The ITPro Podcast

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370

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Jun 2026

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About the show

The ITPro Podcast is a weekly show for technology professionals and business leaders. Each week hosts Rory Bathgate and Jane McCallion are joined by an expert guest to take a deep dive into the most important issues for the IT community. New episodes premiere every Friday. Visit itpro.com/uk/the-it-pro-podcast for more information, or follow ITPro on LinkedIn for regular updates.

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June 11, 202624 min

The AI pricing time bomb

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 failUber 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 productivityCould rising token costs boost interest in on-premises hardware?

June 5, 202621 min

Why mobile connectivity still matters for business

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 ProePrivate 5G and partner ecosystems: The blueprint for intelligent infrastructure | ChannelPro

June 3, 202621 min

SPECIAL EDITION: Security at the speed of AI

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.”ResourcesBeyond visibility: endpoint management and mitigation at frontier pacehttps://www.automox.com/https://www.automox.com/resources/ebooks-and-guides/agile-aihttps://www.automox.com/resources/ebooks-and-guides/business-value-of-automoxhttps://go.automox.com/state-of-endpoint-management-2026/

May 29, 202629 min

The future of employment and gentlemanly hackers

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.”

May 28, 202628 min

SPECIAL EDITION: What Would a Mythos-Resilient SOC Look Like?

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 triageHighlights“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.”Footnoteshttps://www.dropzone.ai/https://www.dropzone.ai/resources/customer-case-studieshttps://www.dropzone.ai/resources/learning-guide

May 22, 202626 min

Dell Technologies World 2026: agents, hardware, and tokenomics

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.

May 15, 202633 min

How AI code is changing software development

IT leaders are carefully assessing the extent to which AI-generated code can make a difference in their business.On the one hand, AI developers promise their tools can enable faster code deployment and free up time for developers. On the other, it can be difficult to know where to start with AI tools – particularly if you want total reliability in your code.How can enterprises make best use of AI code? And what do these tools mean for the developer teams of the future?In this episode, Jane and Rory are joined by Colin Jarvis, head of forward deployed engineering at OpenAI, to discuss internal code generation.

May 13, 202645 min

SPECIAL EDITION: Why cyber resilience is business critical

In 2026, cyber attacks are far from the sole provision of cybersecurity professionals. These incidents pose real, hugely destructive impacts for businesses and can seriously impact employee and customer experience in the short and long term.It’s not a matter of if, but when your business is targeted by threat actors. But in the gap between realizing this and implementing the right cyber resilience strategy, there’s potential for enormous financial losses.How can businesses prepare for the worst? And what role can a trusted partner play in reaching true cyber resilience?In this special edition of the ITPro Podcast, in association with 11:11 Systems, Rory is joined by Sean Tilley, senior director of sales EMEA at 11:11 Systems, and Sam Woodcock, senior director of solutions architecture EMEA at 11:11 Systems.

May 8, 202627 min

Managing tech costs in a volatile market

IT spend can be incredibly hard to accurately calculate. If you’re reliant on public cloud providers for your AI and software needs, you’re open to price rises, license changes, and other baked in costs.The past few years have seen some firms choose to repatriate workloads to offset cloud costs – but this comes with its own risks. Surging international oil and gas prices, driven by conflict, are driving up bills for enterprises and consumers alike – bad news for those running AI workloads on premise.How can leaders begin to get a grip on these costs? And what are some of the major challenges down the road?In this episode Rory is joined by Greg Holmes, EMEA Field CTO at Apptio (an IBM Company), to discuss managing technology spend in the face of rising global instability.

May 1, 202620 min

April rundown: OpenAI hesitations and Apple's new CEO

April has come to an end and what a busy month it’s been, with major announcements, updates, and cancellations across all corners of the tech sector.Earlier this month, OpenAI made headlines throughout the UK with the news that it was cancelling its landmark Stargate UK project citing region-specific difficulties. But how do these claims stack up, given signs OpenAI is pulling back from other key compute projects?Also this month, John Ternus was announced as the incoming CEO at Apple. What does the Apple’s hardware king mean for the tech giant going forward? And DeepSeek released its much-awaited v4 Pro frontier model.In this episode, Rory is once again joined by Ross Kelly, ITPro’s news and analysis editor, to discuss some of April's biggest news.Read more: