SuperBugle Issue 6 story cover: You can't steer a stopped bike

SuperBugle Issue 6 story cover: Trust fall

SuperBugle Issue 6 cover story spread: The Power of Specialization, with Daniel Tobon, founder of Tsquared Technologies

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Your break from the work-work to read about the people and ideas shaping your world.

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SuperBugle Issue 6 story cover: The Long View

SuperBugle Issue 6 story cover: In Good Company

Founder's note

Don't fear AI, take charge of it

"Automation takes over tasks. It doesn't take over responsibility, and responsibility is where IT has always earned its place."

Arvind opens Issue 6 with a message for the IT community: AI doesn't make you matter less. When the routine runs itself, the work that's left is the work only people can do, and IT is still the team that brings method to the madness.

Arvind Parthiban

Co-founder and CEO, SuperOps

Vol 6 · October 2026

In this issue

The Frontrunners · Cover story

The power of specialization

A generalist closes the ticket. Danny Tobon looks at the whole business behind it, and that is the work no chatbot can replace.

Read story

Vol 6 · October 2026

In this issue

Reports

Trust fall

What should IT leaders put in place before rolling out agentic AI? We put one question to 13 OGs of IT.

Carrie Green, CEO, The CanIT Collective: If there's a table you want to be at, and there's no seats, grab a chair or bring your own

Features

Closing the distance for Canada's MSPs

Carrie Green spent a career learning that community, not the next tool, is what moves an MSP forward. Now she builds it for a living.

In Conversation: Arvind Parthiban and Dor Eisner at a podcast table

Interviews

Why security and operations can no longer run apart

For a long time, IT operations and cybersecurity ran on separate tracks. Different tools, different teams, different conversations. AI has collapsed that separation.

Features

You can't steer a stopped bike

As AI takes over the routine work that once defined whole jobs, there's unease everywhere. Ryan Schmierer talks about why the tools aren't the threat, why the real danger is freezing up, and what it takes to start moving.

Amy Babinchak with her book, 20 Questions Every Owner Asks Before Selling Their MSP

Interviews

Amy Babinchak on exits, AI, and an industry growing up

After 23 years running her own MSP, Amy Babinchak coaches owners through the sale. On her new book, AI-driven early exits, and why the industry must grow up.

Reports

The state of AI in IT

Hard data from 300 senior IT decision-makers on trust, governance, adoption and the pain points that keep growing.

The Rethink: Sophie Danby and William Goddard

Events

Pull up a chair, not a slide deck

IT industry experts Sophie Danby and William Goddard spent years noticing that the best part of any industry event was the bit that happened after it ended. Now, with SuperOps as founding sponsor, they're building a whole event series around it.

Sushma Udipi Nagendran, editor of SuperBugle

Letter from the editor

"When the rules are changing as quickly as they are now, there is value in knowing how others are responding. Their experiments can give you ideas. Their mistakes can save you time."

Sushma Udipi Nagendran

Editor, SuperBugle

Future Incidents

The cards have been dealt

The roadmap tells you where you're headed. The deck tells you what you're standing on. We shuffled again and asked the cosmos to skip the promises and point at the ground under your feet. Eight cards. Eight things the quarter ahead will ask of you, ready or not.

Ace of Pentacles

Data as foundation

If one point came up in every conversation, it was this. AI runs on data, and it cannot invent what it does not have. Feed it thin or dirty data and it will confidently hand you the wrong answer. The Ace of Pentacles is the seed, the raw material everything else grows from. Before the agents, before the dashboards, the honest question is simpler: where is your data, who can reach it, and can you trust it?

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Death

Legacy systems & technical debt

EndingsRenewalRelease

Your reading

XIII

Death

Legacy systems & technical debt

The iceberg most teams describe is real. The modern stack up top is ready for AI. The two decades of systems buried underneath are not. Technical debt behaves like compound interest: the longer you defer it, the more it costs to clear. This card is not about loss. It is about what you retire to make room. Some of the stack has to end before the next thing can begin.

EndingsRenewalRelease

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The Hierophant

Fundamentals & management discipline

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The Hierophant

Fundamentals & management discipline

The oldest card in this spread, and the least glamorous. Before the automation, before the agents, the discipline still has to be there. AI does not replace knowing how incidents get resolved, how changes get managed, how users get supported. It sits on top of that. Teams that never understood the why behind their own processes will not suddenly understand it because a tool arrived. Learn the fundamentals first. The tool amplifies whatever it finds.

DisciplineFundamentalsIntent

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Eight of Wands

The pace of change

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Your reading

VIII

Eight of Wands

The pace of change

The card of speed, and speed is the honest read on this moment. One voice put it plainly: technology used to have a shelf life of years, now it's quarters. What you deploy this quarter can be behind by the next. The Eight of Wands is not a push to rush. It is a push to build for constant change, expect the ground to keep moving, and stop waiting for a stable version to plan around. One isn't coming.

SpeedMomentumTiming

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The Hanged Man

Patience & the pilot mindset

PausePerspectiveRestraint

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XII

The Hanged Man

Patience & the pilot mindset

Everyone advising speed also advised this: start small. Pick something low risk, run it in a corner where a mistake costs nothing, and learn how the thing actually behaves before you scale it. The Hanged Man is not stalling. It is the deliberate pause that changes what you can see. Walk before you run. The teams piloting quietly now will know exactly what works while everyone else is still arguing about whether to start.

PausePerspectiveRestraint

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The Devil

Fear & resistance to change

FearControlFreedom

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The Devil

Fear & resistance to change

Every interview named the same thing: fear. People read the headlines about replacement and quietly brace for the worst. The card of the Devil is about chains that turn out to be looser than they look. The teams that adopt well are the ones that bring people in on the change instead of doing it to them. Name the fear out loud. It loses most of its grip once it's spoken.

FearControlFreedom

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The Sun

The payoff & opportunity

ClarityOpportunityReward

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XIX

The Sun

The payoff & opportunity

For all the caution in the deck, the upside is real and worth saying plainly. Done well, AI takes the repetitive, low-value work off your people and hands them the strategic work they were hired for. Disruption on this scale is also opportunity on this scale. The teams that treat it that way, as a chance to matter more to the business rather than a threat to survive, tend to be the ones it rewards.

ClarityOpportunityReward

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XXI

The World

The mature end state

Look far enough ahead and the work changes shape. The most striking prediction across these conversations was a quiet one: service management that becomes invisible. Infrastructure you no longer think about, the way you don't think about the socket when you plug something in. Silos closed. The relationships between systems finally mapped and trusted. This is the far card, the whole picture. Not a promise you'll reach it. A picture of what reaching it looks like.

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