We’ve all spent the last few years talking a lot about AI, and rightly so. The cloud gives us scale, the latest frontier models, and a constant stream of new capabilities. But somewhere along the way, “AI” became shorthand for “send it to the cloud,” and I think that’s worth talking about. Not because the cloud is wrong, but because it isn’t always the right answer. Sometimes you’re on a train with no signal. Sometimes the data simply isn’t allowed to leave the device. And sometimes you just don’t want to spend tokens on a task your laptop can quietly handle on its own.

Organisations that fail to prepare are preparing to fail, says Kyle Davies, Practice Lead - Integrated Technology Architecture at CDW. No-one can predict the future, but we can do our best to prepare for potentially disruptive events.