Modern wide-field surveys will provide us with alert streams generating millions of alerts every night and by that providing a comprehensive picture of the variable sky. Traditionally, microlensing events have been found in the most crowded place in the Milky Way. Thanks to the footprint, microlensing events in the disk will play an increasingly important role. The opportunities opening up by these surveys will lead to more discoveries and the characterization of extrasolar planets (bound and unbound), black holes and insights into the binarity of stars and brown dwarfs. The most audacious surveys will certainly provide the best alert stream but some of the aforementioned science cases still require automated follow-up observations. The "fire-hose of alerts" demands cloud-based tools to trigger heterogeneous follow-up observations with a homogeneous software package - the TOM (Target and Observation Manager) Toolkit. We will show early results from the most recent observing programs running at Las Cumbres Observatory (LCO) global network using a TOM and how that can be applied to the surveys of the future.