- Taco Bell puts AI front-and-center in drive-thru strategy - “Taco Bell’s drive-thru voice AI was designed for internal and external applications. An AI assistant takes orders and relays the information to the staff. The system is designed to help restaurant employees manage orders, reducing their workload, while enabling more accurate order fulfillment for customers.” // Makes sense. I bet this works pretty good. I could even see that the misunderstanding/error rate would be better with AI taking the orders. It could switch languages too.

- Navigating Private Equity ownership. - A memo template for R&D’s plans after private equity. Basically: here’s how we’ll spend less money and use attrition to lower staff costs (hire more junior people as senior people leave).

- IDC: VMware Explore 2024: A Shift to Private Cloud, AI, and AppDev Simplification - The VMware Private AI Foundation “platform appeals to Broadcom customers because of its ability to deliver advanced security and privacy, granular policy and control capabilities, resource sharing functionality, and centralized operations capabilities that deliver a lower TCO.” // Also, a good write-up of the overall VMware and Tanzu shift to private cloud stack. Lots of Tanzu and Spring coverage as well.

- Modernizing the Mainframe in Place: Transforming Core Technologies - Improve the mainframe app. // Likely some good patterns for talking/thinking about modernizing any type existing apps “in place."

- From Agile to Radical: conflict - How management can deal with: “There are at least three consequences of unresolved conflict that I’ve experienced in practice: unaddressed business areas, repeated patterns of unproductive behavior and undoing each other’s progress.” // A little bit on European work-culture too.

- Broadcom’s VMware strategy is winning despite market friction - The case for the Broadcom acquisition being good, especially for all-in, large companies that want a private cloud stack.

- Useful built-in macOS command-line utilities - Some useful MacOS command line utils - not the usual Linux ones.

- Gartner Raises IT Spending Forecast For 2024 Again - IT Jungle - “Gartner thinks that spending on servers, storage, and networking for the datacenters of the world will rise by 34.7 percent in 2024 to just a hair over $318 billion. We have not seen this kind of growth since the recovery after the crash in IT spending during the Great Recession, and this time around it is different because there is no crash ahead of such growth. Rather, this is a transformation in IT systems that is probably more impactful than the Dot Com boom."

- Top 5 Intelligent App Delivery Challenges and How Executives Can Solve Them - AI middleware.

- Gartner Says CIOs Need to Overcome Four Emerging Challenges to Deliver Value With AI - Make sure you cap AI spend in the next few years of messing around with enterprise AI. // Also, new tech burger-stack: “As CIO, your job is to design a tech sandwich that can handle the messiness of AI”