open support tickets, deployment history and observability systems, all of which could be managed by different registries and across different silos. There is no common layer that pulls them together. ARD has been designed to be that layer.

It operates across two levels. Catalogs and Registries. In the first, an organization publishes a catalog setting out its available capabilities. The Registries layer act as a form of search engine, crawling those published catalogs.

The ARD specification is available now. Organizations are invited to publish their own catalogs using the quickstart guide. After this, they are able to join the community and participate in the evolution of ARD.

This article first appeared on InfoWorld.

Enterprises implementing agentic AI face a challenge: Which tools should they allow their agents to use, where can they be found, and how can they be used safely? A new protocol, Agentic Resource Discovery, or ARD, aims to let agents answer those questions for themselves. Behind it are Google, Microsoft, Cisco, Nvidia, Salesforce and others.

ARD aims to standardize the way that tools and services are shared across systems within a corporate domain. For example, when investigating a production problem, an agent may want to query engineering documentation and open support tickets, deployment history and observability systems, all of which could be managed by different registries and across different silos. There is no common layer that pulls them together. ARD has been designed to be that layer.

It operates across two levels. Catalogs and Registries. In the first, an organization publishes a catalog setting out its available capabilities. The Registries layer act as a form of search engine, crawling those published catalogs.

The ARD specification is available now. Organizations are invited to publish their own catalogs using the quickstart guide. After this, they are able to join the community and participate in the evolution of ARD.

Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, and others want to help enterprises demonstrate that their AI applications are behaving themselves through the creation of a new foundation.

The Appia Foundation will, it explained rather impenetrably, “establish modular specifications that provide a connecting layer to bridge foundational global standards with practical, trusted assessments across the global AI value chain.”

Those specifications will help AI users ascertain whether the systems they are using meet all the obligations that apply to them in the form of standards and regulations, it said. It’s a challenging task with so much regional variation in requirements, and where the EU, for example, is more tightly controlled than the US.

The Foundation has established a set of criteria to demonstrate conformity with what is expected. There are two layers: the Requirements and Guidance layers will help users determine what is actually required, while the Assessment Enablement layer will look at how those requirements are evaluated.

Appia stressed that what it is offering are not standards — which are set by recognized international bodies such as ISO/IEC — but a means of assessing what those standards mean and how they can be used by organizations. However, the Foundation said that some of the criteria that it is introducing may become standards themselves after a period of time.

The Appia Foundation is hosted by the Linux Foundation’s Joint Development Foundation, and its other members include Arm, Ericsson, Mastercard, Mitsubishi Electric, Omron, Schneider Electric, and Siemens. It is also looking to bring academics and government into the fold, so that it can establish an advisory board.

This article first appeared on CIO.

Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, and others want to help enterprises demonstrate that their AI applications are behaving themselves through the creation of a new foundation.

The Appia Foundation will, it explained rather impenetrably, “establish modular specifications that provide a connecting layer to bridge foundational global standards with practical, trusted assessments across the global AI value chain.”

Those specifications will help AI users ascertain whether the systems they are using meet all the obligations that apply to them in the form of standards and regulations, it said. It’s a challenging task with so much regional variation in requirements, and where the EU, for example, is more tightly controlled than the US.

The Foundation has established a set of criteria to demonstrate conformity with what is expected. There are two layers: the Requirements and Guidance layers will help users determine what is actually required, while the Assessment Enablement layer will look at how those requirements are evaluated.

Appia stressed that what it is offering are not standards — which are set by recognized international bodies such as ISO/IEC — but a means of assessing what those standards mean and how they can be used by organizations. However, the Foundation said that some of the criteria that it is introducing may become standards themselves after a period of time.

The Appia Foundation is hosted by the Linux Foundation’s Joint Development Foundation, and its other members include Arm, Ericsson, Mastercard, Mitsubishi Electric, Omron, Schneider Electric, and Siemens. It is also looking to bring academics and government into the fold, so that it can establish an advisory board.

This article first appeared on CIO.

Because generative AI (genAI) tools and services have become so ubiquitous (and popular), the costs of using them are going through the roof — leading to an insatiable appetite for tokens.

Tokens represent a common way to measure and price AI use. Much like letters and words in English, large language models (LLMs) grasp a sentence or query by breaking words into tokens.

With the AI explosion well under way, tokens are now “the fundamental units of data our models process, many representing a problem being solved,” according to Google CEO Sundar Pichai. (Google, by the way, processes about 3.2 quadrillion tokens a month.)

But as the price of all those tokens adds up, business and IT execs are looking for ways to cut costs while keeping corporate productivity up. Uncontrolled token use has already landed one company with an unexpected $500 million AI bill. 

There are a number of ways companies can rein in the price of AI at the model, infrastructure, silicon, and business levels. Here’s a look at how some of those savings might actually be achieved.

Switch to lower-cost models

One way of potentially saving money is by re-routing AI work to a cheaper model, Pichai said. At Google that would Gemini 3.5 Flash. It delivers “frontier-level capabilities at less than half the price of comparable frontier models.

“If companies use a mix of [Gemini 3.5] Flash and other frontier models, they could save a lot of money,” Pichai said.

Those kinds of models provide cheaper tokens, with reasoning that’s good enough for many users — if not as strong as mainstream Gemini 3.5 — to deliver useful results.

“There is sometimes overkill with the [LLMs],” said Deepak Seth, senior director analyst at Gartner. “I don’t always need a large language model which has been trained on the works of Charles Dickens and Shakespeare and Harry Potter.”

Hyperframe Research principal analyst Steven Dickens can’t stop using Amazon’s Quick, which costs $20 a month, for personal tasks. “It is great personal ROI as it has not only made tasks faster, but unlocked tasks I would never have even attempted previously,” Dickens said.

Don’t forget the hardware and software part of the equation

The token crisis isn’t new, said Dheeraj Pandey, CEO of DevRev, who likens what’s going on now in the AI market to the disruptions that emerged with the arrival of cloud computing and virtualization years ago. 

“We let chaos reign and then we had to rein in the chaos,” Pandey said. “The word that people started using was server consolidation and virtualization.”

The answer to the token problem, he said, is the same: “Anything in systems can be solved with caching and indirection.”

DevRev, for example, is building a memory layer between AI agents and primary data sources, such as Salesforce or ERP records; that can cut token load and make data movement more efficient. The layer holds a knowledge graph with answers to common agent questions and runs on cheaper CPUs, avoiding more costly GPU cycles.

Sending agents straight at systems like ServiceNow and Salesforce “will burn a lot more tokens. It’s also not precise. And finally, it’s not safe enough where I can roll it back in case an agent has committed a mistake,” Pandey said.

Network automation firm NetBrain uses a different method: It uses conventional computing to map a network’s layout then feeds only key information to models for planning and reasoning, where AI excels. “So you don’t have to spend all the tokens,” said Netbrain CTO Song Pang.

Focus on prompt efficiency

Staffing firm ManpowerGroup has found that prompt efficiency can be an effective tool for improving token use, both internally and externally for clients.

For example, users accessing its internal labor-market tool initially needed 10 follow-up questions to drill into a query. A year later, more efficient use of prompts has brought that number down to an average of four, said Max Leaming, head of data science and AI solutions at ManpowerGroup. 

“They’re using fewer tokens and they’re simply more efficient,” he said. “And that in large part has to do with your ability to prompt efficiently.”

Go local

New AI hardware that generates free tokens at home could ease some of the cost crisis.

At GTC Taipei earlier this month, Nvidia and Microsoft unveiled RTX Spark, an agentic AI desktop PC that runs agents and 120-billion-parameter models locally on Windows. The goal is “to deliver unmetered intelligence to every home and every desk with Windows,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in a statement.

Some companies are looking to reduce cloud AI costs by putting their own hardware in data centers, with vendors such as HPE and Dell providing servers installed in independent facilities. (On-premise AI is gaining ground amid sovereign AI and geopolitical concerns, including the recent conflict in the Middle East, where large data centers were struck with missiles.)

“There are local, region-specific and multiple vendor AI solutions. All of those things can help mitigate the risk. But they’re not going to eliminate it,” said Max Goss, senior director analyst at Gartner.

Use forward-deployed engineers

Reducing token costs is something that may fall to forward-deployed engineers (FDEs) in customer environments, said Taimur Rashid, managing director of AWS’s Generative AI Innovation Center.

“I expect these teams to be able to architect systems that have those cost requirements in mind, whether it’s use a different model or a different use case that doesn’t increase the per-token cost,” Rashid said.

Companies may spend heavily on token consumption, “but if you’re generating revenue, as long as the economics work out, then you’re at peace,” Rashid said.

The use of FDEs is gaining ground as IT decision-makers look to both rollout successful AI deployments while also keeping an eye on costs.

Change the measure of success from tokens to outcomes

Even with the current emphasis on reducing token use to save money, the metrics used to measure AI success are likely to shift, Gartner’s Seth said. At some point, token-based pricing will move more toward an outcome-based model, where the unit of value is outcomes, not fragments of words.

“Some companies are moving towards outcome-based pricing,” Seth said. “When people start realizing the real cost of tokens, then companies will start looking at token efficiency.”

Hot AI companies can’t stop talking about forward-deployed engineers (FDEs), which are now very much in vogue. 

FDEs, in case you haven’t heard, are hired by companies looking (hoping?) to successfully deploy AI tools and services. It’s one of the hotter professions in a world still trying to understand the impact of AI on careers.

So, what exactly are FDEs — are they techy lone rangers like the ones OpenAI, Google and Microsoft are hiring? Turns out it’s not so much about individual engineers who swoop in to design and roll out AI deployments; it’s more about a team of engineers working together at customer sites.

At least, that’s the view at Amazon Web Services (AWS).

In fact, according to Taimur Rashid, managing director of the AWS Generative AI Innovation Center, the FDE concept pre-dates the current generative AI (genAI) gold rush. The same kinds of engineering teams were needed for the earlier machine-learning and cloud eras to help companies with deployments.

Rashid recently talked about how AWS sees FDEs as a profession in a conversation with Computerworld. And he weighed in on the desired job skills the company seeks in this increasingly AI-centric era.

What is an FDE? “We view it as a team. It’s a cross-functional team that has engineers, scientists, strategists, and folks that can piece technology and business together. In some cases, we do have to have security engineers in there, too. 

“I see them as anesthesiologists. They have to prep so many things, monitor things throughout. We see ourselves as a frontier deployment team helping customers adopt all forms of AI, whether it’s genAI, agentic AI, even emerging trends like physical AI. We’re helping these companies become frontier themselves.”

How does an FDE engagement begin, and how is it structured? “Where we see the forward deployed model is when customers come in — for example, we have our executive briefing center in Seattle and in Arlington, VA. When customers share what they’re trying to do, very quickly a customer’s like, “What’s the quickest way I can go and build something with you?” 

“We’ll forward deploy our people in, we’ll embed them in your business and we’ll go through these 45-day sprints that we typically design. Through those successive sprints, we’re building stuff together, we’re proving value, and then they can expand that to a much broader engagement.

Where do FDEs actually sit? Client side, internally, or in-between? “It’s mixed, and it largely depends on what the customer’s preference is. We’ve seen models where the customer has been very adamant that, ‘We want your teams with us in our business.’  In those cases, we forward deploy the majority of the teams on site. 

“We have models where customers are fine with you being wherever you’re based, as long as you’re still embedded virtually. And then there’s a hybrid. We deploy anywhere from five to seven people. Sometimes, the baseline is actually three.”

Will cost savings be the job of an FDE, or someone else on the team? “I expect these teams to be able to architect systems that have those cost requirements in mind, whether it’s use a different model for a different use case that doesn’t increase the per-token cost…or think about ways where you can use semantic caching. I personally think you may have a high spend in token consumption, but if you’re generating revenue, as long as the economics work out, then you’re at peace.”

What challenges have you gone through deploying FDEs in the real world? “One of the challenges worth highlighting is when customers get really excited about us forward deploying resources, what they end up realizing is [that] they’re not set up to absorb that right away. They realize they have to go through … process-related things, security access — all those operational things. 

“One very good example is the Commonwealth Bank of Australia. They said: “Prioritization’s a big thing, and if you forward deploy and you’re 100% dedicated, how do we ensure that our teams are also equally 100% dedicated?’ When you’re sitting in your office, you’re distracted by your day-to-day. So they said, ‘Why don’t we create a neutral ground in Seattle? You fly your people, we’ll fly our people. We’ll give them three weeks of dedicated time so they have no distractions.’”

Have you gone into projects where they want AI but have no security or governance ready? “I’ve been through this before, certainly. We do see customers that have security processes and capabilities, but it’s not as tight as it should be in the age of AI. Governance is the biggest area where customers right now have the biggest gap. I’m talking governance around agents. In the past two months, almost 100% of the conversation around agents is not about capability. It’s all about governance. 

“That is a big area right now where forward deploy teams are helping with governance education, and building the scaffolding for that.”

How does software engineering fit into the FDE model? “One of the greatest learnings is that as we forward deploy resources and get customers to take AI and integrate it into their systems, the knowledge of software engineering is so important. Today, a customer can use one of the Claude models and scan their code base and look at vulnerabilities. 

“The tough part is not assessing those vulnerabilities, it’s remediating [them]. Remediating [them] requires software engineering experience, because you have got to merge code, test it, deploy it. We largely see that the frontier software development teams are smaller and they’re managing agents that are doing various tasks across the software development lifecycle.”

AWS has many models at your scale, open source, closed — it’s more complex than what other AI vendors offer.  How do you nail down the talent? “It’s massive, and when you look at not only scale, it’s the complexity of the stack. We take an approach where we fundamentally do three important things: No. 1, we want to ensure people understand concepts; they have to understand pre-training, post-training, reinforcement, fine-tuning. 

“Secondly, we make sure that our teams are well versed in their first-party services. The third thing is that by design, AWS has always been about choice. We say, ‘Let’s do 80-20 here. What is 20% of those specialties that we need to have, which can cover 80% of what most customers are trying to do?’”

What skills should software developers learn to move into FDE work — the top three or four things? “We look at three categories. First category is entirely functional. Are they more engineering specific? Are they science specific? Are they security specific? Our litmus test is not only knowledge of the function, but the actual hands-on work that they can do with it. Secondly is around domain. I focus on what is their domain understanding across the whole AI lifecycle? The third thing is cultural. We are looking for folks that are okay at dealing with ambiguity, being good at stakeholder management, and having that startup mindset. 

“This AI transformation’s not for the faint of heart.”

There’s a rush for FDEs from OpenAI, Google, and others. What’s different about what you look for? “I don’t know entirely what the others are looking for, but I’ll tell you what we have been looking for in the past. When we hired solution architects, it was about systems level understanding. But what I see more and more is hands-on experience, cultural mindset, all these things are very important. If I had to pick one thing that is going to be very important in the talent that we either upskill or future talent that we hire, it has to be the application of AI towards software engineering and system integration tasks.

You’re upskilling AWS talent as well? “We do. You will see some publications coming out in the next couple of weeks around how do we do this across our software teams and how does that translate to customer-facing roles.”

AIs struggle to understand documents designed for humans; the DocLang working group seeks to flip that imbalance with its specification for machine-readable business documents “built from the ground up for LLM tokenizers.”

The working group, founded by IBM, Nvidia, and Red Hat and hosted by the Linux Foundation’s LF AI & Data project, aims to create an open, universal, AI-native document format designed to improve how enterprises prepare, exchange, and govern document data for AI systems. ABBYY and Human Signal will also be involved in its development, and other contributors are welcome.

“Enterprises today work across a fragmented landscape of document formats, including PDFs, JPEGs, and other file types built primarily for human consumption rather than AI interpretation,” the group said in its launch announcement.

“This disconnect can introduce complexity, raise costs, and reduce reliability when extracting meaning from business documents,” as organizations increasingly rely on generative AI and agentic systems, it said.

Mark Collier, executive director of LF AI & Data, said the goal of the DocLang Specification Working Group is to “develop a vendor-neutral, interoperable standard that helps organizations prepare document data for AI more reliably, transparently, and at scale.”

DocLang defines a structured, machine-readable format for documents of any type, like JSON for data, that any tool can implement and any pipeline can consume. It builds on DocLing, a document processing toolkit hosted by LF AI & Data that can transform human-readable PDFs, word processor documents or spreadsheets into structured data.

Standards must evolve for AI

Something like DocLang is needed, said independent technology analyst Carmi Levy. “Existing document standards have done an admirable job allowing global stakeholders to confidently collaborate for decades, but it’s becoming increasingly clear that they are in desperate need of an update as AI reshapes the rules around how work gets done,” he explained.

Largely static document types, he said, “can be somewhat limiting when AI is redefining the very word, ‘document.’ In many ways. AI-age documents are far more iterative and dynamic than what they once were, and the definitions need to evolve with the times. The documents we currently live with simply weren’t designed for the AI age.”

Within that context, Levy said, “DocLang represents an early, best hope of achieving some kind of foundational baseline for document standards, one that will hopefully allow more intelligent, more efficient, lower-risk workflows than is currently the case.”

Taking an open-source, vendor-agnostic approach to the process ensures the collective will take precedence over the needs of specific vendors, he said, adding, “earlier standards-setting efforts around networking, documentation, the web, and the cloud powered the free-flowing digital landscape that defines modern life.”

An AI-centric documentation standard will carry that reality into the next generation of technology, said Levy.

A question of governance

The entire concept of LLMs, Jason Andersen, principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy said, “involves using natural human languages. The computer is supposed to understand us without us changing our syntax or language. Forcing a syntax on users is exactly what we have today with SEO and more advanced programming languages.”

With something like DocLang, where the standard can be applied to content ingestion, he said, “I would be OK with that being automated, which seems to be the intent. The use case I envision is that when I upload a document to an agent, a skill can be run to preprocess the document into the DocLang standard format, saving tokens.”

That makes sense, he said, adding that he thinks it’s good “if it can help generate outputs, like a visualization, that can be shared outside an AI tool. On that front, that is also why I am liking Web MCP, since you are just adding some code to the page, like CSS or JavaScript, and the consumer, in this case, an AI browser or skill, is better equipped to handle the site.”

The point, he said, is, “these standards need to preserve the fact that humans can still do what they want, and do not need to know any coding to be proficient. In terms of governance, I am not sure if it matters.”

But one analyst did foresee governance problems arising from DocLang’s use.

Yaz Palanichamy, senior research analyst at Info-Tech Research Group, said DocLang adoption will require organizations to implement and review controls in order to scale its use accountably and securely.

This article first appeared on CIO, on June 10, 2026.

For years, the cloud market has made a simple promise: Move workloads to large-scale platforms, gain better resilience, and worry less about downtime. That promise was never entirely wrong, but it is becoming less complete. The latest findings from Uptime Institute’s seventh Annual Outage Analysis suggest that the outage landscape is changing in ways that should concern both cloud providers and cloud customers. The biggest risks are no longer limited to broken physical infrastructure. They are increasingly tied to the complexity of the systems used to run, coordinate, update, and recover that infrastructure.

The most alarming number in the report is that IT and networking issues accounted for 23% of impactful outages in 2024. Uptime Institute links these increases to growing IT and network complexity; the long-term shift toward colocation, cloud, and third-party digital services; and the resulting increase in change-management failures and misconfigurations. That number is more than a statistical footnote. It points to a structural change in how outages happen and why cloud outages are becoming such a stubborn problem.

Hardware redundancy can protect against component failures, but it doesn’t help much when the outage stems from a bad configuration, an automation error, a faulty network change, or an underappreciated control-plane dependency. In those cases, the infrastructure itself may remain intact while the system that governs it breaks down. The industry is learning that resiliency is less about duplicating equipment and more about managing complexity. Today’s increasingly distributed and software-defined environments cannot operate safely at scale.

Failures at the operational level

Uptime’s findings show that power remains the leading cause of major outages, underscoring that traditional infrastructure engineering still matters a great deal. But even as providers continue to improve physical resilience, outages can still arise from the digital and procedural layers above it. Cloud platforms are now dense stacks of services, APIs, orchestration systems, software-defined networks, identity controls, failover logic, and third-party dependencies. That complexity creates more possible points of interaction and more opportunities for an error in one layer to cascade into several others.

This helps explain why outages can feel more surprising today than they did a decade ago. In older data center models, an outage often had a more apparent root cause, such as a power event, a cooling failure, or a hardware fault. In cloud environments, the trigger may be a small configuration change that propagates across regions, a policy update that unintentionally blocks service communication, or a network control failure that affects seemingly unrelated services. These are not failures of raw infrastructure capacity. They are failures of complexity management.

The report’s language around change management and misconfiguration is especially important because it challenges one of the most common assumptions in the cloud market: that scale automatically produces better operational outcomes. The reality? Scale can magnify both strengths and weaknesses. Large cloud providers have more engineering talent, more sophisticated tools, and more redundancy than almost any enterprise customer. But they also run far more interconnected systems at far greater speeds with far more automation. A single process failure can have a wider blast radius.

Another important lesson from the Uptime analysis is that automation has not removed the human factor. If anything, it has changed its form. Even in highly automated environments, human error remains central to the problem. The report notes that in 2025, the share of outages caused by human failure to follow procedures rose by 10 percentage points compared with 2024. A related industry summary of the report notes that 58% of human error-related outages were caused by staff failing to follow established procedures.

That matters because cloud providers often position automation as the answer to reliability. Automation is essential, but it only works as well as the operational model that surrounds it. If teams deploy changes too quickly, rollback paths are weak, approval chains are bypassed, or procedures are incomplete, automation can accelerate failure rather than prevent it. In a modern cloud environment, a human mistake is rarely just a single keystroke. It is more often a design weakness in process, governance, testing, or accountability.

This is also why customers should resist the comforting notion that outages are somebody else’s problem once workloads move to the cloud. Provider-side mistakes remain real, but customer architectures are increasingly entangled with provider networking, identity, observability, and platform services. When an outage occurs, the customer may not have caused it, but they still bear the business impact. The shared responsibility model does not end with security. It extends to resilience planning as well.

Better change management

The Uptime data points to a clear conclusion: Cloud providers need to treat operational discipline as a first-class design requirement. That starts with better change management. High-risk changes should be tested more aggressively, staged more gradually, and accompanied by stronger rollback mechanisms. Providers also need better dependency mapping to understand how a change in one control layer can affect services far beyond its immediate scope. If the system is too complex to clearly explain, it is too complex to operate.

Providers also need to improve procedural quality. The rise in outages caused by failing to follow procedures suggests that procedures are being ignored under operational pressure or that they are too cumbersome, outdated, or unclear for real production conditions. Neither explanation is comforting. Stronger runbooks, better training, more realistic failure drills, and tighter operational guardrails are not glamorous investments; they are increasingly central to resilience.

Another pressure point is visibility. Uptime notes that software-based and distributed resiliency tools can improve availability, but they also introduce new risks and complicate root-cause analysis. Cloud providers need more transparent and faster incident diagnosis, not just more layers of abstraction. Customers cannot build trust in resilience if every major incident becomes a long exercise in reconstructing opaque service dependencies after the fact.

Design with outages in mind

What’s the financial impact of more frequent problems? Uptime’s 2024 analysis found that 54% of respondents reported that their most recent significant outage cost more than $100,000, and 20% said it cost more than $1 million. These are not edge-case losses. They show that outages remain costly even if they are less frequent than in earlier years.

Customers need to stop evaluating cloud resilience through uptime promises and start evaluating it through failure behavior. How does a provider isolate faults? How transparent is incident communication? How portable are workloads if a major service degrades? How dependent is the architecture on a single region, network path, identity service, or control plane? These are not just technical questions; they are now critical business questions.

The core lesson from Uptime’s data is simple. Outages are becoming a bigger problem for cloud providers and customers because the cloud’s biggest vulnerabilities are increasingly tied to complexity, process failures, and control-plane mistakes, not just broken infrastructure. In addition to adding redundancy, the next phase of cloud improvement will focus on building systems that are easier to understand, safer to change, and more disciplined to operate.

Enterprises are increasingly investing copious amounts of cash in AI without a lot to show for it. This could be, in part, because the wrong people are leading the change.

As I’ve argued before⁠, AI isn’t likely to eliminate developers so much as change what we need from them. For example, we keep asking whether junior developers are needed in a world where large language models can write code faster and cheaper. What this overlooks is the reality that these younger developers and their relative inexperience may be exactly what we need to rewrite the rules of software development.

This thought hit me while reading James Governor’s riff on something Ben Griffiths⁠ wrote about our industry’s habit of confusing age with authority. Griffiths remembered sitting through a conference talk in which a speaker tried to shame a young audience for not recognizing some of the older men who had shaped computing. The irony, Ben noted, was that many of those “old men” had done their world-changing work when they were younger than the people being lectured. Bill Joy wrote vi when he was 22, John Carmack created Doom at 23, Linus Torvalds launched Linux at 22, etc. Many of our industry’s titans made their biggest contributions before they had decades of experience.

The point isn’t that young people are smarter. They’re not. The point isn’t that the key to AI success is to ignore more experienced developers. That’s dumb. Rather, it’s a suggestion that Griffiths’ larger point is right: At the beginning of big shifts, experience can be a mixed blessing. It can help you see risk, but it can also make you overconfident in old ways. The most successful enterprises will find ways to balance youthful innovation with experienced guardrails.

The factory doesn’t redesign itself

Zara Zhang recently pointed to Paul David’s classic 1990 paper, “The Dynamo and the Computer,”⁠ as a way to understand why so many companies have “adopted” AI without much to show for it. David’s argument, simplified, is that electricity didn’t immediately transform factories. For a long time, factories simply swapped out the central steam engine for an electric motor while keeping the same layout, the same workflows, and the same assumptions.

Electricity was new, but we largely stifled its potential by force-fitting it into old factory systems.

The big productivity gains came later, when factories stopped treating electricity as a cleaner steam engine and started redesigning work around smaller motors distributed throughout the factory. Once each machine could have its own motor, the factory no longer had to organize itself around a single driveshaft. Work could instead be reorganized around the flow of production.

That’s a decent description of where many enterprises are with AI. Enterprises today are buying copilot licenses by the thousands, wiring agents into existing applications, etc., and then wondering why the results are so uneven, as I’ve written⁠. This is the equivalent of swapping the steam engine for an electric one and declaring that the AI modernization work is done. It’s not. Not even close.

The real payoff won’t come from asking AI to write the same tickets a bit faster. It will instead come from changing how teams define work and how (and what) developers build. The “factory” has to change.

So here’s the uncomfortable question: Who is most likely to build the new factory?

Experience cuts both ways

There’s an obvious danger in romanticizing youth. Plenty of bad software has been written by people with unlimited confidence and limited context. Enterprises need software that works, yes, but “works” also means it complies, scales, respects security boundaries, and more.

This is where experienced developers matter. A lot.

As I pointed out recently, the agent era makes engineering judgment more important than ever. After all, AI makes it easier to generate code, but easier code generation can become easier technical debt generation. Hence, the limiting factor becomes less of “Can we create something?” and more of “Can we create the right thing, in the right place, with the right constraints?” Taste is required, in other words.

Senior engineers are often better at seeing those constraints because their experience gives them “taste.” They know why the weird validation rule exists, and they remember the customer who depended on the undocumented behavior. They understand why a simple schema change can turn into a multi-week migration.

But experience also has a shadow side, because it can make the current process feel inevitable. A senior engineer may see an AI assistant as a faster autocomplete because that’s the easiest way to fit AI into their existing mental model. A junior developer, less invested in the old workflow, may ask the more interesting questions: Why are we doing this ticket at all? Why isn’t the spec executable? Why can’t the agent generate the test harness first?

It’s not that the more experienced developers don’t know these questions. Rather, they may simply not have the energy to rage against the machine, as it were.

The value of inexperience

The worst way to use junior developers in the AI era is to treat them as cheaper versions of senior developers. That was always a bad idea, but AI makes it worse. If the job is “take this ticket, generate some code, and send it to a senior person for review,” the junior developer becomes a human wrapper around a coding assistant. That helps no one. The junior doesn’t learn much, the senior gets buried in review, and the enterprise ends up with more code, which, as I’ve said, is hardly a good thing.

Instead, junior developers should be given room to explore new workflows, with just enough oversight from experienced colleagues. That might mean giving these newer developers interesting questions to answer, such as:

• How would we redesign onboarding if every internal API had an AI-readable contract and examples that actually worked?
• How would we change code review if the agent produced a change summary, test evidence, dependency risk, and rollback plan with every pull request?
• How would we build features if product requirements were written as executable acceptance tests rather than vague prose?
• How would we reduce toil if agents could safely perform routine migrations, dependency updates, or incident triage within clearly defined boundaries?

These are not toy problems. They’re not “junior work.” They’re exactly the sort of process redesign that enterprises need but generally avoid because everyone is too busy running on the existing hamster wheel.

Finding the balance

So what should engineering leaders do? First, stop treating AI adoption as an individual productivity contest. We seem to be moving quickly away from the idea that “lots of tokens” equals “great engineer,” but the fact that we even flirted with it is damning. I love how Santiago Valdarrama eviscerates this vanity metric: “Measuring AI productivity in number of lines written is a stupid mistake. One day, everyone will have always been against this.” Instead we should be asking questions like, “What part of our software delivery process no longer makes sense?” AI’s biggest gains will come when we change how we specify, test, review, and ship software.

Second, mix up your AI workflow teams. No, not committees or PowerPoint-producing centers of excellence. I’m talking about combining two or three newer developers who are already fluent in AI-native tools with two or three senior engineers who understand production, security, architecture, and organizational constraints. Then give them a real workflow to redesign, such as dependency upgrades or test creation.

Third, make the senior engineer’s job less about saying no and more about defining the guardrails within which others can say yes. I’ve argued that golden paths are key to using AI effectively. Good senior engineers should define the paved roads: approved patterns, test requirements, observability standards, etc. Then let junior developers and agents move quickly inside those boundaries.

Fourth, reward deletion. This may be the most important point. Going back to the factory electricity metaphor, we’ll fail with AI modernization if we simply add AI without removing outdated processes.

Bring everyone to the table

The future of software development won’t belong to the young. It won’t belong to the old, either. It will belong to teams that combine the talents of both.

Newer developers often bring impatience. They’re less likely to accept the existing workflow as sacred. They’re more likely to try weird tools, compose them in unexpected ways, and wonder why enterprise software development feels like a ritualized exercise in waiting for permission.

Experienced developers bring judgment. They know that software has users, auditors, attackers, budgets, latency, history, and consequences. They know that the right answer is often boring, and boring is good.

Enterprises need both. They need the developer who asks why the factory is still organized around the old drive shaft, and they need the developer who knows which machines will kill someone if moved casually. In sum, every development team needs people who know why the old system exists… as well as those who don’t.

For years, the cloud market has made a simple promise: Move workloads to large-scale platforms, gain better resilience, and worry less about downtime. That promise was never entirely wrong, but it is becoming less complete. The latest findings from Uptime Institute’s seventh Annual Outage Analysis suggest that the outage landscape is changing in ways that should concern both cloud providers and cloud customers. The biggest risks are no longer limited to broken physical infrastructure. They are increasingly tied to the complexity of the systems used to run, coordinate, update, and recover that infrastructure.

The most alarming number in the report is that IT and networking issues accounted for 23% of impactful outages in 2024. Uptime Institute links these increases to growing IT and network complexity; the long-term shift toward colocation, cloud, and third-party digital services; and the resulting increase in change-management failures and misconfigurations. That number is more than a statistical footnote. It points to a structural change in how outages happen and why cloud outages are becoming such a stubborn problem.

Hardware redundancy can protect against component failures, but it doesn’t help much when the outage stems from a bad configuration, an automation error, a faulty network change, or an underappreciated control-plane dependency. In those cases, the infrastructure itself may remain intact while the system that governs it breaks down. The industry is learning that resiliency is less about duplicating equipment and more about managing complexity. Today’s increasingly distributed and software-defined environments cannot operate safely at scale.

Failures at the operational level

Uptime’s findings show that power remains the leading cause of major outages, underscoring that traditional infrastructure engineering still matters a great deal. But even as providers continue to improve physical resilience, outages can still arise from the digital and procedural layers above it. Cloud platforms are now dense stacks of services, APIs, orchestration systems, software-defined networks, identity controls, failover logic, and third-party dependencies. That complexity creates more possible points of interaction and more opportunities for an error in one layer to cascade into several others.

This helps explain why outages can feel more surprising today than they did a decade ago. In older data center models, an outage often had a more apparent root cause, such as a power event, a cooling failure, or a hardware fault. In cloud environments, the trigger may be a small configuration change that propagates across regions, a policy update that unintentionally blocks service communication, or a network control failure that affects seemingly unrelated services. These are not failures of raw infrastructure capacity. They are failures of complexity management.

The report’s language around change management and misconfiguration is especially important because it challenges one of the most common assumptions in the cloud market: that scale automatically produces better operational outcomes. The reality? Scale can magnify both strengths and weaknesses. Large cloud providers have more engineering talent, more sophisticated tools, and more redundancy than almost any enterprise customer. But they also run far more interconnected systems at far greater speeds with far more automation. A single process failure can have a wider blast radius.

Another important lesson from the Uptime analysis is that automation has not removed the human factor. If anything, it has changed its form. Even in highly automated environments, human error remains central to the problem. The report notes that in 2025, the share of outages caused by human failure to follow procedures rose by 10 percentage points compared with 2024. A related industry summary of the report notes that 58% of human error-related outages were caused by staff failing to follow established procedures.

That matters because cloud providers often position automation as the answer to reliability. Automation is essential, but it only works as well as the operational model that surrounds it. If teams deploy changes too quickly, rollback paths are weak, approval chains are bypassed, or procedures are incomplete, automation can accelerate failure rather than prevent it. In a modern cloud environment, a human mistake is rarely just a single keystroke. It is more often a design weakness in process, governance, testing, or accountability.

This is also why customers should resist the comforting notion that outages are somebody else’s problem once workloads move to the cloud. Provider-side mistakes remain real, but customer architectures are increasingly entangled with provider networking, identity, observability, and platform services. When an outage occurs, the customer may not have caused it, but they still bear the business impact. The shared responsibility model does not end with security. It extends to resilience planning as well.

Better change management

The Uptime data points to a clear conclusion: Cloud providers need to treat operational discipline as a first-class design requirement. That starts with better change management. High-risk changes should be tested more aggressively, staged more gradually, and accompanied by stronger rollback mechanisms. Providers also need better dependency mapping to understand how a change in one control layer can affect services far beyond its immediate scope. If the system is too complex to clearly explain, it is too complex to operate.

Providers also need to improve procedural quality. The rise in outages caused by failing to follow procedures suggests that procedures are being ignored under operational pressure or that they are too cumbersome, outdated, or unclear for real production conditions. Neither explanation is comforting. Stronger runbooks, better training, more realistic failure drills, and tighter operational guardrails are not glamorous investments; they are increasingly central to resilience.

Another pressure point is visibility. Uptime notes that software-based and distributed resiliency tools can improve availability, but they also introduce new risks and complicate root-cause analysis. Cloud providers need more transparent and faster incident diagnosis, not just more layers of abstraction. Customers cannot build trust in resilience if every major incident becomes a long exercise in reconstructing opaque service dependencies after the fact.

Design with outages in mind

What’s the financial impact of more frequent problems? Uptime’s 2024 analysis found that 54% of respondents reported that their most recent significant outage cost more than $100,000, and 20% said it cost more than $1 million. These are not edge-case losses. They show that outages remain costly even if they are less frequent than in earlier years.

Customers need to stop evaluating cloud resilience through uptime promises and start evaluating it through failure behavior. How does a provider isolate faults? How transparent is incident communication? How portable are workloads if a major service degrades? How dependent is the architecture on a single region, network path, identity service, or control plane? These are not just technical questions; they are now critical business questions.

The core lesson from Uptime’s data is simple. Outages are becoming a bigger problem for cloud providers and customers because the cloud’s biggest vulnerabilities are increasingly tied to complexity, process failures, and control-plane mistakes, not just broken infrastructure. In addition to adding redundancy, the next phase of cloud improvement will focus on building systems that are easier to understand, safer to change, and more disciplined to operate.

When it comes to AI deployments, IT leaders are often caught in an awkward middle space, trying to reconcile conflicting directives from senior management with constantly changing AI models, capabilities, and costs; data governance and security needs; and the limitations of their own team.

“Very few real benefits can be attained by simply purchasing an AI product and giving it to employees. Vendors have been overselling that fallacy for the past three years,” said Nader Henein, a Gartner VP analyst.

“The reality is that strong AI value and consistent ROI are almost always a result of deep and intentional integration of AI capabilities into existing workflows. For that you need specialized teams, which do not come cheap, and organizations have been recruiting those teams in a variety of ways,” Heinen said.

Among the options available to IT leaders looking for help with AI deployments are traditional IT consultancies, AI-specific consultancies, and independent contractors. Large enterprises with deep pockets can consider acquiring an AI firm and integrating its technology and expert staff. The use of open source to reduce vendor lock-in is a strategy that can sit on top of those others, an approach that Capital One has used. 

But the option that has been getting the most attention recently is bringing in forward-deployed engineers (FDEs), teams of experts from AI vendors that embed with a customer’s in-house engineers to oversee AI rollouts within the enterprise environment. Both OpenAI and Anthropic have recently announced FDE offerings, for example, and Microsoft is partnering with consulting giant EY in a new FDE program for agentic AI deployments.

Engineering teams employed by AI vendors have key strengths, such as understanding their models better than anyone else, having experience integrating those models into different types of enterprise environments, and knowing about upcoming model capabilities before they’re announced. But they also have the obvious drawback of vendor lock-in. Even if future rollouts are not within their contracted deliverables, those vendor employees could subtly influence a client’s future AI efforts. 

Flavio Villanustre, CISO for LexisNexis Risk Solutions, cautions IT executives to move into FDE programs carefully. 

FDEs “are financially incentivized to grow customers’ use of a vendor’s AI products and to create stickiness with that vendor’s services,” he said. “While FDEs may be a reasonable value-added service by the AI vendor, customers should always find other unbiased expert opinions that can evaluate competitive solutions across multiple vendors.”

This is particularly important at a time when “investor-subsidized AI token business models are starting to show cracks,” Villanustre said. “Also, in the current rapid pace of innovation in this field where AI vendors are constantly leapfrogging each other, retaining the agility to move from one vendor to the next could create significant competitive advantages.”

Analysts, consultants, and other industry experts who spoke with Computerworld about FDEs echoed Villanustre’s caution, citing concerns around hidden costs, confidentiality, observability, and vendor lock-in.

Long-term costs and vendor lock-in

A key issue that IT executives need to consider is how long the FDE teams will be needed. The enterprise will likely need an ongoing series of AI deployments synced with the current AI model(s). If help is needed today, why would that change tomorrow?

Enterprises tend to overlook those longer-term costs, said John Sangyeob Kim, an AI engineer at software development vendor Solidroad.

“Deployment is maybe 20% of the total cost. The other 80% is keeping the system running through model upgrades, data drift, and edge cases that only appear after months in production,” Kim said. “Most contracts price the first part and assume the rest. Deployment isn’t the hard part of enterprise AI anymore. The next eighteen months are.”

And whether it’s intentional or not, FDEs will naturally favor their own product portfolio — it’s what they know best.

“FDEs from model labs are good at making their own models work in your environment. They are less suited for multi-model systems, because their incentive is to keep you inside their ecosystem,” Kim said.

Sanchit Vir Gogia, chief analyst at Greyhound Research, said IT leaders should look at the FDE model as a strategy involving ongoing operational power. 

“Whoever shapes the deployment pattern shapes the enterprise’s future muscle memory. Whoever owns the evaluation layer owns the truth layer. Whoever controls the integration logic controls the dependency map,” Gogia said. “This is why the FDE model matters. It is not just another delivery option. It is the frontier AI vendor moving closer to the customer’s workflow, operating model, and decision architecture.”

That proximity cuts both ways, Gogia noted. “FDEs are embedded inside the customer’s [environment], but they are also connected to the vendor’s commercial center of gravity. Their instinct will be to build around the model family, tooling assumptions, deployment patterns, and product roadmap they know best. This is perfectly natural. It is also precisely why CIOs must be cautious,” he said.

Allowing AI vendor employees an outsized say in enterprise deployment decisions could lock in model vendor dependency, which in turn will fuel high prices that can’t be fought effectively.

“FDEs can accelerate deployment and deepen dependency at the same time,” Gogia said. “Frontier AI vendors are no longer content to sell access to models. They increasingly want to shape how enterprises deploy intelligence. That is a larger prize.”

What happens when the FDE team leaves?

FDE post-departure risks are severe and often underappreciated, according to Justin Greis, CEO of consulting firm Acceligence and former head of the North American cybersecurity practice at McKinsey.

For one thing, the FDE team learns a massive number of operational details from the enterprise deployment. Although NDAs and confidentiality contracts protect any data accessed, they often don’t regulate observed processes and procedures. 

“The learnings are absolutely going to be taken from client to client,” Greis said. “Whoever helps deploy AI will learn far more than what appears in the statement of work. They will learn the real workflows, the undocumented exceptions, the data-quality gaps, the approval bottlenecks, the security workarounds, and the places where the business depends on a few people knowing what to do when the process breaks. That knowledge may be as sensitive and precious as the data itself.”

Another critical but often overlooked issue is how much meaningful control will IT have over the project if and when the FDE team leaves.

“The danger is not using outside help. Most companies will need outside help,” Greis said. “The danger is using outside help in a way that leaves the enterprise less capable and more dependent when the engagement is over.”

It is precisely those operational decisions that IT often neglects, said Solidroad’s Kim.

“The best predictor of success is not the vendor. It is whether one internal engineer truly understands the system before the implementer leaves. What matters is who owns the evaluation loop after the demo,” Kim said.

“What happens to our prompts, scorers, and guardrails when the model version changes? If we paused this engagement tomorrow, what would actually stop working, by design or by accident?” Kim asked. “Where do you want the enterprise’s AI learning, control, and dependency to live after the engagement is over?”

Kim argues that observability — the ability to understand and manage all elements of a complex enterprise environment — is a critical function to which IT often gives insufficient attention. Determining whether the project uses the enterprise’s observability stack or the vendor’s observability stack is crucial.

“If the implementer is using their observability stack, that is fine during the build, but you need a plan to migrate it to something you own before they leave; otherwise the visibility walks out of the door with them,” Kim said. “If they are using yours, that is the best case. It means they are working inside the system your team will operate long-term.”

A major problem crops up when they are using neither the enterprise’s nor the vendor’s observability stack. “Neither means they are building the system without any production observability layer at all, and you inherit a system you cannot see into. The first time something breaks in production, you have no traces, no failure history, and no way to tell whether the issue is a model regression, a data problem, or a code bug,” Kim said.

“If observability was not a priority during the build, evals and regression testing usually weren’t either, so you are inheriting a system you cannot measure and cannot safely change. That’s the worst possible handoff position,” he said.

Weighing the alternatives

While the FDE approach is not new, it is just now beginning a surge in popularity, and there are a finite number of such specialists available. That means not all companies even have the option of using FDEs.

This availability disconnect is especially prominent for non-US deployments, where on-site FDEs are rarer, said Gartner’s Henein. “Where is the development happening? There may not be FDEs available in that region,” he said. 

There are plenty of other places enterprises can turn to for AI help. Ishraq Khan, CEO of coding productivity tool vendor Kodezi, encourages IT executives to consider a wide range of options but notes that all approaches have major drawbacks.

“Traditional consultancies are usually stronger at governance, process, compliance, and organizational coordination. They know how large enterprises operate politically and structurally. The downside is that many move slower and often lack deep frontier AI specialization,” Khan said.

Gogia from Greyhound Research put it more colorfully: Traditional IT consulting firms “know how to get legal, risk, security, finance, HR, and business units into the same room without anybody setting fire to the carpet. For regulated enterprises, that matters,” he said.

Specialized AI consultancies have a different set of strengths, Khan said. “AI-native consultancies move much faster and are often more technically current, but many are still immature operationally. Some can build impressive demos without fully understanding long-term maintainability, governance, or production reliability.”

Greis from Acceligence commented on two other options for bringing in outside AI help. Using an independent contractor “can be great for eval design, architecture reviews, red teaming, agent design, or getting a stalled team unstuck,” he said, but it can increase the risk of “key-person dependency,” where a single external person is the only one who understands the system.

As for purchasing an AI firm and onboarding its employees, a practice known as “acquihiring,” Greis said it can work well when the AI capability and expertise being brought in are truly strategic for the acquiring enterprise. But there is a risk that the acquired team will be smothered by the parent company’s bureaucracy: “You buy a speedboat, bolt it to an aircraft carrier, and then wonder why it stopped moving,” he said.

Finally, an open-source strategy can give companies flexibility and reduce vendor dependence, but “many companies underestimate the operational burden that comes with it,” Kodezi’s Khan said. “Open source only helps if the organization has the internal talent and discipline to maintain it properly.”

Bottom line: enterprises need to define their true objectives before deciding on an approach. Khan offered several key questions for CIOs to consider: “Who owns the deployment after implementation? Can we move providers later without rebuilding everything? What happens if the vendor relationship changes or disappears? Are we optimizing for short-term deployment speed or long-term operational resilience?”

In any scenario where outside firms have direct access to enterprise systems, IT needs to be kept fully in the loop. “The worst outcome is when an enterprise successfully deploys AI but no longer fully understands how its own systems operate underneath,” Khan said.

External help for AI deployments: 6 options

	Pros	Cons
AI vendor FDEs	+  Best expertise on the main model being used	–  Vendor lock-in –  Operational detail leaks
Traditional IT consultancies	+  Best understanding of change management, legacy integration, global rollout, governance, and operating-model redesign	–  Can be too slow, too expensive, or too generic
AI consulting firms	+  More practical AI deployment experience than traditional consultants +  Less vendor lock-in than model-provider FDEs	–  May not sufficiently understand enterprise-grade requirements: security, identity, auditability, compliance, incident response, cost controls, and long-term maintainability
Independent contractors	+  Useful for precision tasks: eval design, architecture reviews, red teaming, agent design, or getting a stalled team unstuck	–  Risk of ‘key-person dependency’
‘Acquihiring’ an AI firm	+  Works when the acquired capability is truly strategic	–  Acquired team can be smothered inside existing bureaucracy
Deploying open-source products	+  Reduces dependency on one model vendor +  Attractive for data sovereignty, control over enterprise systems, cost efficiencies, and regulated environments	–  Enterprise takes on full responsibility for security, patching, evaluation, deployment, monitoring, and lifecycle management

Related reading:

• Here’s one career emerging from the AI shift: ‘forward-deployed engineers’
• The forward-deployed engineer: Why talent, not technology, is the true bottleneck for enterprise AI
• The new AI lock-in