The Signal
In Q1, member submissions about AI focused on visibility and governance: how to find shadow AI, how to secure it, how to write policy for it. In the last 30 days, the buying question changed. Seven enterprise IT leaders in seven different industries posted decisions across the DoGood network to fund AI for work their teams currently do.
A Global IT Director in Automotive Service is testing whether AI can scale across a large offshore AP/AR team.
A Software IT Director wants AI that can reliably handle Tier 1 telecom support during network outages so the company can safely reduce overnight staffing.
An IT Services Infrastructure Director told the network the org gets roughly a billion customer contacts a year and is "planning to aggressively reduce with automation and AI."
A Manufacturing Sr. Director of Tech Transformation is choosing between a third-party AI platform and "just good enough" ERP-vendor capabilities for AP/AR and supply chain.
A Pharmaceuticals Sr. Director is buying AI to run CX with customers.
A Media & Internet Program Director is rebuilding QA as an AI-driven process.
An IT Services Director is adding AI automations to a large contact center.
These are not Copilot-for-engineers requests. They are AI-for-the-work-finance-and-operations-people-do requests. The procurement question is no longer "what tools do my engineers need." It is "what AP, QA, and support work can the AI do instead of the people doing it now."
That is a different budget line. The CIO who used to own AI buying is now the implementer for an AI conversation the CFO and COO have started controlling. None of the seven submissions framed the buy as an IT initiative.
The Network's Vendor Watchlist
Microsoft (5), Azure (3), AWS (2), VMware (2), Verkada (2), M365 (2). The rest of the watchlist is a long tail of single mentions: Splunk, Datadog, Grafana, AppDynamics, Varonis, Purview, Onyx Security, SoftwareOne, Red Canary, HackerOne, Stormagic, Hyper-V, Genetech.
Notable absence: no AI-platform vendor surfaced in the top mentions this week. Members described the work they want AI to take over. They did not name the vendor they expect to deliver it. The buyers are still shopping.
From the Network
"We are going through ERP transformation and looking to understand if bringing in third party automation (AI platform preferably) would make sense or utilizing 'just good enough' capabilities from ERP vendors for our AP/AR and supply chain activities."
"We get approximately a billion contacts per year and are planning to aggressively reduce with automation and AI."
"Intent is to limit manual QA and reduce risk and bugs. Efficient and AI driven QA process to be explored."
Three different industries. Same buying motion. None framed the buy as an engineering productivity initiative. All three framed it as a way to take work off people who currently do it.
Top Open Priorities This Week
Two raw asks pulled directly from member submissions in the last 14 days, unedited:
"I want to see if their AI can reliably handle our Tier 1 telecom support volumes during network outages so we can safely reduce our overnight staffing costs"
"We currently have a large offshore team handling AP/AR activities. I'm curious about your approach and if it would be something we could potentially adopt and scale?"
Both members named the cost they want the AI to take out. Neither framed the buy as a Tier-1 engineering platform purchase. The headcount conversation is the AI conversation.
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The Context
The headlines are catching up to what the network already knew. On May 7, Cloudflare reported record Q1 revenue (up 34% year over year) and announced it was cutting 1,100 jobs, about 20% of its workforce, in the first mass layoff in the company's 16-year history. CEO Matthew Prince wrote that the "vast majority of those laid off were 'measurers'": middle management, finance, legal, internal auditing, and revenue recognition. Cloudflare's internal AI usage was up 600% in three months.
The category of work Cloudflare just cut is the same category of work seven of your peers are funding AI to take over. The Cloudflare announcement is the public version of the conversation already happening inside enterprise procurement pipelines.
Bottom Line: The AI-to-headcount substitution is not a 2027 thesis. It is closing this quarter, in the AP, QA, and customer-support cost centers your CFO has already mapped.
What to Do About It
Pull the three largest internal cost centers outside engineering (start with AP/AR, contact center, and QA), and identify which AI projects in your 2026 pipeline are already targeting those budgets. If the answer is "none of them," the AI conversation in your company is happening in someone else's office. Get on that committee this week.
Renewing an EA this quarter? Check whether your AI platform line is being funded out of IT op-ex or out of the labor budget. The two answers route to different people, and the second one is no longer rare.
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