AHEAD

Thank you to everyone who stopped by the AHEAD booth at the ServiceNow World Forum event. The conversations were the best part of the event: real questions, sharp ideas, and a lot of energy of what's next for the platform.

What do we actually mean when we say AI-accelerated development? That's the question that opens the first episode of Ready, Set, Runtime. AHEAD Field CTO Michael Kolbrener sat down with Joshua Perkins and Craig Martin to talk about how enterprise teams are applying AI across the software development lifecycle, and what it takes to do that well at scale. The conversation covers: → AI-powered digital workforces → Why operational discipline matters more as organizations accelerate → How technical debt and legacy modernization change when agents do the work → Context engineering, trust, and what comes next One idea runs through all of it. Results start with a business problem. Tune in on your favorite podcast platform: https://bit.ly/4AOmGsN Then head over to the companion blog for Episode 1: https://bit.ly/4i64XWb #ReadySetRuntime #AISDLC

There's a rule in every demo playbook: never go live without a backup. I knew all the ways it could go wrong. The wifi fails. The prompts don't land the way they did in rehearsal. AI pulls something confidential. I had a hotspot running on my phone, a backup prototype ready, a bounded AI space, and a plan for each contingency. I decided not to pre-plan a single prompt anyway. The point of the session was to show attending leaders that plain language prompting can do more than generate static content, and that the difference between a fast AI output and a genuinely useful one is the quality of human thinking that goes into it. A rehearsed demo would have shown the first thing. It wouldn't have proven the second. I opened Claude live and started building. I described a sample initiative, asked it to name the stakeholders, surface what each group actually cares about. I asked the audience to shout out what else we needed, and we prompted Claude together in plain language. The audience and I live-edited each response using our own critical thinking before moving to the next step. At one point Claude got impatient and generated the finished product before we had finished our thinking. I closed that version and kept going. That moment made my point. The goal isn't to delegate to AI. It's to collaborate with it. Slow it down. Take it through the steps you would actually think through yourself. What comes out the other end is better, not just faster. The finished output was everything I had hoped, a clickable, query-able, personalized communication tool. Several people came up afterward, committed to trying it on their own work when they got home. I'd call that a success. #techfuturesNYC #aitransformation

What changes when growth reveals fragmented operations? For one cloud managed services provider, expansion after multiple mergers and acquisitions meant more teams, more tools, and more ways for work to disappear between service boundaries. A shared ServiceNow environment gave customer operations a common place to manage cases, share knowledge, and improve visibility. Within four days of go-live: → Captured task volume increased 300% → 3,598 tasks were handled on the busiest day → 74% of incidents were resolved by day four That's what operational change looks like when platform, process, governance, and adoption move together. Explore the case study and see how #AHEADIntelligentOps helped create room to scale: https://bit.ly/4ehkvUJ

ModelOp and AHEAD have partnered to close the gap between an approved AI strategy and AI running in production. Enterprises fund more use cases than they can deliver. Our 2026 AI Governance Benchmark Report found 67% of organizations have 101 to 250 proposed use-cases, while only 6% run 26 to 100 AI systems in scaled production. The ones that stall get stuck in the same handoffs across data science, IT, security, legal, and risk. AHEAD brings the AI strategy and consulting, platform and application engineering, implementation, and change management to stand that path up. The use case priorities, risk tiers, and approval gates they design get configured in ModelOp as workflows, where each becomes a step a use case can't skip and evidence gets captured as it runs. ModelOp runs as the system of record for ML, GenAI, Agentic AI, and vendor AI, powering workflows and generating operational intelligence above AI development and execution, GRC, ITSM, data management, and security. Together we give enterprises one repeatable path from AI strategy to governed production. Thanks to Joshua Perkins and the team at AHEAD for the incredible partnership! Alex Rice, our Director of Partnerships, shares what this means for enterprise AI leaders on our blog. Read it here: https://lnkd.in/gxjprPAu #AgenticAI #EnterpriseAI #GenAI #ArtificialIntelligence #AIGovernance #ModelOp #AIDelivery Erika Hoeft Liz Molli

India is at the top of the list.   In a conversation with CRN India, AHEAD leaders Keith Odom (EVP, Services & Consulting), Chris Tucker (EVP, Foundry) and Sumed Marwaha (Managing Director, AHEAD India) shared where our Foundry strategy is headed in APAC and why India is the leading candidate for our next facility.   What's driving it: - Customers want to procure, transform and deploy AI infrastructure in the regions where it will be used, not move product around the world - OEM partners are looking for partners who can shift deployment work left, before infrastructure reaches the customer   As AI racks move from 10 to 15 kW toward 250 kW and beyond, power, cooling and networking readiness will define who can deploy AI at scale. That's exactly where Foundry comes in.   Read the full story: https://lnkd.in/esG7ABmZ #AHEAD #AHEADIndia #Foundry #AIInfrastructure #APAC #India #DataCentres

AHEAD's Intelligent Ops leaders are heading to McCormick Place for #ServiceNowWorldForum Chicago. AI, automation, and modern workflows are changing how organizations run IT operations. Visit our IO experts at Booth #27 to talk through what that shift means for service operations + how to turn it into real business outcomes. Swing by our booth at 2 pm for a sweet treat or join us for wine and cheese with ServiceNow and ScreenMeet at 4 pm to keep the conversation going. See you tomorrow! https://lnkd.in/gq_dZRGD

When something breaks, who owns the outcome? Customers often bring in multiple specialists to reduce IT complexity. Then an outage exposes the gap between providers. One statement of work covers this, another covers that, and the gap belongs to nobody. In an article for MSP Channel Insights, AHEAD’s EVP of Services & Consulting, Keith Odom, explains how outcome selling changes the model. Instead of selling monitoring or backup as tasks, MSPs commit to business results such as network availability or recovering critical systems within an agreed time. That puts accountability in one place and moves the conversation from components to what the business needs technology to deliver. Read Keith’s perspective on the MSP’s answer to complexity: https://bit.ly/4yBrXlU

AHEAD AI Principal Consultant Kristi Woolsey leads a workshop on AI-Native Prototyping for Leaders at TechFutures NYC tomorrow. Check out the preview for Kristi's session below. ↓ #AHEADai