Agents of IT

AI adoption is accelerating across the enterprise, but many organizations are discovering that adding more AI tools doesn't automatically create better business outcomes. In this Hot Takes episode, Fran Fernandez and Zack Austin react to recent reports on tool sprawl fatigue and infrastructure complexity. They discuss why enterprises often buy AI before defining the problem they're solvi...

As AI agents become more autonomous, organizations face a new challenge in managing machine identities at enterprise scale. In this Hot Takes episode, Fran Fernandez and Zack Austin react to recent coverage on agentic AI identity governance, and access management. They discuss why agents are starting to resemble digital employees, how identity frameworks must evolve beyond traditional user account...

Fran Fernandez and Zack Austin sit down with Chris Ennis, Senior Technology Solutions Specialist at Risepoint, to discuss what successful automation adoption looks like in a growing organization. Chris draws on his diverse experience to share lessons learned from implementing automation at scale, as well as using AI to solve real business problems. 

AI adoption is accelerating across the enterprise, but governance is struggling to keep up. In this Hot Takes episode, Ari Stowe is joined by Chief Product Officer Fran Fernandez and Director of Product Marketing Zack Austin to unpack what happens when organizations move too quickly with agentic AI without fully understanding the processes underneath.    The episode also marks Ari’s departure from...

AI personalization can indeed make work smarter and more intuitive... but only when it feels helpful instead of invasive. In this Hot Takes episode, Ari reacts to recent coverage on hyper-personalization, enterprise AI, and predictive systems. He explains why personalization is really about context, how agents can remove friction from everyday workflows, and why successful AI adoption depends on s...

This week, Ari meets up with Geoff McQueen, founder and CEO of Ascendius, to review how AI is changing the way businesses operate, as well as how leaders should think about performance in an AI-first world. Drawing on 25 years of building and scaling tech companies, Geoff shares some hot takes on everything from individual productivity gains to agentic workflows and, ultimately, business-level AI.

AI security headlines are getting louder, but are the risks actually new? In this Hot Takes episode, Ari reacts to recent coverage on agentic AI and breaks down what’s really changing, especially speed and access. He explores why overprivileged agents look a lot like overprivileged employees and how broken workflows can get worse without the right guardrails. Finally, he discusses how to scale AI...

Ari Stowe sits down with Nora Osman, founder and CEO of Norvana, to discuss what it really takes to build service experiences people remember for the right reasons. Drawing on 20 years of leading customer service transformations, Nora shares how empathy, intentional process design, and the right use of AI can help organizations eliminate friction, but without losing the human touch. 

Claude went down, the memes flew, and suddenly developers everywhere were being forced to remember how to… write code. In this Hot Takes episode, Ari unpacks what the outage unveiled: AI is becoming operational infrastructure. He also discusses how organizations should start thinking about resilience, failover, and “graceful degradation” in an AI-first world.

Sean is mysteriously absent (global tour? Carmen Sandiego arc? Grain Gang business trip?), so Ian sits down with Ari for a behind-the-scenes look at Ari’s Fortune 500 AI advisement. What starts as “we need an AI strategy” quickly turns into something far more important: figuring out who owns AI and how to drive real outcomes.    Additionally, please stick around for a very important announcement a...

Sean and Ari sit down with Bob Strong, AVP of Service Operations at Assurant, to talk about what it really looks like to run IT service teams in an AI-first world. Bob shares how automation and virtual agents are improving resolution quality, accelerating documentation, and reshaping frontline roles while also touching on a hard truth: AI is only as good as the knowledge and governance behind it.

In the first Hot Takes of 2026, CCO Sean Hoyer and COO Ari Stowe take on the growing debate around AI hype, maturity, and real-world impact on IT. They hash out why expectations for agentic AI outpace reality and why it should be treated like an employee instead of a silver bullet. They also unpack human-in-the-loop models, AI reasoning’s (considerable) limits, and why better outcomes hinge on ret...

Sean and Ari sit down with Yaju Suneja, Global Head of i-Automation, Customer Strategy and Transformation at Stefanini Group, to unpack what it really takes to make automation stick. Yaju starts by getting practical on the barriers that still slow progress today: adoption, trust, security, and skills. Along the way, he shares how to shift to a durable operating model, why shared goals and KPI comm...

In this year-end episode, CCO Sean Hoyer and COO Ari Stowe look back on what truly defined 2025 in IT and agentic AI. They unpack the explosion of AI experimentation, the strain it put on IT teams, and why hype often outpaced real value. They also share predictions on what it’ll take for enterprises to turn AI promise into measurable outcomes in 2026. 

In this episode, CCO Sean Heuer and COO Ari Stowe take on a favorite enterprise myth: that you need “prerequisites” like perfect data, governance, and cultural readiness before you can adopt agentic AI. They also get into guardrails vs. overengineering, how agentic AI reshapes architects and project managers, and why “agent societies” might be closer than you think.

Sean and Ari are back with another customer episode! This week, they sit down with Prasad Watve, Head of NextGen Services at Vivicta (formerly Tietoevry), to gaze into the crystal ball that is the future of AI and figure out where this technology is taking IT. Listen in and decide for yourself whether they’re seeing into the future! 

In this episode, CEO Sean Heuer and COO Ari Stowe dig into whether today’s so-called “AI agents” are actually agentic… or just glorified chatbots riding the hype. They also tackle broken data strategies, why “dump everything into an LLM and see what happens” is a fast track to a busted project, and how shrinking the universe to specific, high-value use cases keeps AI from collapsing under its own...

Luke Mitchell is a UK-based IT orchestration expert who’s had a guiding hand on robust automation initiatives at some of the world’s biggest retailers. And he had no idea he’d be in that driver’s seat. In this episode, he switches to the hot seat, where Sean and Ari ask him about his career in IT automation, where he thinks this discipline is going, and how you can leverage automation to meaningfu...

In this Hot Takes episode, CEO Sean Heuer and COO Ari Stowe dive into whether agentic AI can really reinvent ERP and IT as we know them. What does this transformation mean for the Zero Ticket™ approach? How does it affect everything from frontline enterprises to Sean and Ari’s newly founded illicit wheat-buying syndicate? Listen in to find out!

In this episode, Sean and Ari sit down with Avro Chatterjee, Altus Group’s Director of SRE and Tools, to discuss the blistering speed at which agentic AI has evolved. What does this technology’s lightspeed development mean for enterprises, their customers, and the wider world of IT? Listen in to find out! 

Welcome to the very first episode of Sean and Ari’s Hot Takes!  In this episode, CEO Sean Heuer and COO Ari Stowe take a look at whether agentic AI measures up to the hype and offer their perspectives on what these stories for Zero Ticket™ IT and beyond.

Welcome to the very first episode of Agents of IT, the podcast for IT leaders accelerating the shift to Zero Ticket™ IT! For our inaugural episode, Sean Heuer (CEO) and Ari Stowe (COO) sit down with Espressive founder Pat Calhoun to discuss why agentic AI and intelligent orchestration are the superhero duo that teams need to meaningfully transform IT. This is a conversation that tech leaders looki...