Nerds On Site - Edmonton/Red Deer

09/07/2026

I've been talking to clients about this fragmentation problem all week. They're running cron jobs for scripts, CI/CD platforms for builds, specialized schedulers for data tasks. Three, four, sometimes five different tools doing automation work that should live in one place.

The kicker? That scattered approach creates operational silos, increases maintenance costs, and kills visibility. As businesses scale, the manual effort to connect these systems becomes a real bottleneck.

That's exactly why I'm seeing teams move toward unified orchestration layers in 2026. Tools like Jira (which now has Rovo AI built in), Zapier, and ServiceNow are getting smarter about becoming that central control plane instead of just another point solution.

Jira's new Rovo dev agents can even take an issue, plan the code changes, execute them in a sandbox, and open a pull request while your developer focuses on actual strategy. That's not just automation, that's your team multiplied.

The difference between a team that's running in circles with manual handoffs and one that scales smoothly? Almost always comes down to whether they solved the orchestration problem or just layered on more tools.

What's your current automation setup looking like? Still manually copying data between systems, or have you consolidated?

The 9 best workflow automation software options for 2026 include: 1. Jira 2. Zapier 3. Make 4. N8n 5. Monday 6. Asana 7. ClickUp 8. Hubspot 9. Smartsheet.

09/06/2026

Your customers aren't actually asking for AI. They're just expecting things to work faster and smarter than they did last year.

This is the real shift happening right now. 71% of consumers expect personalized interactions, and 76% get frustrated when they don't get them. That's not a tech preference, that's become the baseline expectation.

Here's what caught my attention from a recent breakdown on this topic: once people experience a smooth, customized interaction in one place, they expect it everywhere. A fast retail experience changes what they expect from healthcare. A relevant streaming recommendation sets the bar for financial services. One good experience rewires their expectations across the board.

The tricky part? Most organizations treat AI personalization like you just flip a switch and it works. That's underselling the actual work. Behind every seamless customer interaction is solid infrastructure, quality data, and someone making real decisions about what "better" actually means for your business.

It's not about the technology itself. It's about using technology plus human judgment to deliver something that's fast, relevant, and trustworthy. That's what actually keeps customers coming back.

What's your biggest challenge right now, delivering personalized experiences at scale? Is it the data, the tools, the team bandwidth, or something else entirely? Genuinely curious what's holding organizations back.

Discover how AI-powered personalization is changing customer expectations for speed, relevance and business success in the generative AI era.

09/05/2026

So I'm reading through infrastructure trends for 2026 and this stat jumps out: 89% of IT teams are now managing multiple automation platforms. Not multiple tools. Multiple platforms.

Think about that for a second. You've got your ITSM system, your cloud orchestration layer, your monitoring stack, maybe some custom scripts still running in the background. And nobody's talking to anybody.

The kicker? Only 49% of organizations have fully unified workflows. That means half of you are sitting in the same room with visibility gaps, recovery blind spots, and governance nightmares.

I see this constantly with clients. They've invested heavily in automation to reduce manual work, which is smart. But they built it piecemeal. The CI discovery tool doesn't sync with the CMDB. The cloud automation doesn't talk to on, prem orchestration. And now everyone's spending time manually porting data between systems instead of doing actual work.

The teams I work with who've solved this didn't rip everything out. They standardized on a single enterprise automation foundation first, then integrated everything else around it. Takes discipline, but it pays off fast.

How many separate automation platforms are you running right now? And more importantly, how much manual data movement is happening between them that you could eliminate tomorrow?

What are 402 IT pros doing in 2026? Get the Global State of IT Automation report for the latest IT automation trends: hybrid IT, AI workflows, and more.

09/04/2026

Most IT leaders I talk to are still operating like it's 2022. They're sitting on infrastructure decisions that made sense five years ago, and now they're scrambling because the landscape shifted underneath them.

Gartner just published that by 2028, over 40% of leading enterprises will have adopted hybrid computing paradigm architectures into critical business workflows. We're currently at 8%. Let that sink in. The organizations winning right now aren't the ones with the biggest budgets or the fanciest tech stacks. They're the ones who stopped trying to pick a lane between on, premises and cloud and just accepted that the future is both.

Here's what I'm seeing in the field: companies are building distributed architectures with unified governance. Translation: compute runs where it needs to run, but everything talks the same language. No more silos. No more legacy systems becoming albatrosses around your neck.

The teams that are ahead are also shifting from periodic cost optimization exercises to continuous operational discipline. They're not reviewing their cloud spend once a year. They're monitoring it like they monitor security.

If your infrastructure strategy still sounds like "we're moving everything to the cloud" or "we're keeping everything on, premises, " you're already behind. The real conversation in 2026 is about orchestrating workloads intelligently across multiple environments without creating a management nightmare.

What's your current infrastructure setup? Still anchored to one model or already splitting the difference?

Enterprise I&O in 2026: Seven trends reshaping hybrid strategy, AI costs, observability, resilience, and zero-trust security.

09/03/2026

79% of organizations haven't hit enterprise, scale AI workflow deployment yet. Let that number sit for a second.

Not because they don't have the tools. They do. It's not even because the technology is hard to understand anymore. The actual blockers are operational.

I've been talking to teams running disconnected systems across cloud platforms and hybrid environments, and the pattern is always the same: they've got pieces of automation everywhere, but nothing talks to anything else. One tool handles approvals. Another handles data flows. A third handles cloud orchestration. Manual handoffs between all three.

Then they try to scale it and hit a wall.

The shift from 2022 to 2026 is real though. It went from "we have a workflow automation tool" to "we need to orchestrate end, to, end workflows across every system we use." That's different. That's not adding another tool. That's rethinking how your whole operation connects.

The teams actually shipping at scale right now? They stopped treating automation as something IT bolts on. They rebuilt their approval chains, their data flows, their exception handling around orchestration from the ground up.

Is your automation still living in silos, or have you started connecting the dots across your actual workflow?

https://www.stonebranch.com/resources/analyst, reports/global, state, of, it, automation

What are 402 IT pros doing in 2026? Get the Global State of IT Automation report for the latest IT automation trends: hybrid IT, AI workflows, and more.

09/02/2026

I keep watching companies throw millions at AI pilots that never make it to production. The pilots work great. The demos are polished. Then reality hits.

They realize their data is scattered across 12 different systems. Nobody really knows what's actually in there. The quality is inconsistent. And suddenly that AI project that looked brilliant in the boardroom becomes a nightmare to actually deploy.

Here's what's actually happening in 2026: AI capability is advancing way faster than organizational capability. The technology isn't the bottleneck anymore. Your data architecture is. Your governance is. Your ability to actually integrate AI into how you work every day is.

Gartner says 45% of business leaders cite data accuracy and governance as their top concern when deploying AI. Not the AI itself. The foundation underneath it.

I've seen this flip when organizations treated data as a prerequisite instead of a cleanup task they'd do later. Suddenly integration moves from months to weeks. Scaling stops being a nightmare.

Where's your AI project actually stuck right now? Is it the tool, or is it the infrastructure underneath?

09/01/2026

Your brand might be completely invisible to ChatGPT while showing up fine on Google. And that's a problem most people don't even know they have yet.

Here's the uncomfortable truth: only about 11% of domains that get cited by ChatGPT also show up in Perplexity. These AI engines are basically seeing different internets. ChatGPT runs on Bing's index, Perplexity pulls from community sources and Reddit, Gemini uses Google's data. You could dominate one and be a ghost in the others.

The kicker? Most SEO teams have never even opened Bing Webmaster Tools. They're laser focused on Google and have no idea they're missing half the battle.

There's a simple audit you can run yourself in about 30 minutes. Write down 10 to 15 questions your actual customers ask (not your brand name, but real problems they're trying to solve). Then search those same questions in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini. Write down where you appear, where competitors show up instead, and how you're described.

That one exercise usually surfaces at least one uncomfortable gap. And gaps mean visibility you're leaving on the table while your competition figures this out.

If you're managing your online presence, this is worth doing this week. Have you run this audit yet? What did you find when you checked?

A step by step audit you can run yourself. Put your top queries through ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini, see where you appear versus competitors, and find the technical gaps most SEO teams have never checked. No tools required.

08/31/2026

Just read the 2026 Global State of IT Automation Report and something jumped out at me that I'm seeing with clients constantly. 50% of enterprises are planning to invest in workflow automation next year, but here's what's actually happening on the ground: most teams are still treating automation like it's just about efficiency gains and job scheduling.

That's backwards.

The report makes it clear that automation has basically become the operational layer that coordinates everything. Infrastructure, applications, data pipelines, AI workflows. It's not a back, office efficiency tool anymore. It's the nervous system of the entire operation.

The disconnect I'm noticing? Organizations that are winning aren't necessarily spending more money. They're orchestrating better. They're building platforms where teams can self, service instead of creating bottlenecks. They're thinking about hybrid environments and multiple cloud platforms as one system, not separate silos.

If you're still thinking of automation as a way to cut down on manual tasks, you're missing the bigger picture. Your infrastructure isn't static anymore. Your workflows aren't linear. Automation needs to reflect that complexity.

How is your team approaching automation right now? Are you still in the efficiency phase or have you shifted to thinking about it as operational infrastructure?

What are 402 IT pros doing in 2026? Get the Global State of IT Automation report for the latest IT automation trends: hybrid IT, AI workflows, and more.

08/30/2026

I was looking at the 2026 Global State of IT Automation Report this morning and something jumped out at me. 69% of organizations are saying they need more functionality from their automation platforms, but specifically: self service portals, modern interfaces, and AI workflow creation.

That's the real gap right now. Most teams have automation tools. They just can't actually use them without going through IT gatekeeping or wrestling with outdated interfaces.

Think about what that means. Your team could be spinning up workflows, fixing issues, and deploying changes without waiting for your ops person to get to it. Instead they're stuck clicking through 2015 era interfaces or asking for tickets.

The companies moving fastest aren't necessarily buying fancier tools. They're giving their people better access to the ones they already have. Self service changes everything. When a developer can provision their own infrastructure or a sys admin can spin up an automation routine without filing a request? That's when you actually unlock productivity.

Are you stuck in the gatekeeping model, or have you pushed self service automation out to your teams already? What's the actual blocker?

What are 402 IT pros doing in 2026? Get the Global State of IT Automation report for the latest IT automation trends: hybrid IT, AI workflows, and more.

08/29/2026

I keep running into the same problem with clients: they're spending their whole week compiling status reports instead of actually managing anything.

Look at the numbers. Project managers using legacy systems are burning over 20% of their week just on manual reporting. That's one full day gone. One day. Every week. Just writing updates about work instead of doing the work.

And then everyone acts surprised when projects slip. When visibility goes to zero. When different teams are working off different versions of the same project because nobody has a real, time view of what's actually done.

The thing is, this isn't a tooling problem anymore. It's a workflow problem. You can throw the fanciest project management software at a team, but if your culture is still built around status meetings and email chains, you're just adding another layer of noise.

I've seen it flip. Teams that moved from fragmented spreadsheets to a centralized dashboard didn't just save time on reporting. They caught scope creep early. They saw bottlenecks before they became disasters. They actually had time to think strategically instead of firefighting.

Where's your team bleeding time? Is it in the tools, or in how you're using them?