Going with the flow 

The biggest story with readers of CIO this week was this article about how IT leaders are using agentic AI to accelerate business workflows. It's the Holy Grail for many organizations - introduce AI agents to an existing workflow and in so doing create efficiency and velocity across the business.  

Easy to say, hard to do. The article shared real-world examples of where agentic had been proven to improve workflows, but the readers wanted more - asking Smart Answers how to identify processes that could be improved by agentic. Fuelled by many years of human reportage our AI chat bot has the insights.  

Short answer - you need a process that maps to business goals, and is well defined. Long answer below.  

Find out: How to know if a business process is ripe for agentic AI?  
 

How to earn $30k more, working in IT 

It's a theme of this column that people with jobs like to get paid. Ideally: we'dall like to get paid more. (It'sthese kinds of searing insights that bring in the readers.)  

The biggest story on CIO.com in the past seven days was our report on the rising value of IT certifications.  

We said that getting certified can benefit IT professionals and the organizations that employ them, boosting productivity and engagement, while also closing skills gaps. And, yeah, in many cases increasing earning potential. And that is the bit our readers latched on to - naturally.  

One stat suggests that certification can be worth as much as $30k on top of the certified professional's salary. CIO readers asked Smart Answers if this is true. And to find out you will need to ask, too.  

Find out: What percentage of IT executives estimated $30,000 to be value of IT certification?  
 

AI in the cloud 

In another big story this week we interviewed the CIO of Johnson Controls who is rethinking IT for the cloud-native and AI era. In explaining how the company is building in-house IT capacity and know-how after years of overly relying on technology partners, we prompted our readers to ask about cloud in support of AI.  

As infrastructure needs escalate to take advantage of AI, many organizations are moving to cloud or a hybrid cloud solution. Smart Answers (and AI tool that lives in the cloud), can explain why.  

Find out: Why are companies adopting hybrid cloud for AI workloads?