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Volume 341, Issue 4 · 2026-08-24 – 2026-08-30 · Popular →

Monday’s Briefing · August 31

AI
Cloud
CxO
FOSS
Platform Engineering

Upcoming Event · Wed, Sep 30 · 11:00am

The Gartner 2026 CEO Technology Agenda: How AI Drives Growth, Leadership Moves Beyond the CIO

This webinar explores what CEOs expect AI to deliver across technology, finance, HR, operations, and other functions, where confidence gaps remain, and how success is being measured. Attendees will gain practical insights into how CxOs can translate AI investments into business outcomes, operate in a distributed leadership model, and meet rising CEO expectations. more →

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The Gartner 2026 CEO Technology Agenda: How AI Drives Growth, Leadership Moves Beyond the CIO (Sept. 30th)
Security
Linux
Java

Upcoming Event · Wed, Sep 9 · 10:00am

Train Employees on Cost-Optimized Best Practices for GenAI

Gartner experts will discuss approaches for selecting the right models for the right tasks, establishing context-specific training programs, improving prompt design practices and creating accessible prompt repositories. The session also examines how usage monitoring and governance can help organizations identify key cost drivers, manage consumption and optimize GenAI investments as adoption grows. more →

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Train Employees on Cost-Optimized Best Practices for GenAI (Sept. 9th)
12touches.com

12touches.com, Wednesday, August 26th, 2026

To Ask Permission Is to Seek Denial

Sellers at large firms routinely stall on a personal newsletter because they haven't been approved to run one - and Scott McNealy's Sun-era mantra explains why asking is the wrong move: the person receiving an unprecedented request has no upside for yes and all the downside, so the safe answer is defer or decline, and a "no" on the record is far harder to reverse than a question nobody formally raised. more →

To Ask Permission Is to Seek Denial

12touches.com, Wednesday, August 26th, 2026

Being Interesting Is Not the Same as Being Present

Advisors, speakers and fractional CIOs don't have a lead generation problem, they have a recall problem - and their visibility is event-shaped, producing four tall spikes and forty-eight flat weeks, with the moment that mattered almost certainly landing in the flat part. more →

Being Interesting Is Not the Same as Being Present

12touches.com, Wednesday, August 26th, 2026

You're Not in Sales. You Still Need to Be Known.

Enterprise IT is a few thousand people per specialty, and a dozen professions orbit them with the same dependency and the same structural problem: the only contact their job naturally supplies is the contact that asks for something. more →

You're Not in Sales. You Still Need to Be Known.

12touches.com, Wednesday, August 26th, 2026

Your Top Performers Don't Want Another Plaque

Top sellers are the hardest people in the company to reward - cash is already maxed, the incentive trip ends, and promotion into management is often unwanted - while the independent streak that makes them outperform is exactly what makes corporate advocacy mandates slide off them. more →

Your Top Performers Don't Want Another Plaque

12touches.com, Wednesday, August 25th, 2026

Your Customer Today Is Your Colleague Tomorrow

In most enterprise deals the most trusted person isn't the account executive but the sales engineer, precisely because they'll say what won't work - yet that credibility is invisible outside the few accounts they're staffed on, living in the memories of a few dozen people and a CRM someone else owns. Enterprise IT is a small, circulating world: vendor people become customers, skilled customers get recruited into field roles by the engineers who worked with them, and the boundary between customers and network dissolves over a career. Publishing isn't self-promotion - it's the filtering you already do, done in public. more →

Your Customer Today Is Your Colleague Tomorrow

12touches.com, Thursday, August 25th, 2026

Your Best Distribution Channel Is Already on Your Payroll

Alan Shimel's argument that Google's AI Overviews are engineered to make the click unnecessary - his "Google Zero" - lands as hard on technology vendors as on publishers, because organic search was always rented distribution that merely felt owned. The largest untapped alternative is already on staff: a few hundred customer-facing employees, each publishing a weekly newsletter carrying the company's news section, is hundreds of trusted channels reaching the market with no algorithm in between. It succeeds where employee advocacy usually fails because the employee owns the asset, and the resulting traffic is attributable and rewardable per person. Enterprise IT is a small, circulating world: vendor people become customers, skilled customers get recruited into field roles by the engineers who worked with them, and the boundary between customers and network dissolves over a career. Publishing isn't self-promotion - it's the filtering you already do, done in public. more →

Your Best Distribution Channel Is Already on Your Payroll
Akamai Technologies
Cloudflare
DataRobot
Dell
Huntress-News

Huntress, Friday, August 28th, 2026

Teach Yourself to Phish

Huntress explains the strategy behind phishing simulations and how they build organizational resilience. more →

Teach Yourself to Phish
Microsoft
Palo Alto Networks
Rubrik
Salesforce
SentinelOne
Veeam
Zscaler