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Volume 342, Issue 3 · 2026-09-14 – 2026-09-20 · Popular →

Monday’s Briefing · September 21

Upcoming Event · Wed, Sep 30 · 11:00am

AI Is Ready. Is Your Data?

Justin Yan will bring a customer-inspired scenario to life through a demonstration - covering ETL pipeline construction, large-scale pipeline operations, and automated governance enforcement using AI agents. Participants are encouraged to question the approach and compare it against their own data challenges. This is not a conversation about doing the same work a little faster. It is a conversation about how the way enterprises deliver data is about to fundamentally change. more →

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AI Is Ready. Is Your Data? (Sept. 30th)

12touches.com, Friday, September 18th, 2026

Your Customer Today Is Your Colleague Tomorrow

In most enterprise deals the most trusted person isn't the account executive but the sales engineer, precisely because they'll say what won't work — yet that credibility is invisible outside the few accounts they're staffed on, living in the memories of a few dozen people and a CRM someone else owns. more →

Your Customer Today Is Your Colleague Tomorrow

12touches.com, Friday, September 18th, 2026

Your Best Distribution Channel Is Already on Your Payroll

Alan Shimel's argument that Google's AI Overviews are engineered to make the click unnecessary - his "Google Zero" - lands as hard on technology vendors as on publishers, because organic search was always rented distribution that merely felt owned. more →

Your Best Distribution Channel Is Already on Your Payroll

12touches.com, Friday, September 18th, 2026

Your Top Performers Don't Want Another Plaque

Top sellers are the hardest people in the company to reward - cash is already maxed, the incentive trip ends, and promotion into management is often unwanted - while the independent streak that makes them outperform is exactly what makes corporate advocacy mandates slide off them. more →

Your Top Performers Don't Want Another Plaque

12touches.com, Friday, September 18th, 2026

You're Not in Sales. You Still Need to Be Known

Enterprise IT is a few thousand people per specialty, and a dozen professions orbit them with the same dependency and the same structural problem: the only contact their job naturally supplies is the contact that asks for something. more →

You're Not in Sales. You Still Need to Be Known

12touches.com, Friday, September 18th, 2026

Being Interesting Is Not the Same as Being Present

Advisors, speakers and fractional CIOs don't have a lead generation problem, they have a recall problem - and their visibility is event-shaped, producing four tall spikes and forty-eight flat weeks, with the moment that mattered almost certainly landing in the flat part. more →

Being Interesting Is Not the Same as Being Present

12touches.com, Friday, September 18th, 2026

To Ask Permission Is to Seek Denial

Sellers at large firms routinely stall on a personal newsletter because they haven't been approved to run one - and Scott McNealy's Sun-era mantra explains why asking is the wrong move: the person receiving an unprecedented request has no upside for yes and all the downside, so the safe answer is defer or decline, and a "no" on the record is far harder to reverse than a question nobody formally raised. more →

To Ask Permission Is to Seek Denial

Databricks, Thursday, September 17th, 2026

What Is AIOps?

Databricks provides a primer on AIOps and how AI and ML apply to IT operations. more →

What Is AIOps?

Upcoming Event · Wed, Sep 30 · 11:00am

The Gartner 2026 CEO Technology Agenda: How AI Drives Growth, Leadership Moves Beyond the CIO

This webinar explores what CEOs expect AI to deliver across technology, finance, HR, operations, and other functions, where confidence gaps remain, and how success is being measured. Attendees will gain practical insights into how CxOs can translate AI investments into business outcomes, operate in a distributed leadership model, and meet rising CEO expectations. more →

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The Gartner 2026 CEO Technology Agenda: How AI Drives Growth, Leadership Moves Beyond the CIO (Sept. 30th)

Upcoming Event · Tue, Sep 22 · 1:00pm

Trustworthy AI in the Cloud: Observability as a Control System

This session explores why observability is emerging as a foundational capability for trustworthy AI. Rather than focusing solely on infrastructure health, modern observability provides the transparency and context needed to understand how AI systems behave, why they produce specific outcomes, and whether they continue to perform as intended over time. more →

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Trustworthy AI in the Cloud: Observability as a Control System (Sept. 22nd)

Schneier on Security, Monday, September 14th, 2026

Microsoft's Patching

September's Patch Tuesday fixed a record ~972 vulnerabilities, evidence that AI vulnerability finding favors defenders for now. more →

Microsoft's Patching