Archive for May 6, 2026

ServiceNow hits $1 billion in AWS Marketplace transactions as enterprises rapidly adopt AI at scale

Posted in Commentary with tags on May 6, 2026 by itnerd

ServiceNow and Amazon Web Services (AWS) today announced a platform expansion as companies rapidly deploy and scale agentic AI across the enterprise, which follows a significant milestone of ServiceNow’s AWS Marketplace transactions surpassing $1 billion. The expansion introduces a governance architecture for mutual customers built on ServiceNow AI Control Tower and Amazon Bedrock AgentCore; new AI agent integrations for enterprise security, IT operations, and telecommunications that detect, act, and resolve issues; and a native developer integration that lets teams build and deploy ServiceNow applications directly from Kiro, the AWS agentic integrated development environment (IDE), so that developers can move from idea to impact faster.

ServiceNow’s $1 billion milestone reflects something larger than a commercial threshold. Enterprises are consolidating their AI infrastructure around platforms they trust, and increasingly, that means combining cloud and foundation model services with orchestration, governance, and workflow execution. ServiceNow’s platform expansion with AWS is a direct response to that demand: customers who have already committed to both platforms now have a single, connected architecture to deploy and scale AI. The AI workloads they’ve already built and deployed on AWS can now be governed, audited, and wired into the ServiceNow workflows that run their business, without rebuilding anything from scratch.

AI Control Tower and Amazon Bedrock AgentCore: where enterprise AI gets built and governed

Enterprises scaling agentic AI face a common problem: agents built on different models, governed by different teams, with no unified view of what they are doing or whether they are working. ServiceNow AI Control Tower and Amazon Bedrock AgentCore address this together. Amazon Bedrock AgentCore provides the flexible foundation to build agents on the models and infrastructure customers trust, while ServiceNow AI Control Tower delivers the unified control plane to help govern how those agents operate across the business. Leading enterprises are building toward this architecture now.

ServiceNow AI specialists and AWS AI agents tackle critical enterprise workflows

Across security, IT operations, and telecommunications, manual triage and system handoffs compound risk and delay outcomes. ServiceNow AI specialists working alongside AWS AI agents handle these workflows end-to-end, with humans in the loop to guide important decisions.

  • Security use case: The moment a configuration change is detected in the Configuration Management Database (CMDB), ServiceNow’s Vulnerability Resolution AI Specialist calls the AWS Security Agent via the Model Context Protocol (MCP) to run an on-demand penetration test against the affected application. ServiceNow then layers on identity blast radius from Veza and device exposure from Armis, producing a complete risk picture. It then determines the fix and presents it for a single human approval. Remediation executes on two parallel tracks: patch deployed, privileges reduced. A final call to the AWS Security Agent will confirm that the fix is clean.
  • IT operations use case: An anomaly detected by Amazon CloudWatch is routed to ServiceNow, where ServiceNow’s AIOps AI Specialist and SRE AI Specialist collaborate with the AWS DevOps Agent to correlate events, enrich signals with business context, and validate and execute remediation with human approval. Post-remediation, alerts are confirmed cleared, often proactively without a formal incident ever being raised.
  • Telecommunications use case: A ServiceNow and AWS AI-orchestrated telecommunications customer care solution leverages the combined strengths of Amazon Connect for interactions, AWS for infrastructure intelligence, and ServiceNow Telecommunications Service Management for orchestration. When a customer contacts support, a transcript streams into the ServiceNow Telco Customer 360-powered agent workspace in real time via Amazon Connect. ServiceNow’s AI specialist queries RADCOM, a cloud-native network intelligence provider running on AWS, for a scored assessment of voice, video, and streaming quality via Agent-to-Agent (A2A), and simultaneously queries ARIA for billing history and lifetime value. Based on findings and knowledge base rules, the AI specialist recommends a resolution, routes important decisions for human approval, triggers field dispatch if required, and closes the case with a full audit trail.

Build and deploy ServiceNow AI Agents directly from Kiro

ServiceNow is bringing the ServiceNow SDK with Build Agent skills natively into Kiro, giving developers the ability to build and deploy ServiceNow applications, including AI agents, directly from the AWS IDE. With a single-click install from the Kiro Power Marketplace, developers can scaffold applications, configure workflows, and create AI agents through prompt engineering without ever leaving their IDE. Because everything runs natively on the ServiceNow AI Platform, developers get enterprise governance and security without any additional configuration.

Availability

  • ServiceNow AI Control Tower with Amazon Bedrock AgentCore is available now in AWS Marketplace.
  • The ServiceNow Vulnerability Resolution AI Specialist, AIOps AI Specialist, and SRE AI Specialist integrations with AWS AI agents is expected to be available later this year, with launch details to follow.
  • The AI specialist workflow for telecommunications is available now. ServiceNow Telecommunications Service Management is a generally available product and now includes ServiceNow Telco Customer 360 as part of the Australia Platform release.
  • The ServiceNow SDK for Kiro is available now through the Kiro Power Marketplace.
  • Learn more about how ServiceNow is expanding its Autonomous Workforce of AI Specialists to major business functions at Knowledge 2026 here, and how it’s introducing new AI Control Tower capabilities to further discover, observe, govern, secure, and measure AI deployed across the enterprise here.

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TELUS Is Using AI To Alter The Accents Of Their Customer Service Agents…. WTF?

Posted in Commentary with tags on May 6, 2026 by itnerd

This is really bonkers.

A Globe and Mail (Paywalled) story popped up in my news feed with this:

The voice you hear on the other side of a call-centre interaction might soon sound a little more familiar, thanks to an AI tool that adjusts speech in real time – but not everyone thinks it’s a good idea.

Telus Digital, the wholly owned division of Telus Corp. responsible for customer experience and call centres, has deployed artificial-intelligence technology that alters the accent of customer service agents.

In a post on the company’s website explaining the benefits of speech enhancement, Telus Digital says the technology, provided by a third-party company called Tomato.ai, uses speech-to-speech models to transform live audio.

It works by encoding the speaker’s voice, modifying pronunciation-related features, then decoding the speech back into audio, the company said.

“These models directly modify the acoustic features of speech, preserving the speaker’s voice while improving clarity and reducing accent-related friction,” the company wrote in its post. “This approach allows the solution to address mispronunciations without altering the speaker’s identity or emotional tone.”

Other companies that provide a similar feature say it helps speed up calls and help customers find solutions, while protecting service agents from harassment or discrimination.

Telus Digital provides the call-centre support for the company’s Canadian telecom subscribers, as well as other clients globally.

Where do I begin with this one?

So on one hand, I can see what TELUS is up to here. They know that certain accents from certain ethnic groups rub some people the wrong way. Which in my opinion says more about those people than TELUS or those who are contracted to work for TELUS. So using AI to fix that could be considered a viable path to make customer interactions easier for those people. But here’s the flip side in my opinion. This can easily be perceived as being inherently racist with TELUS being perceived as being the bad guy here as they are covering up the fact that they outsource their customer service. Related to that, a really cynical person could easily say that rather than use AI to do this, TELUS should hire “Canadians” instead. Which opens up a whole can of worms in terms of what defines a “Canadian” because a “Canadian” can have a non

Honestly, TELUS in my opinion created a PR problem that it didn’t need to create. They may want to rethink their life choices as this really doesn’t look good for them. And they need to do something quickly before this blows up more than it already has.

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Herd Security Raises $3M to Tackle the Rise of AI Threats with AI-Powered Training Programs

Posted in Commentary with tags on May 6, 2026 by itnerd

Herd Security, an agentic AI creative platform built for continuous security training and simulation, today announced a $3M funding round with strategic investment from Aspiron Ventures alongside participation from Team Ignite, ForwardSlash VC, Forum Ventures, Rightside Capital, and YPO. Designed for security and GRC teams, the platform enables practitioners to leverage AI as a creative partner, replacing static training programs that fail to engage employees with dynamic curricula built for the rise of AI-driven and increasingly advanced threats. The capital will expand product development across new training categories in HR and AI, optimize AI-powered video generation capabilities, and grow the company’s partnership ecosystem.

As AI-driven social engineering attacks accelerate, annual compliance programs struggle to keep pace with modern threats. Gartner predicts that by 2028, 40% of social engineering attacks will target executives and the broader workforce, expanding the scope of human risk and putting pressure on enterprises to rethink security awareness. Yet according to the SANS Institute, it can take 3-5 years for organizations to influence employee behavior and up to a decade to shape security culture. This highlights a gap between the speed of evolving threats and time required to foster lasting security habits, underscoring the need for ongoing training.

into relevant programs that engage employees when it matters most. Herd removes this barrier so teams can continuously put their knowledge into action without added resources, creating everyday awareness that strengthens human defense to match the speed and scale of emerging risks.”

Unlike traditional security awareness training solutions that rely on a periodic, one-size-fits-all approach for reducing human risk in the enterprise, Herd gives practitioners the ability to create training content, scenarios, and assessments that bring in organizational context and active-threat scenarios. Customers using the platform can:

  • Import policies, compliance frameworks, and security data, which Herd automatically parses, understands, and updates when changes are made
  • Generate tailored micro-training in seconds using prompts aligned with organizational needs
  • Deliver training anywhere across existing tools employees already use, in formats like text, video, image, and conversational AI

For more information, visit: https://www.herdsecurity.io/

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The L Suite Introduces New Community-Powered AI Tool for In-House Legal Teams

Posted in Commentary with tags on May 6, 2026 by itnerd

The L Suite today announced the launch of Lloyd, a community-powered AI tool built on the collective intelligence of its highly-experienced network. Lloyd is purpose-built for General Counsels and their legal teams and is available exclusively to members of The L Suite.

The announcement coincides with TechGC Nexus, the L Suite’s marquee annual gathering of General Counsels in the tech ecosystem. 

Lloyd combines foundational AI capabilities with the trusted judgment of thousands of accomplished in-house legal executives, delivering contextually aware, highly-calibrated guidance grounded in more than a decade of peer discussions, benchmarking data, shared resources, outside counsel insights, and community knowledge.

The legal profession has gained tremendous value from AI tools that automate drafting, research, and document review. Lloyd complements these tools by providing something data alone cannot: the hard-won experience and judgment of trusted peers. In-house legal teams can better understand how their most trusted peers approach critical decisions such as advising on a sensitive acquisition, evaluating outside counsel, prioritizing contract clauses in negotiations, structuring their legal departments, or pressure-testing policy positions. These decisions require more than an understanding of statutes and case law. They are best answered by asking someone who has already been there before and learned what works and what doesn’t.

Lloyd makes that possible at scale. It draws on The L Suite’s private member platform— the Braintrust—used by 2,500+ General Counsels and their legal teams. Built over eleven years, the Braintrust comprises 3,000+ templates, playbooks, checklists, and artifacts, 1,200+ hours of event video content, 2,000+ annual discussion threads, 10,000+ instances of outside counsel and vendor feedback, and much more—to surface how experienced legal leaders actually handle similar situations. Every response is cited and traceable to the specific peer discussion, document, or video it draws from, a feature that matters considerably to legal professionals who need accurate information from reputable sources.

Lloyd also draws on the internal knowledge set of the leading LLMs and trusted external sources on the web, as well as curated expertise from Am Law 100 and other leading law firms, professional service providers, and legal tech vendors that have partnered with The L Suite across 550+ annual events. Lloyd makes all this knowledge available, along with the practical insights of thousands of in-house legal leaders, in a single query.   

Lloyd is available to members of The L Suite immediately. Click here for more details.

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Guest Post: VMware Migration. The Claims Came First. The Results Lagged. Not Anymore.

Posted in Commentary with tags on May 6, 2026 by itnerd

By Don Boxley, CEO and Co-Founder, DH2i (www.dh2i.com) 

VMware has earned its place in the data center. For years, it’s helped organizations bring structure, reliability, and scale to environments that needed it. That foundation matters.

But the world around it has changed.

Infrastructure today isn’t one place, one platform, or one decision made every five years. It’s hybrid. It’s multi-cloud. It’s evolving constantly. And because of that, more organizations are starting to look at their options a little differently. Not because VMware stopped working, but because the business needs more flexibility than it used to.

The real question isn’t “what replaces VMware?” It’s “how do we move forward without disrupting everything we’ve already built?”

Why Organizations Are Taking a Fresh Look

IT environments today don’t sit still. They stretch across clouds, data centers, and edge locations, and that shift is starting to expose some pressure points. Costs that are harder to predict. Less flexibility in where and how workloads run. A growing expectation to modernize faster than ever. And a need for more control, not less.

VMware still plays a role. It will for a long time, in many environments. But it’s no longer the only path forward. And in some cases, it’s not the most flexible one.

The Real Challenge Isn’t the Destination. It’s the Journey

Choosing an alternative platform is actually the easy part. There are plenty of solid options out there, whether it’s Hyper-V, KVM, or public cloud. Where things get complicated is in the move itself. 

Migration has traditionally meant rebuilding virtual machines, reconfiguring applications, planning downtime, and managing risk at every step. That’s a heavy lift… And for a lot of organizations, that’s where progress slows down or stops altogether.

A More Practical Way to Think About Migration

What’s starting to change is where the focus sits. More organizations are stepping back and asking a simpler question, instead of anchoring everything to infrastructure: what actually needs to move? Things start to open up, when you center on the application, not the platform.

Workloads can move between environments without forcing major changes, by decoupling applications from the underlying OS and infrastructure. That means running across different hypervisors. Moving into the cloud more easily. And adapting as needs evolve without starting from scratch each time. It’s a quieter shift, but it changes a lot.

What Modern Migration Should Feel Like

If you’re doing this right, migration shouldn’t feel like a disruption event. And let’s face it, in the past there were (and still are) vendors that claimed they could do it – but couldn’t really pull it off… Today, it can feel like a controlled transition. Workloads stay online. Applications move as they are. Windows and Linux operate side by side without friction. Infrastructure becomes simpler, not more complex.

And you’re not locked into a one-time move. You have the flexibility to adjust over time. That’s the bar organizations are starting to expect.

Once you remove the friction from moving workloads, your options expand quickly. Cloud becomes easier to leverage when it actually makes sense. Alternative hypervisors become viable for cost optimization. Bare metal becomes an option for performance-sensitive workloads. Hybrid stops being a compromise and starts being a strategy.

At that point, it’s not about replacing VMware. It’s about giving yourself room to operate.

What This Looks Like in Practice

Organizations that take this approach are seeing some very real, very practical outcomes. They’re moving critical workloads without downtime. They’re reducing costs without sacrificing performance. They’re shifting workloads based on business needs, not technical constraints. And they’re simplifying disaster recovery in the process. It’s not theoretical. It shows up in day-to-day operations.

This shift isn’t about reacting to a single change in the market. It’s about recognizing where infrastructure is heading. Flexibility isn’t optional anymore. Mobility isn’t a nice-to-have. And the ability to move applications without disruption is becoming a core capability. Organizations that lean into that are putting themselves in a much stronger position for whatever comes next.

VMware helped define an era of enterprise IT. That is not going away. 

But the next phase is about removing constraints versus committing to a single platform. The entire conversation changes, when you can move workloads freely, without tearing things apart to do it. And when that happens, migration stops being a challenge… and starts becoming an advantage.

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Cayosoft Launches Microsoft Migration Services

Posted in Commentary with tags on May 6, 2026 by itnerd

Cayosoft today announced the launch of Cayosoft Microsoft Migration Services, a new offering designed to help organizations modernize Active Directory, Entra ID, and Microsoft 365 with greater control, lower risk, and stronger long-term outcomes. Delivered in partnership with XMS Solutions, a long-time provider of migration and cybersecurity services, the offering pairs expert migration delivery with Cayosoft’s platform for management, monitoring, and recovery to enable full-lifecycle identity modernization.

Cayosoft’s proven track record of helping customers—including the Department of War, the IRS, and AAA—modernize identity administration and recovery across hybrid Microsoft environments repositions migration and consolidation–-often driven by mergers and acquisitions (M&As)—as a structured modernization milestone, helping organizations move beyond one-time project thinking toward a continuous, resilient operating model. The Microsoft Migration Service offering provides end-to-end migration services for Active Directory, Microsoft 365, Exchange, SharePoint, Teams, and related identity infrastructure, combining proven execution with pre- and post-migration capabilities.

Cayosoft Launches Microsoft Migration Services to Redefine Identity Modernization

Specifically, Cayosoft Microsoft Migration Services include:

  • Pre-migration assessments that identify risks, dependencies, and readiness gaps across identity, collaboration, and infrastructure environment.
  • Structured, phased migration execution designed to reduce disruption, shorten coexistence, and ensure predictable outcomes.
  • Validation of data integrity, permissions, metadata, and version history across Microsoft 365 workloads.
  • Post-migration monitoring, governance, and recovery capabilities to support long-term operational resilience. By integrating these capabilities into a single approach, organizations can modernize identity and collaboration platforms while reducing migration risk, simplifying hybrid environments, and strengthening security and compliance outcomes.

Cayosoft Microsoft Migration Services is available starting May 2026. For more information, please visit: https://www.cayosoft.com/support/active-directory-migration-microsoft-365-consolidation/

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Strike Graph Launches Trust Chai

Posted in Commentary with tags on May 6, 2026 by itnerd

Strike Graph today launched Trust Chain, a Third-Party Risk Management solution that moves vendor risk assessments from self-reported questionnaires to AI-validated compliance evidence. Most TPRM solutions on the market today operate on the same underlying assumption: that the vendor’s responses are accurate and reflect their real-world security posture. Trust Chain is built on the recognition that this assumption leads to increased risk, and that those consequences compound at enterprise scale.

While general-purpose AI reads vendor documents and summarizes what they say, Trust Chain’s validation engine does something different: Trust Chain requires vendors to submit actual compliance documentation—security audits, penetration tests, breach response procedures—and uses Strike Graph’s patent-pending Verify AI to automatically test and determine whether the evidence provided satisfies and mitigates the potential risk as intended. Trust Chain is built directly into the Strike Graph platform, meaning vendor risk data lives alongside a customer’s compliance programs, framework controls, and audit evidence without requiring a separate tool or a separate workflow. 

The platform is built around three core capabilities:

  • Evidence Request Libraries: Define exactly what evidence each vendor must submit—from Trust Chain’s standard set or converted from existing security questionnaires—and assign requests universally or per vendor relationship.
  • AI Evidence Validation: As vendors submit documentation, Trust Chain uses Verify AI to test each submission against the specific requirements it is meant to satisfy—assessing whether evidence actually demonstrates compliance. Gaps surface automatically, without manual review.
  • Automated Supply Chain Monitoring: Risk visibility persists beyond the point-in-time assessment. Trust Chain enables custom evidence expiration schedules to automate evidence refresh requests so teams can act on emerging risks rather than discovering them at the next annual review.

Trust Chain is designed for enterprise organizations managing compliance across multiple subsidiaries and vendor ecosystems. Its flexible architecture enables compliance teams to not only publish and synchronize controls across subsidiary workspaces, but also define unique vendor requirements per the specific needs of each subsidiary. This gives enterprise compliance teams governance at scale without the operational overhead of managing separate tools per entity. Vendors submit existing compliance documentation once; Trust Chain’s AI handles validation, reducing the friction that historically causes assessment backlogs and vendor non-responsiveness.

Results from Trust Chain’s pilot program show vendor assessment completion rates more than double those of traditional questionnaire-based tools and a reduction of customer time spent on TPRM by 92%.

Availability 

Trust Chain is available today for current Strike Graph customers. Full pricing begins at $7,500 for 25 vendors, with unlimited vendor access available at $30,000—a fraction of the cost of standalone TPRM tools, without the implementation complexity of enterprise GRC suites.

For more information visit: www.strikegraph.com/trust-chain

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