Alix Pressley, Director of Strategic Content, Intelligent Global Media

In this column, we’ ll be discussing key issues for CISOs and their teams – from AI to wellbeing and from Zero Trust to communication.

If you’ d like to get in touch, email alix. pressley @ intelligentglobalmedia. com

Unlike the headline-grabbing promises of fully autonomous systems, co-pilots are designed to sit alongside professionals, not replace them. They draft code, summarise incidents, suggest configurations and flag anomalies – always with a human in the loop. This subtlety is precisely why the trend is spreading so fast. It fits existing workflows rather than demanding radical reinvention.

Understandably, the appeal is universal. In mature markets, co-pilots help overstretched teams maintain complex hybrid environments with fewer errors and faster response times. In emerging regions, they lower the barrier to entry, enabling smaller teams to manage infrastructure and applications that once required large, specialised departments. The technology scales not just across clouds, but across contexts.

What’ s driving adoption is not novelty, but economics. IT organisations everywhere face the same pressures: skills shortages, growing system complexity and the expectation of maintaining uptime. Co-pilots promise incremental productivity and are ultimately reshaping operational reality.

Yet the trend also exposes a familiar tension. Tools that suggest actions inevitably influence decisions. Over time, teams may come to trust recommendations they no longer fully interrogate. This is not a flaw of the technology so much as a governance challenge. The regions and organisations that benefit most will be those that invest early in standards: when to rely on automation, when to override it and how to audit its behaviour.

There is also a cultural shift underway. Traditional IT excellence rewarded deep specialisation – knowing a system inside out. Co-pilots change the equation by making broad competence more valuable. Engineers increasingly spend less time recalling syntax or commands and more time framing problems, validating outcomes and communicating intent. The skillset tilts from memorisation to judgement.

Importantly, this is not a trend confined to Silicon Valley or a single vendor ecosystem. From public sector data centres to regional banks, from manufacturing plants to telecom operators, copilots are being embedded wherever repeatable decisions meet uncertainty. The interfaces differ, the regulations vary, but the pattern is consistent.

It’ s not a question of whether AI assistants will become part of everyday IT work, but how deliberately we integrate them. Treated as shortcuts, they risk amplifying blind spots. Treated as colleagues, they can elevate the quality of human decisions.

In that sense, the latest IT trend is not really about AI at all. It’ s about redesigning the partnership between people and machines and doing so in a way that works, everywhere.

It’ s not a question of whether AI assistants will become part of everyday IT work, but how deliberately we integrate them.

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