EP011 | Pulling the Plug: AI Dependencies You Didn't Know You Had

EP011 | Pulling the Plug: AI Dependencies You Didn't Know You Had

What happens to your business if an AI tool you depend on disappears tomorrow? On June 12, two Anthropic models, Mythos and Fable, went dark under an export control directive. By some reporting, the warning window was about ninety minutes. Tad Doyle and Nabil Gharbieh use the moment to surface the AI dependencies most mid-market companies have not mapped, and what to do about them. This episode opens with a clip from Fareed Zakaria's GPS, then unpacks the fallout. When access to a tool can be cut overnight, trust in any single provider takes a hit, and people route around the gap. That is shadow AI, and it is a governance problem, not a personality flaw. Cut people off and they bring their own tools, which may include a model run by a company you would never have chosen. The dependency problem runs at every scale. Allied governments and companies are already favoring EU-based infrastructure over US cloud, because they cannot plan around arbitrary cutoffs. Operational systems that ran for years can stop with little notice. That is real risk for any organization that depends on a single provider, whether you are a national government or a fifty-person company. Then the hype-versus-real check. The headline that an AI penetrated nearly all classified government systems in hours is real, but the context got buried. It happened inside a controlled red team. Finding flaws is the point of red teaming. A kid at home on a chatbot is not breaching the NSA. Separating the scare from the signal is the whole job. So what should a small or mid-sized company actually do? Nabil keeps it to three moves. One approved tool to start, often Copilot if you live in Microsoft 365. A no-copy-paste rule that spells out what can and cannot go into AI, including which files are off limits. And one human owner, because most AI policies fail on ownership, not on wording. Push the policy out, train on it, and evolve from there. To plan for the uncertainty, answer three questions. What stops working tomorrow if the plug gets pulled today? Is there a second tool that can hot swap, or get you eighty percent of the way back? Can you run a week without it? Register the answers, and you are in a far safer place than most. Chapters 0:00  The story that got buried 0:41  The clip: ninety minutes to comply 1:28  What happened: the Mythos and Fable shutdown 3:20  Fareed's fix: a Federal Reserve for AI 4:00  Pull the plug, get shadow AI 5:35  Why some governments are moving off US cloud 6:53  Hype versus real: it was red teaming 7:45  Three steps to govern AI at a small company 9:15  The no-copy-paste rule, explained 10:38  Three questions to plan for the future 11:36  Closing thoughts Hosts: Tad Doyle and Nabil Gharbieh, Strategic Advisors with 25-plus years in IT strategy, infrastructure, and advisory services. Links Fareed Zakaria, GPS segment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7N7eZ68yFg Latest update after we posted the show: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/anthropic-granted-approval-release-claude-mythos-i0ebe/ Disclaimer: The views shared here are personal opinions, not professional advice, and do not represent the position of our employers.

EP010 • Info-Tech Live 2026: Conference Recap

A good CIO does two things at once: cuts through the AI hype and puts a number on the value. Tad Doyle and Nabil Gharbieh close out their Info-Tech Live 2026 recap from Las Vegas with the leadership side of the job. The theme this time is the CIO, and what separates a good one. Cut through the hype. Almost every AI headline is built to provoke, for or against. The CIO’s job is to filter that noise and define real value for the business. Manage in 360 degrees. Good leaders manage down to their team, across to peers and other departments, and up to the executives they report to. The work is building relationships in all three directions, not just running projects. Give the CFO a number. Finance does not want a feature list. They want a figure. If a Copilot seat runs around thirty to thirty-five dollars a month, what does the business get back? Putting a credible number on value is what gets the budget approved. Turn AI off and watch what happens. One client wanted to stop AI use. The result is predictable: people find their own tools, and you lose governance and control over your data. Shadow AI is worse than managed AI. The retention risk nobody budgets for. Surveys show people increasingly want to work for employers that use modern tools. Shut that down and you risk losing talent, then pay again in hiring and training. CIOs get sharper around other CIOs. Info-Tech Live put thousands of IT leaders in one place. Most CIOs compare notes with peers once a year. Working alongside other CIOs every day is where the growth happens. Key takeaway: a good CIO cuts through the hype and puts a number on the value. Do both, and you stop being a cost center and start being transformative. Nobody Told Me About IT is hosted by Tad Doyle and Nabil Gharbieh, two strategic advisors with 25-plus years in IT strategy and infrastructure. The IT strategy conversations your organization needs to be having. New episodes every Monday. Watch on YouTube: youtube.com/@NobodyToldMeAboutIT Listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts: search Nobody Told Me About IT Follow on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/company/nobody-told-me-about-it More at nobodytoldmeaboutit.com #CIO #ITLeadership #ITStrategy #AIgovernance #ShadowAI #AIvalue #MidMarketIT #DigitalTransformation

EP009 • Info-Tech Live 2026: Day 2 Recap

Almost everything you read about AI right now is clickbait. Tad Doyle and Nabil Gharbieh recorded this episode live from Info-Tech Live 2026 in Las Vegas, between sessions, to cut through the noise and talk about what actually mattered on the show floor. This is Part 1 of a two-part recap. Four things came up that every IT leader should be thinking about. First, the hype problem. Pro-AI, anti-AI, or somewhere in the middle, most of what gets published is written for clicks. The real work is filtering that noise so a business gets honest answers. Second, quantum computing and your encryption. A quantum machine at scale could break the encryption protecting your data today, and attackers are already harvesting encrypted data to decrypt later once the hardware catches up. NIST has finalized post-quantum encryption standards (FIPS 203, 204, and 205). If you are running older protocols, now is the time to start planning a migration. Third, token cost. Enterprise AI licenses look great in week one. By week two, a few heavy users can burn through the budget and force a hard cap. Watch your contracts, set limits, and know your burn rate before the bill arrives. Fourth, systems thinking. Linear thinking means playing whack-a-mole with outages and failures. Systems thinking means looking at how your people, data, and infrastructure interact, then building for the whole picture. Key takeaway: the job isn’t to be pro-AI or anti-AI. It’s to filter the noise so your organization gets real answers. Nobody Told Me About IT is hosted by Tad Doyle and Nabil Gharbieh, two strategic advisors with 25-plus years in IT strategy and infrastructure. The IT strategy conversations your organization needs to be having. New episodes every Monday. Watch on YouTube: youtube.com/@NobodyToldMeAboutIT Listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts: search Nobody Told Me About IT Follow on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/company/nobody-told-me-about-it More at nobodytoldmeaboutit.com #ITStrategy #ITLeadership #QuantumComputing #PostQuantum #AIgovernance #CIO #MidMarketIT #TokenCost #SystemsThinking

EP008 | Info-Tech LIVE Day 2: What a Fractional CIO Actually Does

Recorded live at Info-Tech LIVE 2026 in Las Vegas, Tad Doyle and Nabil Gharbieh pull back the curtain on the fractional CIO role — what it actually is, who needs it, and why so many mid-market organizations are running without IT strategy leadership they can't afford to be without. The conversation covers: * The difference between managing technology and owning IT strategy * Why a fractional or virtual CIO makes sense for SMBs and mid-market orgs that can't justify a full-time hire * How the vCIO role cuts across every department, from finance to marketing to operations * Concrete ways a vCIO saves money: vendor rationalization, software audits, shadow IT cleanup, and budget alignment * What involvement in the annual IT budget process actually looks like * The Covid case study: how IT strategy leadership moved companies remote in a week without buying a single new tool Nobody Told Me About IT is a weekly video podcast hosted by Tad Doyle and Nabil Gharbieh, two fractional CIOs and strategic IT advisors with 25+ years of combined experience. Each episode cuts through the hype and gets into the IT strategy conversations mid-market organizations need to be having. Find us on YouTube, LinkedIn, and everywhere you listen to podcasts. Contact: nobodytoldmeaboutit@gmail.com

Live from Info-Tech Live 2026 in Las Vegas 1 of 4

Live from InfoTech Live in Las Vegas, Tad Doyle and Nabil Gharbieh bring you a field episode straight from the conference floor. The CIO role is one of the most talked-about positions at this conference, and for good reason. The job has fundamentally changed. Two years ago, CIOs were managing infrastructure. Today, they are the only executives in the building having conversations with every department, every function, every stakeholder. That cross-functional visibility makes the CIO seat a natural launchpad into CEO and COO territory, and the best leaders here are starting to recognize that. But the opportunity comes with a prerequisite: data governance. Before any organization puts AI to work, they need to know what data they have, where it lives, who has access to it, and what shape it is in. Throwing AI on top of dirty data does not just produce bad outputs. It creates real security exposure. In this episode, Nabil and Tad break down why data governance, data loss prevention, and data optimization have to come first, every time. They also tackle one of the most common failure modes they see in client organizations: the binary CIO. The CIO who says no to everything blocks adoption and pushes employees toward shadow AI, which is worse. The CIO who says yes to everything creates a Wild West with no governance and real risk. The answer is a middle path, and they explain how to find it. Finally, they address the question every conference attendee is asking: is AI going to take my job? Info-Tech's position is clear. In the next two years, AI augments positions. It does not replace them. The organizations getting this right are not reducing headcount. They are repurposing people, freeing up capacity for higher-value work, and building institutional knowledge that AI cannot replicate. Episode recorded live at InfoTech Live, Las Vegas. Transcript available on YouTube. Nobody Told Me About IT is hosted by Tad Doyle and Nabil Gharbieh, two fractional CIOs and Strategic Advisors with 25-plus years of combined experience in IT strategy, infrastructure, and advisory services. New episodes every Monday.