As AI saturates the market, what becomes of its competitive advantages? Does it become a basic, digital commodity in the background?

As InformationWeek kicks off “The Cost of AI series,” this episode of DOS Won’t Hunt brought together Andy Boyd, chief product officer with Appfire; Amol Ajgaonkar, CTO of product innovation with Insight; Mike Finley , CTO and co-founder for AnswerRocket; Kashif Zafar, CEO of Xnurta; and James Newman, head of product and portfolio marketing for Augury.

The podcast panel discussed what happens if companies start to look like they are just copying each other when they use AI, what the ROI is for AI, and how organizations can differentiate what they get out of AI?

This episode features Luke Behnke, vice president of product for Grammarly; Cliff Jurkiewicz, vice president of global strategy for Phenom; Ryan Bergstrom, chief product and technology Officer for Paycor; Daniel Avancini, co-founder and chief data officer for Indicium; and Arun Varadarajan, co-founder and chief commercial officer for Ascendion.

They discussed how AI already changes staffing, what skillsets organizations want in an AI-powered world, fears about job loss, what this may mean for executives in the C-suite who need to get up to speed on AI, and when organizations can comfortably rely on AI to enhance their workforce.

In a world dominated increasingly by AI, access to relevant data becomes paramount -- but what if such streams of information dry up?

This episode features Shobha Phansalkar, vice president of client solutions and innovation for Wolters Kluwer; Olga Megorskaya, founder and CEO of Toloka; Pete DeJoy, co-founder and senior vice president of product for Astronomer; Melissa Bischoping, senior director of security and product design research at Tanium; and Omar Khawaja, Field CISO, Databricks.

They discussed types of data that is necessary and relevant for training AI, how organizations might determine if data is useful or simply junk, what happens if policy stonewalls data access, and whether or not AI simply dies without data.

In this early stage of the AI era, it can be easy to think a blank check to develop the technology will deliver success. At what point should the ROI be measured for AI? What happens if a company overspends on AI? Can the project be recovered or should the company cut its losses and move on?

This episode of DOS Won’t Hunt featured Manish Goyal, vice president and senior partner for AI and analytics for IBM Consulting; Richard Buractaon, head of AI for Andesite; Carter Busse, CIO for Workato; and Ashok Reddy, CEO and KX.

They discussed such matters as whether a barometer exists that companies can compare their AI expenses against and what might be a “reasonable” percentage of budget that can be spent on AI.

Before an enterprise can set any strategy in motion for AI, leadership at the top must decide what the plan of action will be. The question is, who should guide the conversation?

The CEO, the overall executive leader? A more tech-oriented executive such as the CTO or CIO? How much say should other, operations-driven divisions have?

This episode brought together Adam Caplan, president of digital business and AI for Altimetrik; Bradon Rogers, chief customer officer for Island; Max Chan, CIO for Avnet; Ben Waber, PhD, visiting scientist at MIT; and Cliff Jurkiewicz, vice president of global strategy for Phenom.

They discussed such questions as how does C-suite leadership tend to regard AI, key considerations when exploring how to leverage new technology, and if managers who are not part of the C-suite should be part of the conversation?

In 1999, under the digital gleam of Keanu Reeves in “The Matrix,” IT teams either sat confidently with the changes they made to resolve the Y2K bug or waited with bated breath to see if the fixes held.

The arrival of the year 2000 did not bring about the feared digital apocalypse thanks to fixes to make software and hardware to understand what seemed like a simple, yet crucial change to date formats.

This episode saw Greg Rivera, vice president of product at CAST; Paul Davis, field CISO at JFrog; and Theresa Lanowitz, chief evangelist at LevelBlue, discuss how computer infrastructure evolved in the 25 years since worries about Y2K launched IT teams into action.

This episode of DOS Won’t Hunt saw a panel comprised of David Richardson, vice president of endpoint and threat intelligence for Lookout; Kris Lovejoy, senior vice president for security with Kyndryl; Jake King, head of threat and security intelligence with Elastic; Mikhail Ishkhanov, senior director, product strategy and sales enablement with SOTI; Stephanie ”Snow” Carruthers, IBM’s global head of cyber range and chief people hacker with IBM X-Force; and John Paul Cunningham, CISO for Silverfort.

They discussed what is at stake during the holidays, security risks that can arise with undertrained seasonal staff, and why it is not a good idea to have someone caught up in holiday festivities tasked with cyber forensic audits. Mind the champagne.

This episode gathered Marcus Merrell, principal tech Advisor at Sauce Labs; Anuj Kapur, CEO of CloudBees; Bina Khimani, chief product officer and chief revenue officer with Kinesis Network; and Richard Munro, business value lead for the VMware Cloud Foundation Division.

They spoke to questions that included whether enterprises are now able to tailor cloud resources to fit their actual operational needs, if cloud costs have become more manageable, how cloud usage has scaled in recent years, and whether or not more organizations are going cloud-first.

Did any forecasts for 2024 hold water? Are organizations better served by not chasing predictive trends or does that mean giving up a competitive edge?

This episode brought together Rocky Cole, co-founder and COO of iVerify; Bogdan Raduta, head of AI with FlowX.AI; Bryan Wood, machine learning solutions engineer at Snorkel AI; Dave Merkel, CEO and co-founder of Expel; Alvaro Oliveira, chief talent officer with Andela; and John Peluso, Chief Technology Officer at AvePoint.

This episode saw Matt Bishop, principal architect at Bitwarden; Artem Kroupenev, vice president of strategy at Augury; Matias Madou, Secure Code Warrior’s CTO and co-founder; and Joel Carusone, senior vice president of data and AI at NinjaOne come together. They discussed the use of AI in software development, its benefits and risks, and how developers want AI to be implemented in the cycle.