Alan Shimel

Alan Shimel

About the Author:

Alan Shimel is founder, CEO and editor-in-chief of Techstrong Group, a Futurum company, and a member of Futurum's executive leadership team. A technology entrepreneur, media executive and industry commentator, Shimel has spent more than three decades building businesses, communities and media platforms serving enterprise technology professionals, including co-founding StillSecure, a network security company, and the DevOps Institute, a DevOps certification and training body. At Techstrong, he leads a portfolio of media brands including DevOps.com, Security Boulevard, Cloud Native Now, Techstrong AI, Techstrong IT, Digital CxO, Platform Engineering, Techstrong Semi and Techstrong TV, along with a growing portfolio of events, educational programs and digital communities. With more than 25 years of experience in cybersecurity, Shimel is a familiar voice in the space and was an early advocate of the DevOps movement, helping bring DevOps practices into mainstream enterprise technology. His work today spans cybersecurity, DevOps, cloud-native technologies, artificial intelligence, semiconductors and digital transformation, and he hosts popular programs including Techstrong Gang, Shimmy Says and Still Cyber, After All These Years. He holds a Bachelor of Arts in Government and Politics from St. John's University and a Juris Doctor from New York Law School.

Articles by Alan Shimel

The First Victims of AI are Graduates

March 10, 2026

AI may not trigger mass layoffs in the near term. The early disruption may show up somewhere quieter: Companies simply stop hiring the junior workers who once formed the first rung of the white-collar career ladder.

Apple & AI: Crazy Like a Fox

March 5, 2026

While Big Tech pours more than $100 billion a quarter into AI data centers, Apple’s infrastructure spending has actually declined. Yet Macs and iPhones are quietly becoming some of the most practical machines for running AI locally.

The Chatbot Didn’t Pull the Trigger

March 5, 2026

A wrongful-death lawsuit involving Google’s Gemini chatbot highlights a growing dilemma for the AI industry: As conversational AI becomes more human-like and emotionally persuasive, do the companies building these systems have a responsibility to intervene when users show signs of self-harm or violence?

Anthropic vs. The God of War

February 25, 2026

Anthropic built its brand on ethical AI. The Pentagon builds weapons and wins wars. Now those two worldviews are colliding over how Claude can be used inside classified military systems. When “lawful” and “responsible” stop meaning the same thing, the fight isn’t just contractual — it’s philosophical, strategic and very real.

The World Will Create the Next Better OpenClaw a Thousand Times

February 23, 2026

OpenClaw did not finish the agentic AI race. It started it. As personal agents become practical and AI-assisted coding democratizes building, the real story is iteration at scale. From Moltbook to multi-agent orchestration, the next generation will move faster, reason smarter and push far beyond today’s breakthroughs.

Moltbook: Netscape Moment or Bot Daycare?

February 19, 2026

Is Moltbook a geeky bot playground or the first real coordination layer for agentic AI? Beneath the memes, karma farms and “receipts” culture, something bigger may be forming.

Are AI Agents Really Intelligent and Does it Matter?

February 19, 2026

AI agents can draft documents, orchestrate workflows and even simulate online communities. But do they actually understand what they are doing? Or are we projecting intelligence onto sophisticated pattern-matching systems? The real enterprise question may not be whether AI agents are truly intelligent, but whether intelligence is even the right metric for measuring their value.

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