Brandon Vigliarolo

Brandon Vigliarolo is a government and enterprise IT reporter at The Register who focuses on how large-scale technology decisions, especially around AI, affect public agencies, corporations, and the infrastructure that supports them.

Government and enterprise IT under AI pressure

Government technology programs and enterprise IT deployments sit at the centre of his reporting. In coverage of initiatives such as the America.gov portal, he examines how federal services are being rebuilt around commercial AI chatbots, detailing the way tools like Gemini and Grok become the public’s front door to government information and the practical shortcomings that result. His stories describe unfinished, poorly designed interfaces, dependence on third‑party models, and the gap between bold executive orders and the modest functionality ordinary users encounter.

Across his public‑sector pieces, he returns to the question of whether AI‑heavy projects improve service delivery or simply add complexity and risk to already fragile systems.

On the enterprise side, he writes about the everyday systems that keep organizations running - software, project management tools, security, and cloud infrastructure - treating them as operational commitments rather than product announcements. That perspective is underpinned by previous hands‑on work managing IT systems at a national laboratory and in private‑sector network engineering, which comes through in his attention to implementation details and failure modes.

Tracking the AI bubble and its fallout

A recurring thread in his work is the economics and sustainability of the current AI boom. In multiple pieces and podcast transcripts, he analyzes quarterly earnings, market valuations, and banking reports to test the claim that AI is an unstoppable growth engine. He follows signs of strain in hyperscalers and enterprise vendors, highlighting moments when Oracle’s performance, financial‑sector warnings, or collapsing startup valuations suggest that the AI bubble is taut and vulnerable rather than endlessly expansive.

Cost and return on investment are central concerns in his enterprise AI coverage. He reports on executives rethinking large AI deployments after encountering unexpected spend, explaining concepts like “token mining” and how open source tools can blunt runaway inference costs without resolving deeper strategic questions. Infrastructure and environmental impact are treated as part of the same story: in work on AI datacenters, he links wildfire smoke, gas turbines, and grid pressure to the industry’s hunger for compute, asking whether a multitrillion‑dollar “magic 8‑ball” justifies the climate and resource trade‑offs. The profile of the ALS worker using an AI‑powered brain‑computer interface to hold a full‑time job adds a counterpoint, showing how AI deployed carefully at the interface of hardware and healthcare can deliver tangible benefit rather than speculation.

The Kettle podcast on AI, infrastructure, and policy

Brandon is also a central voice on The Register’s Kettle podcast, where he hosts regular discussions with editors and reporters about the week’s biggest technology stories. Many of his written pieces double as episode write‑ups and transcripts, giving him room to move beyond headline coverage into extended conversation on AI regulation, infrastructure design, and vendor behaviour.

In episodes on “killer AI” narratives and regulatory capture, he digs into how apocalyptic messaging from large vendors can serve their interests in locking in rules that favour incumbent models over emerging approaches.

Across Kettle episodes, he steers debates on topics such as advertisers targeting AI bots with hidden ads, OpenAI’s conflicts with open‑source communities, and the ways enterprise AI tools can be manipulated or misaligned with user interests. He frequently anchors these discussions in concrete stories from the week - market moves, technical reports, regulatory documents - linking them back to longer‑term questions about trust, governance, and the stability of the AI ecosystem. The podcast work reinforces his written beat: rather than treating AI as an abstract future threat, he examines how specific deployments, business decisions, and policy arguments reshape the technology landscape in real time.

Broader technology and infrastructure reporting

While AI and government IT are his core focus, Brandon’s archive spans a wider range of infrastructure and industry stories.

He has covered breakthroughs like laser‑and‑optical‑chip experiments that push data transmission speeds beyond the current global internet’s traffic, approaching hardware innovation with the same emphasis on practical capacity and deployment challenges. In pieces on self‑driving technology and LiDAR companies whose valuations have collapsed since their IPOs, he connects sensor performance and capital markets, showing how technical and financial realities combine to reset expectations for autonomous vehicles.

His reporting also returns to long‑lived software and operating systems, including work on why Windows XP still resonates and why users revert to low‑tech practices like paper passwords and mechanical watches. In coverage of Microsoft’s missteps and promises to improve, he examines user‑experience friction, subscription nudges, and mandatory onboarding flows as symptoms of broader strategic drift. Taken together, these stories illustrate a reporter who treats technology as an ecosystem of tools, markets, and policies, and who is most interested in how that ecosystem behaves when hype fades and systems have to operate at scale.