The ITPro Podcast

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.
Highlights
“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.
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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.
Highlights
“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
Highlights
“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