Enterprise AI apps (or lack thereof), ROI surveys, CFO budget pivots, agile’s stubborn relevance, platform engineering vs. private cloud, Heroku’s freeze, IRS tech cuts, and Europe hedging on AI tools

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• How tech chiefs gauge ROI on AI - AI uses: better search, preparing leases, and this: “When the system senses that ice is running low, it fires off an order to AI agents, which begin routing trucks to fulfill orders. The system also takes into account historical sales trends, weather analytics and other factors to anticipate each route’s ice requirements.”
• This CTO Says 93% of Developers Use AI, but Productivity Is Still 10% - Developers who use AI produce more code, and have faster onboarding. But, in this study, their productivity gain tops out at four hours saved a week. The thinking is that the organization doesn’t change enough to expand that more. “Culture” is the bottleneck.
• AI and tech investment ROI - October 2025: whole bunch of survey data on IT budgeting and priorities, plus the payoffs (ROI).
• 6,000 execs struggle to find the AI productivity boom - An elusive enterprise AI ROI survey round-up.
• Most CFOs expect larger IT budgets, ‘collapsing’ staff growth: Gartner - Management is always eager to “reduce costs.” // ‘The real story lies “in collapsing headcount growth expectations, from 6% in 2025 to just 2% in 2026 with just 21% of CFOs planning staff increases of 4% to 9%, down from 31% last year,” Nauman Abbasi, vice president analyst in Gartner’s finance practice, said in the release. “This marks a structural pivot from labor expansion to optimization driven by automation and AI that deliver productivity gains without proportional increases in headcount.”’
• Training your replacement - We’ve always been trying to get rid of programmers.
• Amid The AI Hype, Agile Still Remains Relevant In 2025 - “But the new report reveals a striking insight: “Despite the buzz around agile’s supposed decline, a commanding 95% of professionals affirm its critical relevance to their operations.” This statistic, coupled with the 58% of business and technology professionals prioritizing agile adoption, paints a clear picture: Agile is not just surviving; it’s still thriving and not going away, yet it does need improvement.”

• Fragments: February 18 - Deep blue adjacent vibes from the big brains at ThoughtWorks.
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• Platform Engineering Needs a Cloud Engine - “71% of enterprises are moving nearly 24% of their public cloud workloads on premises. These organizations need a modern private cloud platform that delivers public-cloud-like self‑service without forcing developers to become infrastructure experts, while also allowing them to customize configurations as needed.”
• Heroku future in doubt as Salesforce freezes features to focus on AI - Also, some commentary from 2010 to 2012 of Heroku: tech debt and scaling problems…and us-east-1, as always.
• DOGE bites taxman - “Job cuts at the IRS’s tech arm have gone faster and farther than expected, with 40 percent of IT staff and four-fifths of tech leaders gone, the agency’s CIO revealed yesterday.”
• I swear the UFO is coming any minute - Social science and psychology studies are incredibly fraught and susceptible to replication problems, a round up.

ICYMI

• AI still not good at basic knowledge worker workflows, which is likely an apps problem - three experiments.
• Why it’s great to be a Spring developer now, and how to make it even better - State of Spring, 2026 - a new talk of mine.
• Progressive Delivery, with Heidi Waterhouse - Software Defined Interviews - Whitney and Coté talk with Heidi Waterhouse, co-author of the book Progressive Delivery.
• Does Platform Product Management & Design Really Happen? Or is it all just platform engineering? - Tanzu Catsup - Most organizations treat infrastructure as a series of projects to be “completed,” but successful platform engineering requires a permanent product mindset. In this episode, we explore why platform teams need dedicated product management.
• You Can Feel It Coming - Software Defined Talk
• New short videos since last time: bad advice from Wall Street on enterprise AI, devs want AI tools that freak ops people out.

Logoff

I’m still figuring out how to setup my newsletter at micro.blog, and move off substack. It doesn’t work yet, so I’m posting this manually to the newsletter list (via substack, sure). But, this means, though, if you’re reading the newsletter that you missed the episode from earlier this week. You can check it out here if you like links and original content.