Relative to your interests, Monday

Getting your data in shape for enterprise AI usage. Also: MCP gateways, day-two platform ownership, flying toasters, and a pantograph.

Agents don’t ask for data politely

We’ve got a few announcements in Tanzu land this week. I made a short video about one of them, Tanzu Platform AI-ready data foundations. It’s all about getting data ready for AIs to use, curating views of that data and securing its use, and then, of course, serving it up to AI to use.

Check out this post from my colleague, Jason, for even more detail.

ICYMI

Original content published since last time.

• Software Defined Talk #587: The Singularity Didn’t Happen on the First
• Playing D&D with AI vs. building tools to play D&D with AI.
• “Ask an individual whether AI made them more productive and about four in five say yes. Ask an organization whether AI moved EBIT and it is fewer than two in five. Ask whether AI moved EBIT by at least five percent and it is one in sixteen.” See chart.
• Related: enterprise AI ROI, see chart.

Related to your interests

• You’re Not Behind, You’re Being Sold a Vocabulary – A cheatsheet for understand what all the AI-loving nerds are talking about.
• CIOs are still waiting for AI’s cost savings
• 🤖 A Third of Companies Expected AI to Cut Head Count Last Year, 14% Say It Did, and They Have Now Raised the Forecast to 39% – Executives have not laid off as many people as they thought they world from using AI. Despite that, they are predicting more layoffs in 2027. I don’t know: maybe AI is bad at firing people.
• AI agents meant to replace Meta workers made “large-scale, disruptive actions” – Ai layoffs don’t work as well as planned.
• Your AI Project Doesn’t Need More Agents – “Brandon speaks with Rich Ziade, co-founder and CEO of Aboard, about why enterprise AI projects fail without real discovery, why ‘agents’ have been oversold as a headcount play, and why organizational urgency, not new tooling, is what actually makes digital transformation succeed.”
• Before You Build An AI-Powered Enterprise, Build Its Human Foundation – “AI Amplifies What Already Exists” – you’ll get better at what you’re good at, and worse at what you’re bad at.
• Claudeforce: The AI Interface Salesforce Never Built – Headless life-style, no need for a UI, just give me an API.
• Top Platform Orchestration Tools for 2026 – For if you’re dealing with Kubernetes: “A useful gut check: ask how many people need to get involved in a simple and safe (but urgent) security patch change? Tools optimised for application delivery tend to make day-one provisioning easy and leave day-two ownership unresolved and hard to manage. Tools built as genuine platform orchestrators build clear responsibility lines from the start and treat day two as the actual job.”
• Effective Patterns for Advanced MCP Usage – MCP gateways.
• Making Your Data Ready for Agentic AI
• I think the data center backlash is mostly about data centers – Charts, charts, charts.
• Afterglow — classic After Dark screen savers on modern macOS – Flying toasters screen saver.
• Ollee Watch – Fun!

Upcoming Talks

• Cloud Foundry Summit 2026 – Heidelberg, Germany, September 21st, 2026. “Making and Maintaining the Case to Stay on Cloud Foundry”
• DevOpsDays Prague 2026 – Prague, Czechia, October 5th, 2026. “Here comes the normies – how DevOps can handle the flood of AI slop-apps”
• DevOpsDays Istanbul 2026 – Istanbul, Turkey, October 24th, 2026. Keynote, title to come.
• Cloud Native Denmark 2026 – Copenhagen, Denmark, November 19th, 2026. “What goblins and druids can teach us about enterprise AI”
• Build Stuff 2026 – Vilnius, Lithuania, December 2nd-4th, 2026. “What goblins and druids can teach us about enterprise AI”

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