“The demand for AI is out of control,” says Prouty. “It feels like a tsunami. Everyone feels like they need AI.”

While such enthusiasm may make it easier for Akamai to see strong adoption rates when new AI tools are deployed, it can also come with organizational challenges for leaders like Prouty, who oversees the company’s global IT organization and is responsible for assessing, testing, and deploying new AI tools to be used by over 9,000 employees globally.

Following the beginning of the generative AI boom in late 2022, Akamai initially embraced a “thousand flowers bloom” strategy for AI. The company quickly set up internal infrastructure that would give employees a safe “sandbox” to test use cases. While none of these AI applications were intended for full production, Akamai saw the value in encouraging experimentation. But only up to a point. 

“It didn’t make sense to me as a CIO that I would have people out in the Akamai ecosystem just developing AI and developing copilots,” explains Prouty, a 26-year veteran at Akamai. 

Now, Prouty prefers a more centralized approach and has adopted the thesis that most generative AI use cases that Akamai will adopt will come from the company’s vendors, including Cisco, Salesforce, and Google. Her team spends a lot of time with vendors, including a wide variety of AI startups that pitch Akamai, to better understand what their technologies can deliver, their future innovation roadmaps, and the changes that Akamai may need to make internally so it can best tap into these AI tools and generate meaningful productivity gains. 

When Akamai does opt to move forward with an AI feature, it does so in a highly measured rollout. “We’re sort of looking at as many of our vendors as we can in a very small pilot way, to understand what it is they’re offering and how it’s going to benefit us,” says Prouty, noting that she still has concerns about the maturity of AI technology and about the “murky” cost structures she’s seen from some vendors.

Each time an AI pilot is launched, Akamai creates a team chat channel in Webex so that people can share what’s working—or not working—when trying new AI capabilities.

Github Copilot has been rolled out under a “controlled release” for software engineers and in some cases, projects that would take weeks can be achieved in hours. But in other cases, the code written by the AI assistant doesn’t make sense and more work is needed to fix the errors. “There’s a learning curve,” says Prouty.

There is also some internal appetite to test offerings from other AI coding assistants, including Cursor and Anthropic’s Claude. But before Prouty signs off on that, she wants to really home in on measurable productivity benefits.

“I am still seeing that the technology is not quite there,” says Prouty. Workers still hit a lot of roadblocks when adopting these new AI tools and when that’s conveyed to vendors, they’re quick to say, “‘Oh yeah, that’s coming in the next release,’” she adds.

For some limited cases, Akamai sees a competitive advantage in building in-house AI tools. For example, the company partnered with French AI startup Dataiku to build a chatbot for the sales team, which taps into a blend of OpenAI’s LLMs and internal data from Akamai. The sales team is able to use this tool to pull a mix of private and public information about customers before making a pitch.

And while 2025 was christened as “the year of agents,” Akamai remains firmly on the sidelines when it comes to testing agentic AI. “I just don’t know if the technology is there yet,” says Prouty.

But even with the IT department exerting greater control of Akamai’s AI strategy, Prouty says she encourages an open-door policy when it comes to fielding new AI ideas.

“Let’s encourage, not discourage,” says Prouty. “Bring us your use cases. Let’s help you do that in a way that’s secure. But we’re going to put some cost controls around it.”

John Kell

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NEWS PACKETS

Salesforce debuts a new way to make it easier to build AI agents. Ahead of Salesforce’s annual Dreamforce customer conference this week, the software giant unveiled a new platform called Agentforce 360, which is intended to make it easier for businesses to build, control, and deploy AI agents. Rivals including Google and Amazon Web Services have also recently unveiled more centralized AI agent platforms as adoption of this technology is frequently stuck in the pilot phase. “Companies have invested a lot in AI, but they’re not getting the value,” Srini Tallapragada, president and chief engineering and customer success officer at Salesforce, said during a press briefing last week, according to CIO Dive.

Meta scoops up Thinking Machines Lab co-founder. Andrew Tulloch, an AI researcher and co-founder of Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines Lab, has left to rejoin Meta Platforms. Tulloch previously worked at Meta for 11 years and left in 2023 to join OpenAI before co-founding Thinking Machines Lab alongside Murati, who previously served as CTO at OpenAI, at the beginning of 2025. The Wall Street Journal reports that it is unclear which team Tulloch will be on at Meta. But the hire further highlights Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s particularly aggressive push to poach top AI talent from competitors, hiring more than 50 top AI researchers from OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Apple, and others.

Broadcom hooks up with OpenAI. OpenAI is proving to have the “Midas Touch” on a large number of tech stocks and the latest to enjoy the glisten from the ChatGPT maker is Broadcom, which stands to generate billions in new revenue from a newly announced multi-year deal to sell the company’s custom chips and networking equipment to support the AI startup’s infrastructure needs. Under the terms of the deal, OpenAI will design the hardware and work with Broadcom to develop it. OpenAI’s recent long-term partnership with AMD (the sponsor of this newsletter) also sent shares of that chip supplier earlier in October, while Bloomberg reports that at OpenAI’s annual developers event, mere mentions of other companies like Figma, HubSpot, and Salesforce led to stock gains for those public companies.

ADOPTION CURVE

Executives say AI is now essential to their operations. Nearly three-quarters of executives say that their company would struggle to function without AI, a figure that rises to 77% of smaller companies with fewer than 10,000 employees, according to a survey of 1,500 IT business executives conducted by PagerDuty, which helps incident management for IT departments. A vast majority of the companies (84%) also reported that they are using AI in software development to write, review, or suggest code.

Additionally, the survey uncovered that three out of four companies have deployed at least one AI agent, with 25% saying they’ve deployed five or more. 81% of executives said they would also trust AI agents to take actions on a company’s behalf during a crisis, which could include a service outage or security event. But less optimistically, 85% say they need better procedures to detect errors or failures in AI tools and 84% of companies report experiencing at least one AI-related outage.

Courtesy of PagerDuty

JOBS RADAR

Hiring:

- The state of Wisconsin is seeking a CIO, based in Dane, Wisconsin. Posted salary: $148.5K/year.

- Amalgamated Bank is seeking a chief information security officer, based in New York City. Posted salary range: $240K-$260K/year.

- Mascoma Bank is seeking a SVP of IT, based in White River Junction, Vermont. Posted salary range: $142.1K-$191.9K/year.

- Instrumental is seeking a VP of engineering, based in Palo Alto, California. Posted salary range: $330K-$360K/year.

Hired:

- The Knot Worldwide appointed John James as CTO, reporting to CEO Raina Moskowitz. James joins the wedding-planning website from financial services company Ouro, where he served as SVP of engineering. He also previously worked as VP of technology at travel technology company Expedia Group.

- ASML Holding NV promoted Marco Pieters to the roles of EVP and CTO, reporting to CEO Christophe Fouquet. Pieters has had over 25 years at the Dutch semiconductor company, most recently as EVP for the product area of applications. He initially joined ASML in 1999 as a software designer.

- Ibex announced the appointment of Michael Ringman, joining the outsourcing company from industry peer Telus International, where he most recently served as CIO/CTO. Prior to that, Ringman worked at another outsourcing firm, TeleTech Holdings, where he served as VP of global technology infrastructure.

- JWP Connatix named Pat DeAngelis as CTO, joining the video technology company to advance its product roadmap. DeAngelis has  more than 20 years of leadership experience in the ad tech space, including serving as co-CTO at Innovid and CTO of Flashtalking.

- Sovos appointed Peter Gaffney as CIO, joining the compliance and tax reporting software provider after most recently serving as SVP and CISO for workforce management software provider Magnit. He has also held technology leadership roles at Oracle, Blue Cross Blue Shield, Condé Nast, and Ann Taylor.

- ConstructConnect appointed Gaurav Singal as CTO, where he will steer product development, IT, and security for the construction software provider. Singal joins ConstructConnect from payments firm Cantaloupe, where he served as CTO. He also previously served as CIO of the Georgia Lottery, chief product officer for the last mile division at XPO Logistics, and VP of technology at Goldman Sachs.