Congratulations to us on 50 Episodes of This Week in Enterprise Tech! And appropriately, this week was a busy one with everything from Snowflake vs. Databricks to Workday and Cisco throwing in their versions of agent management to some surprising research coming from Microsoft Research on how too much AI can atrophy confidence.
This Week in Enterprise Technology, Hyoun Park and Charles Araujo critically assess the biggest tech issues for the CIO office:
- The Dissection of Intel Begins…
- AWS Marketplace Changes Affect SaaS FinOps Strategy
- Glean Releases Agents to Manage Data
- Snowflake Brings Cortex Agents to Public Preview
- SAP & Databricks Team Up to Unlock SAP Data
- Workday Releases Agent System of Record
- Outshift by Cisco Discusses Internet of Agents
- PegaSystems Points Out Employee Concerns for Agents
- Anthropic Economic Index Measures Enterprise AI Usage
- Microsoft Research Discovers AI Atrophies Cognitive Confidence
- DOGE Struggles to COBOL Together a Mainframe
The Dissection of Intel Begins …
Broadcom and TSMC have been discussing how to break up Intel along with the Trump administration. For Intel fans, this is tough to watch. Charles and Hyoun toast the end of an era as well as potential CIO repercussions.
AWS Marketplace Changes Affect SaaS FinOps Strategy
AWS is requiring any SaaS eligible for AWS discounts to be 100% hosted on AWS moving forward. Although this seems like a reasonable policy, the challenge is in getting Amazon certification, which can be a time consuming process and may lead to some lost discounts. Hyoun and Charles provide their caveats to the financially minded CIO and FinOps pro.
Duckbill Group: https://www.duckbillgroup.com/blog/new-aws-marketplace-rules/
Glean Releases Agents to Manage Data
Glean has entered the agentic fray with Glean Agents, which automate tasks using a wide range of data to enable task automation and data analysis. Charles and Hyoun debate whether this announcement does enough to stand out in a crowded data agent market.
Snowflake Brings Cortex Agents to Public Preview
Snowflake launched its Cortex Agents in public preview to support data management use cases that Snowflake is well known for. The granularity of the agent as well as iterative process and continuous governance capabilities help Cortex Agents to stand out.
Snowflake: https://www.snowflake.com/en/blog/ai-data-agents-snowflake-cortex/
SAP & Databricks Team To Unlock SAP Data
SAP is teaming up with Databricks to create SAP Business Data Cloud, a joint product designed to improve SAP customer access to the deep metadata within their SAP deployment. Charles and Hyoun debate how this may prevent SAP customers from migrating their data over to Snowflake by working with a competitor with both technical capabilities and head to head competitive experience in selling against Snowflake.
SAP: https://news.sap.com/2025/02/sap-databricks-open-bold-new-era-data-ai/
Tags: SAP Databricks, Business data cloud, Mosaic AI, Databricks SQL, Unity Catalog
Workday Releases the Agent System of Record
Workday announces a system of record for agents to support the inventory and indexing of agents. Hyoun and Charles discuss how they are making big claims but not taking full advantage of the breadth of workday metadata and application functionality across skills, contingent, labor, and performance management to truly treat agents as work enablement technologies.
This concept is interesting especially after NVIDIA’s Jensen Huang’s recent claim: “The IT department of every company is going to be the HR department of AI agents in the future.” Workday would prefer that HR remain the HR department for AI agents. But can they pull it off?
AOL: https://www.aol.com/finance/nvidia-jensen-huang-says-become-133641793.html
Outshift by Cisco Discusses the Internet of Agents
Cisco estimates there will be 20,000 AI agents per company: How will they all work together? Cisco posits the need for an Internet of Agents, an open and secure system that allows different AI agents to communicate and collaborate. Charlie and Hyoun discuss some of the challenges of an Internet of Agents, including thinking beyond the API.
VentureBeat: https://venturebeat.com/ai/20000-ai-agents-per-company-how-will-they-all-work-together
PegaSystems Points Out Employee Concerns for Agents
A new PegaSystems survey shows that a large percentage of workers are uncomfortable using agents in the workplace. Even as we’ve seen other data showing that executives actually want their workers to use agents and AI. Hyoun and Charles discuss employee concerns and whether executives are ready to teach and train their expectations regarding AI.
CIODive: https://www.ciodive.com/news/Workforce-AI-agent-sentiment-concern-accuracy-quality/740134/
Anthropic Economic Index Measures Enterprise AI Usage
Anthropic is launching the Anthropic Economic Index to track the value and use of AI. This is both a website and a research paper. The most interesting finding that got Charles and Hyoun’s attention is that 3/4 of current AI usage is concentrated in 4% of jobs. These metrics serve as a strong reminder of the current maturity of enterprise AI, which leads Charles to an interesting conclusion.
The Register: https://www.theregister.com/2025/02/11/ai_impact_hits_midtohigh_wage_jobs/
Anthropic economic index: https://www.anthropic.com/economic-index
Paper: https://assets.anthropic.com/m/2e23255f1e84ca97/original/Economic_Tasks_AI_Paper.pdf
Microsoft Research Discovers AI Atrophies Cognitive Confidence
Microsoft finds that too much AI leads to cognition atrophy. Uh oh. The interesting aspect, as Charles wisely notes in this discussion, is that this study measures the human perception of cognitive quality, leading to concerns on how to keep sharp in an AI world. Hyoun provides some tips and suggestions for more human AI.
404 Media: https://www.404media.co/microsoft-study-finds-ai-makes-human-cognition-atrophied-and-unprepared-3/
DOGE Struggles to COBOL Together a Mainframe
What happens when you get a former COBOL programmer and a former IT asset auditor and data analyst to look at DOGE?
Elon Musk’s DOGE team may need a crash course in COBOL as they dig deep with their presidentially conferred admin access to Social Security, Medicare, and other key government payments and transactional data. Hyoun and Charles discuss the real challenges of budget and data audits and Charles provides an unconventional solution to DOGE.
Fast Company: https://www.fastcompany.com/91278597/elon-musk-doge-cobol-language