Jamf has a new CEO: former CTO Beth Tschida. She succeeds previous CEO John Strosahl, who himself replaced Dean Hager on his retirement. Tschida has served as interim CEO since March.

Jamf-using IT pros should be pleased. Tschida is an engineer who joined the company in 2018 as senior vice president, engineering and became CTO four years later. She has led the company’s expansion into security as well as its ongoing mission in device management. She takes the helm as device management, and IT more generally, struggle with the potential and the peril of artificial intelligence deployment across industry.

‘We are making AI work on Apple’

“Over the last eight years, I’ve had the privilege of working with an exceptional team to build the leading platform for managing and securing Apple at work,” said Tschida in a statement. “Now, AI is reshaping how organizations work, and we are making AI work on Apple. We’re building autonomous management so devices manage themselves within boundaries, opening our platform so others can build AI tools directly with Jamf, and delivering the governance layer to deploy AI confidently. Everything we’re doing is built on the trust we’ve earned over two decades of making Apple simple, secure, and connected at scale. I’m energized by what’s ahead.”

Challenges and opportunities

Following its acquisition by Francisco Partners, Jamf is no longer a public company, but it faces a fresh set of challenges as it enters its 25th year of existence. The Apple ecosystem it is built around has utterly transformed, with Macs, iPhones, and iPads acting as peer players in enterprise IT.

The company’s specialized Apple-focused model faces fresh challenges from other more multipolar IT device management vendors, even while the scale of opportunity for Apple in the enterprise continues to grow. There are more Macs used in business today than ever before, the success of MacBook Neo has only boosted that fact, and the number of companies seeking MDM and security support across Apple’s platform continues to grow.

In fact, Apple recently entered the ring with its own very much expanded Apple Business product; as Hager said when that service originally launched, “When Apple innovates, Jamf celebrates,” arguing that Apple effectively grew its presence in enterprise IT — creating more opportunity for vendors such as Jamf – by doing so.

Regulation, security and control

Brian Decker, partner and co-Chief Investment Officer at Francisco Partners, certainly sees opportunity in the Apple-in-the-enterprise space. “We look forward to working with Beth as she builds on what this team has built and goes after the opportunity ahead in Apple enterprise management and security,” he said in a statement.

News of the promotion comes in the sleepy prelude to what may be Apple’s most important WWDC yet for enterprise professionals. Many business users have been somewhat reluctant to fully embrace AI services in their work and will be very curious to find out if Apple has figured out some way to support the conveniences of such services while retaining the data privacy regulators demand.

That’s certainly a need Tschida recognizes. When she discussed Jamf’s FedRAMP partnership with UberEther late last year, she said the goal was to “bring secure, Apple-first management and security solutions to highly regulated environments.” 

Getting ahead of AI adoption with Jamf

Jamf, of course, sees plenty of opportunities that can be unleashed by Ai, and it seems is ready to ramp up its offerings. It’s not a new initiative, as the company has been weaving AI into its own ecosystem for some time; indeed, as CTO, Tschida introduced Jamf AI Assistant in 2024, which she called a “game changer for Apple device management and security.” 

The company also recently introduced a beta version of its own AI tool for executive threat detection, designed to detect sophisticated attacks targeting high-value users. This trajectory makes it very unlikely the company will slow down its exploration of how AI can improve the world of Apple enterprise IT, while also protecting against shadow AI.

As Tschida told me today: “98% of organizations have employees using AI tools their IT team never sanctioned. That number is not going down. The organizations that figure out how to govern AI adoption on Apple, rather than just react to it, will have a real advantage. That is exactly what we are building at Jamf.”