Digital twins have been a key tool for organisations to create virtual replicas of operating environments. From transportation to manufacturing and oil & gas, they help simulate performance and prepare for ‘what-if scenarios’. But they’re evolving.

On this week’s episode, Bobby talks to ITPro’s news and analysis editor, Ross Kelly, to ask what exactly a digital twin is and how they are evolving since the arrival of generative AI.

The term ‘digital twin’ is even taking on different meanings; in some cases it’s not just a virtual replica of a factory floor, for example. We are now seeing digital twins of people, with Forrester describing them as ‘Digital Doubles’. Gartner also predicts that some organisations will begin creating ‘Digital Twins of Customers’ as a way to simulate how customers might respond to specific scenarios.

• Does your business need a digital twin? | IT Pro
• Are AI digital twins a match made in heaven? | IT Pro

The rise and fall of tokenmaxxing has been dramatic, not least because of how quickly it happened. From a darling of CEOs wanting to show how AI-forward they are to a balance sheet nightmare, the journey this particular strategy for measuring AI lasted mere months before its star started to fade.

In this episode of the ITPro Podcast, Jane and Bobby are joined by Frank Böhmer, CEO of Ninox, to talk about what prompted the trend in tokenmaxxing, why it fell apart, and what comes next.

• Could rising token costs boost interest in on-premises hardware?
• Uber’s eye-watering AI bill shows enterprises are still measuring AI success through consumption rather than outcomes’
• IT leaders are being stung by "unexpected" AI costs
• The AI pricing time bomb
• ‘What we’re seeing right now is just rapid escalation in AI token spend’: Accenture tells staff to stop using AI for unnecessary tasks amid surging costs
• Surging AI costs could exceed developer salaries by 2028 – analysts say context engineering could be the key to optimizing token consumption
• Companies are regretting investing in generative AI so quickly – here’s how to avoid buyer’s remorse

Image credit: Getty Images

It’s a very uncomfortable end to June with temperature records once again being broken across Europe. The technology world is moving forward unabated, though, still talking about AI and, in particular, the workforce and infrastructure that underpins it.

Do we have the talent to meet the demand for AI? Do we have the power to keep our data centers operational? And can the European Union get us off our dependence on Google Workspace and Microsoft 365?

ITPro’s news editor Ross Kelly joins Jane and Bobby to look back on some of the most interesting stories of the month.

• ‘Open source should rest on transparency, not deception’: Euro-Office ‘sovereignty’ claims questioned in scathing open letter by LibreOffice maintainers | IT Pro
• The UK is running on fumes as data center build-outs can’t keep pace with demand | IT Pro
• UK faces huge AI talent shortage | IT Pro

This week’s episode comes to you live from Las Vegas, where we link up with Jane McCallion at HPE Discover and also ITPro’s news editor, Ross Kelly, at Pure Accelerate.

Jane talks us through all the major announcements at HPE, with a heavy focus on how its Juniper Networks acquisition is impacting its new products and services. She also gives her thoughts on CEO Antonio Neri and the company’s approach to agents.

Across the Las Vegas Strip at Resorts World, Ross gives us his insight into Everpure, the impact of rising hardware costs on its business, and how organizations can get their data AI-ready.

• HPE Discover 2026 Live: Day 2 keynotes
• HPE unveils a raft of new networking products for AI workloads at Discover 2026
• HPE Discover 2026 Live: Day 1 keynotes
• Everpure wants you to get your data AI-ready
• Everpure continues data management pivot with new Data Intelligence platform launch
• Everpure’s data management pivot puts it on a ‘collision course’ with industry big hitters
• What will the big announcements be at HPE Discover 2026?

Are businesses heading for an AI pricing time bomb? With companies like Uber suddenly raising concerns about the inability to draw a clear line between token usage and visible improvements, there is a growing question about the real cost of AI and agents.

On this episode of the ITPro Podcast, Bobby Hellard and Ross Kelly are joined by the CEO of Mendix, Raymond Kok, to discuss the different scenarios facing businesses as the true cost of AI hits home.

“I think more and more the conversation is shifting in that direction. So, starting with what are the business-relevant use cases, and I'm saying business relevant on purpose, because there are plenty of interesting use cases around generative AI, but it's about the business-relevant use cases. Then it's about what is the job that needs to get done, and then to your question, how do you actually budget for agents like you budget for your human workforce in any company? And I think slowly but surely that narrative is changing, right, and I think what we're going to go see is that after the IPO of Ventropic and Open AI, the prices will further soar, and I think this conversation will become more and more important.”

“I'm glad that actually you're talking about it in your podcast, because I think it's now really becoming an issue, meaning that CEOs and CIOs were obviously promoting their employees to become AI literate and started to make AI tooling available to their workforce. 24 months ago, they were able to sign attractive deals with the big technology providers and get their people going, but now the bill is starting to show up. It used to be maybe 10, 20, maybe 50k a month for a larger company, but it's now moving into the hundreds of ks, and guess what, because this is also usage-based, it's very hard to control, right, so most of the monetization models, as you know, of these large language providers is based on usage.”

• 'One-size-fits-all' agent governance sets enterprises up to fail
• Uber caps usage of AI tools like Claude Code to manage costs (Bloomberg)
• Uber’s eye-watering AI bill shows enterprises are ‘still measuring AI success through consumption rather than outcomes’ – and it's warping our perception of ROI and productivity
• Could rising token costs boost interest in on-premises hardware?

When we talk about wireless connectivity, often what we’re thinking about is WiFi, however mobile connectivity such as 5G is still important for many sectors.

What happens to a business when mobile connectivity is inadequate or fails completely?

On this episode of the ITPro Podcast Jane and Bobby are joined by Paul McHugh, VP of EMEA sales at Ericsson, to discuss how wireless connectivity issues can affect businesses.

Sign up to the ITPro Newsletter for more content like this direct to your inbox every day.

• Three and Ericsson just launched a first-of-its-kind managed 5G service for businesses | IT Pro
• ePrivate 5G and partner ecosystems: The blueprint for intelligent infrastructure | ChannelPro

Many IT leaders are at a crossroads in their careers, with the clear potential of AI for cybersecurity matched with the huge threat of AI-powered attacks.

Recent releases such as Anthropic’s Claude Mythos have revealed the wave of AI-assisted vulnerability discovery, which will act as a powerful asset in the defender’s toolkit but could also become a potent weapon in the attacker’s arsenal.

Luckily, IT leaders don’t have to make all these decisions alone. With the right partner today, they can get in the right mindset for AI-speed attacks today, and make the most of automation in their cybersecurity.

In this episode, in association with Automox, the ITPro Podcast is joined by the company’s CTO Jason Kikta to discuss how to do more with less in endpoint management.

Highlights

“A core principle of cyber resilience is that every strategy fails at the inventory layer first, as you cannot defend, patch, or recover what you don't know you have.”

“Cyber resilience is framed as a business problem that requires the investment and attention of the CFO, not solely an IT or security team responsibility.”

“IT leaders are advised to benchmark their security response times against the fastest attackers, not the average, as attacker tooling is improving faster than defensive capabilities.”

“The speed at which attackers can exploit vulnerabilities has drastically decreased, moving from weeks to mere hours due to AI-assisted exploit development.”

Resources

Beyond visibility: endpoint management and mitigation at frontier pace

https://www.automox.com/

https://www.automox.com/resources/ebooks-and-guides/agile-ai

https://www.automox.com/resources/ebooks-and-guides/business-value-of-automox

https://go.automox.com/state-of-endpoint-management-2026/

The month of May is coming to a blistering hot end. Across Europe, new high temperature records are being set and unpredictability is very literally in the air as people wonder how they will adapt to these rapid meteorological changes long term.

In the world of IT, technology may be evolving equally rapidly but are the takes from the AI faithful still that hot or is the discourse increasingly predictable?

Plus, a dapper ransomware outfit is gaining infamy as one of the most active and successful cyber gangs in the world.

“It's a fairly tepid take. The idea that the professions that will survive the AI revolutions are the ones that need to physically be done – trades, as we say in British English. Also … things like hairdressers, carers, nurses, doctors, whatnot, they're all supposed to be kind of fairly safe professions as well.”

“You wouldn't take a section of your employees and give them access to everything, or leave them to run consistently and hope that everything works out, because it would just end up in failure with data privacy issues [and] all kinds of problems. What Gartner's report said was that if you fail to distinguish between an agent's ability to act and the scope of access it's granted, then it will come down to some kind of a failure, and these are often not noticed until the failure happens.”

“[The Gentlemen] feel kind of somewhat nomadic, somewhat just able to turn their attention to wherever is going to be the most lucrative spot for them … [and] they are now responsible for 10% of all cyber crime.”

Security operations center (SOC) analysts were already stretched to their limits, with teams often unable to investigate threats at the scale and speed needed to keep their organizations completely protected against modern threats.

The surprising emergence of the Claude Mythos Preview represents an inflection point when it comes to that issue. In pre-release testing, Anthropic found this frontier model so effective at discovering and independently exploiting vulnerabilities that the company decided not to release Mythos.

Whether Mythos ever gets a full release, it is a harbinger of a step function in capabilities with large language models that will likely push the limits of SOC analysts even further – with automated attacks coming at all hours, increased volumes, and potentially better-than-human sophistication.

One of the great promises of AI agents is that of the 24/7 worker, which could play a particularly powerful role in security. But what does this look like in practice, especially in an era of Mythos-type LLMs?

In this episode, in association with Dropzone AI, ITPro is joined by Edward Wu, founder and CEO at Dropzone AI, to unpack how agentic AI can automate alert triage

“End-to-end remediation in complex organizations requires human judgment, context, and accuracy, areas where AI agents are not yet close to automating.”

“AI agents can be thought of as 'foot soldiers' managed by human 'field generals' in the SOC, handling tasks like alert investigations while humans focus on complex issues.”

“The threat from LLMs is not overblown, but rather a culmination of a gradual increase in capabilities over the past few years, with Mythos being a significant threshold.”

“The future of the SOC will involve experienced people managing armies of AI agents, similar to software development teams where engineers manage multiple AI coding agents.”

“Models like Mythos fundamentally change the situation by enabling attackers to more economically find zero-day vulnerabilities and weaponize them into exploits, impacting vulnerability management teams first.”

Footnotes

https://www.dropzone.ai/

https://www.dropzone.ai/resources/customer-case-studies

https://www.dropzone.ai/resources/learning-guide

It’s been a busy week for the enterprise tech world in Las Vegas as Dell Technologies customers, partners, and channel partners poured into the Venetian Conference Center to hear about the company’s latest strategies, products, and predictions for the future of IT.

In this episode, Bobby speaks to Jane about what she’s learnt during her week at the conference, what some of the big announcements were, and whether her pre-conference predictions were correct.