Ron Miller

Disclosure: I was paid by SailPoint for moderation and video work at its Navigate conference. The company had no input into this commentary, which follows my editorial guidelines

Hi everyone. I spent the first part of this week at the SailPoint Navigate conference in Austin where I learned loads about identity and agentic

With over 30 years of IT experience, Qualcomm CIO Atilla Tinic has seen a few shifts in his time. But like many executives and analysts I've spoken with recently, he says AI is changing how he manages IT more significantly than anything that came before it.

Hi everyone. The colors are bursting outside my window as it's fall in its full glory in New England. Just a reminder if you're interested in having me moderate a panel or fireside or produce a sponsored video for your event, please drop me a line at [email protected]. If you like what you see, please share this week's edition with a friend, and encourage them to subscribe. It really helps.💌

Those of you who follow me on LinkedIn know I report regularly about my tempestuous relationship with AI under the title 'My adventures in AI.' I have dabbled, struggled, experimented, raged and eventually found a somewhat peaceful way to coexist with these tools as I incorporate them into my daily work routines.

Earlier this year, Salesforce announced Headless 360, its way of providing back-end access to the data on the platform without requiring a front-end. The company reiterated this position at Dreamforce last month. I wrote about it here and here

When I was at SailPoint Navigate earlier this month I learned a lot about the importance of identity in controlling agents. Agents have the unique ability to take on different identities as they move through a complex process and encounter other systems and agents, each with a different set of permission requirements.

The news is full of agentic horror stories, of escaping sandboxes, and finding ways around guardrails. This is raising a persistent worry among security professionals: As agents proliferate in the enterprise, companies are struggling to find ways to keep them under control.

When you're the chief data officer at an insurance company that's more than 150 years old and primarily serves businesses, you have to figure out how to make AI work while dealing with legacy systems that can be expensive to change. For CDO Kristen Bessette, it also means understanding that

For a company that put the brakes on acquisitions just a few years ago in the face of activist investor pressure, Salesforce has been pretty busy lately making deals. Since the beginning of 2025, it has announced plans to buy 18 companies. That's a lot of M&A action.