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The Future of Enterprise IT with Kurmi Software CEO, Micah Singer

Micah Singer, CEO of Kurmi Software and a 25-year veteran of the telecoms and collaboration industry, joins Tom Arbuthnot for a forward-looking conversation rather than a product pitch. The pair debate where generative AI, low-code, security, hybrid work and platform monetisation will take enterpris

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Who should listen: Microsoft 365 service owners, UC and collaboration leads, and IT strategists who want a view on how AI, automation and platform economics will reshape enterprise IT roles, tooling and spend over the next decade.

Guest: Micah Singer — CEO, Kurmi Software

Many thanks to Kurmi Software, sponsor of this episode.

Key insights

Singer's view is that generative AI's biggest practical impact will be on software code rather than text or images — code output should clear the development backlogs and roadmap items that never get built, meaning software supports far more edge-case user stories than it does today. ▶ 2:07
AI and low-code/no-code favour the polymath over the specialist: breadth of knowledge across many systems becomes more valuable than deep expertise in one. Singer's analogy is the airline cockpit, which went from a flight engineer plus pilot to a single generalist who understands physics, engineering and weather without being an expert in any of them. ▶ 4:39
The IT role shifts from answering 'how' to answering 'why' — Arbuthnot argues practitioners will stop firefighting the plumbing and move to choosing and navigating solutions against business objectives, and will need to talk organisational requirements as fluently as technical ones. ▶ 7:43
Collaboration and cloud infrastructure spend is projected to roughly double in five years, with one forecast Singer cites at 24% CAGR to 2030 — more spend means more systems and more management complexity, not less. ▶ 8:13
Security will become an AI-versus-AI arms race, and Singer expects perimeter security to consolidate into a line item on the Azure or AWS bill within five to ten years, in the same way personal antivirus gave way to platform protection. Quarterly 15-minute computer-based security training feels inadequate against AI-generated, profile-targeted social engineering. ▶ 9:45
Automated social engineering already targets small firms: Arbuthnot reports that both recent joiners at five-person Empowering.Cloud immediately received WhatsApp bank-detail-change scams, evidently from LinkedIn scraping — proof the automation is indiscriminate, not reserved for large targets. ▶ 11:46
McKinsey's July workplace study found average days in the office among large enterprises has fallen from 3.7 to 3.2, excluding the pandemic spike; Singer quotes the Cisco WebEx keynote line that the office should be 'a magnet, not a mandate', and sees remote and cross-border hiring driving further tool sprawl. ▶ 14:51
Big vendors have found ways to monetise innovation without acquiring it — Kurmi participates in Microsoft's Solutions Plus/ISV route, the Avaya ecosystem and Zoomtopia — and marketplace models let platforms take a percentage without ownership. Buyers are also learning that acquired products (Yammer is the example) stall on innovation and offer far less roadmap influence than a small independent vendor. ▶ 19:00
Service management is moving from human-triggered provisioning to ticket-triggered workflows in ServiceNow, and next to AI-ops systems kicking off remediation workflows; the scope is widening beyond provisioning into licence cost management, fraud detection and performance, because every pound spent on management is a pound not spent on tools that improve worker experience. ▶ 23:36
Empowering.Cloud is pulling Microsoft 365 change communications — roadmap, blogs, event announcements — into an Azure database to report to enterprises on what is user-impacting, IT-impacting or informational; Arbuthnot says no customer he has spoken to claims to have change management handled. ▶ 25:07