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Analyzing Tableau Next for the Era of AI

As we start our farewell tour of the analyst world, Amalgam Insights had the opportunity to attend Tableau Conference, which has consistently been one of the key events for data and analytics throughout my analyst career. The most influential Tableau Conference from a personal level was when I attended in 2013 and then-CEO Christian Chabot gave an inspiring speech on the role of discovery. It was so long ago that Tableau was just starting to get a Mac-native version and had just launched a data connection interface!

But even then, Tableau stood for a fundamental transformation in business intelligence and data discovery, one that would end up up-ending the definition of the business intelligence market and seeing monolithic billion-dollar revenue companies fall to the vision of Tableau. It is one of the few times in my career that I have seen the analyst industry unanimously agree that a market needed to be effectively redefined. And this redefinition came from the understanding that the data analyst job was changing from the order-taking report builder that I had done early in my career to a data discoverer, contextualizer, and storyteller. That role has continued to evolve to this day and every analytics vendor has had to describe its ability to empower the data analyst.

Contextualizing the Background for Tableau Conference 2025

We face another fundamental shift in the data analyst world, this time driven by AI. Over the past three years, the emergence of generative AI and related agentic AI capabilities have created a new interface for computing that has led to terms including retrieval augmented generation, vibe coding, and agentic analytics to come into the technical vernacular. And in this light, vendors have sought to state that AI is here to help the data analyst and that no jobs will be lost.


Here at Amalgam Insights, I’m here to provide a more realistic perspective. There are jobs in the data analyst world that are focused on the basic creation of dashboards and some basic data cleansing. And these jobs may have been steady and reliable jobs for many years through the last era of the data analyst and the rise of the data preparation solutions that emerged over the past decade. But those jobs are going to disappear as agents start taking over basic capabilities. And I believe this is a trend that will hold across analytic platforms and solutions. Let’s be honest about what AI can do.

At the same time, AI struggles with maintaining attention across multi-stage tasks, lacks the creativity to look outside its training data or to proactively find new data, and still maintains both strategy and storytelling weaknesses when trying to work outside of a generic context. All this provides context for this year’s Tableau Conference 2025 and the big announcement of Tableau Next, which lends some potential answers for the future of the data analyst as well as the future of Tableau as a Salesforce-based solution.

Understanding Tableau Next

In 2025, Tableau’s current CEO, Ryan Aytay, kicked off Tableau Conference 2025 with an honest appeal to the data analyst on the future of Tableau and the commitment that exists for supporting Tableau as a set of solutions as well as a community. Since taking over as CEO of Tableau two years ago, Aytay has faced the interesting challenge of integrating Tableau with Salesforce in a way that takes advantage of Salesforce’s massive investments in data and AI without losing the magic that has made Tableau one of the most influential technologies and tech communities of the 21st century.

Tableau Next, which is currently available as part of the Tableau+ SKU, has been developed as three interrelated sets of technologies used to help support a more agentic use of analytics, which simply means that human analysts will have greater access to AI for supporting the busy work of data while business users will have greater access to natural language-based querying of data.

The first of the three sets of technical capabilities are the foundational layers used to support the data. Tableau describes these layers as an open data layer, a semantic layer, a visualization layer, and an action layer. For many long-time Tableau users, there has never really been a need to think about much more than the semantic and visualization layers, but as we’ve already established the times are a-changin’. The most interesting aspect of these layers to me is the re-use of Salesforce platform capabilities to expand Tableau’s functionality. That sentence alone probably needs some explaining.

So, when most people first hear of integration with Salesforce, they think of integration with Salesforce CRM or some combination of Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, or maybe Marketing Cloud. That is not what is meant here. Others with knowledge of Salesforce may think this refers to Heroku or some sort of application development platform. But that is not what is meant here, either. Rather, the type of integration I am referring to here is between Tableau and specific functional aspects of the Salesforce Platform.

For instance, the open data layer that Tableau is providing to support access to external data platforms like Databricks and Snowflake uses the Salesforce Data Cloud to provide real time data access to a wide variety of data lakes, data sources, and business applications. This capability is something that Tableau needed to build to improve data analyst access to data and avoid unnecessary imports and exports. Zero copy data access is always preferrable when possible. The open data layer does not completely eliminate the need to duplicate and transfer data, but it does reduce this need while allowing for greater data access and orchestration.

The action layer is a reuse of another long-time Salesforce platform capability, the process automation capability of Flow. And this use of Flow is really interesting to me because it will allow for greater process automation within Flow. Using the action layer will be less clunky than the current use of Tableau External Actions. Despite Tableau’s dominant market position, it has not been seen as a leading data workflow automation solution. It is no secret that the data analyst will be asked to both support the AI-based creation of commoditized work as well as to be more responsible for automating the contextualization and insight creation associated with new data.

Tableau Semantics is an additional step towards supporting context. Data context is all over the place between data warehouses, data catalogs, ETL tools, and even Retrieval Augmented Generation jobs used for AI models. Although the initial version of Tableau Semantics is focused on Tableau Next, Tableau Cloud, Tableau Server, and the Salesforce platform, which includes access to the recently announced Salesforce Agentforce, future versions are expected to support Tableau Semantics to third-party semantic layers where I believe the real value will lie. Having a full enterprise semantic layer under the umbrella of the solution that is often the first tool that uncovers big strategic insights from data would be extremely helpful.

Currently, the visualization layer of Tableau Next is probably the area that will get the most scrutiny from veteran users, especially as Tableau Next is designed to be an agentic solution while the classic Tableau solution is still most optimized for providing the widest variety of visual capabilities. Tableau Next’s visualizations shine in terms of performance and supporting real-time data in a composable and API-friendly manner. Visualizations in Tableau Next are focused on being application components, which is important as the data analyst will be held increasingly responsible for sharing data outputs across every imaginable channel including reports, dashboards, visualizations, workflow automations, APIs, applications, and agents. The less work analysts have to spend on making visualizations app and API-ready, the better.

Tableau Next Launches Agentic Analytic Skills


The second area of Tableau Next that analysts will notice is the set of pre-built agentic analytics skills that are mostly scheduled to come out in June 2025. Data analysts have understandably been concerned about the agentic and AI capabilities coming into data analyst work as there has been a lot of press over the past three years about AI taking away technical jobs and even pressure from employers to avoid hiring employees to do work that AI can do. So, what is Tableau Next’s AI intended to do?

At Tableau Conference, Tableau Chief Product Officer Southard Jones provided some guidance on areas where Tableau Next would provide additional context for data analysts, especially in areas that data analysts typically either do not enjoy or are unable to keep up with because of the overwhelming volume of potential requests.

Data Pro is an agentic assistant for data preparation and quality that aligns with the Tableau brand promise of supporting data analysts. If the average data analyst rated their work from a 1-5 scale, I am sure that data prep and quality tasks would rank a consistent 1 as the bane to any good analyst’s goal of making data insights shine. Even those concerned about AI will likely welcome any agentic help supporting prep, cleansing, and transformation tasks.
Tableau’s second agentic capability is Concierge, which answers natural language data requests and is aimed at the business user.

Although the data analyst can use Concierge to look over large reams of data and provide some guidance on how to describe the data in human language, the primary intention here seems to be in helping the average business user to create, organize, and leverage basic data charts and visualizations. It will be interesting to see both how these queries end up leading to more complex requests for data analyst support and if this insight creation may end up creating a massive amount of outputs that need to be curated and rationalized by… of course, the data analyst.

Although I am generally a fan of giving more people the self-service access to data that they seek, I do wonder if there will be unexpected challenges from giving people who lack data fluency the access to explore data and rapidly create insights that lead to “top 3 opportunities,” “top 4 opportunities,” “top 5 opportunities” and “top 6 opportunities” all ending up in a departmental dashboard or notebook or holding area of some sort that needs to be cleaned up. Perhaps we will be trading data prep for analytic debt and prep in the near future as the cost of getting sales the data they tactically need in real-time? As long as the business value is there, this is not really a problem as much as a bit of a redefinition of the data analyst’s role. Both Data Pro and Concierge are scheduled for a June 2025 Generally Available launch.

The third Tableau agentic capability, Inspector, is not scheduled for June, but later in 2025. Inspector is designed to constantly monitor data for changes and then provide alerts related to those changes. This is a capability that I believe will be very interesting to combine with Tableau Action Layer, as an alert based on either an IT problem or a customer service problem could quickly set off a series of root-cause analysis visualizations or data pings or agentic descriptions or a rapid response team. Inspector also extends Tableau’s functionality to become increasingly proactive and automated to fit with the data analyst’s increasing need to orchestrate responses while designing data-driven explanations of the truth.


Finally, Tableau is including both internal and external marketplaces to help Tableau users to share and reuse existing data and analytic assets. Over time, internal marketplaces may end up superseding some of the need for static dashboards as marketplace subscriptions or selections allow for greater customization of data connections and data assets. The ability to potentially build valuable data products on an external marketplace could be interesting as well, depending on whether the customer has data that is commercially valuable.

Recommendations for Current and Potential Tableau Customers

Overall, the Tableau Next offering demonstrates both Tableau’s ability to leverage capabilities from the Salesforce platform and the desire to help Tableau data analysts as analysts are being asked to do more and different activities based on their data and analytic capabilities. Based on these functionalities and capabilities, Amalgam Insights provides the following suggestions.

First, look at these capabilities as part of an exploration of how your data analyst job will change. Automation will take away some of your dashboarding and reporting responsibilities. Look at Tableau Next as a starting point to see if there are opportunities to become more of a virtuoso graphic visualizer working off open-ended questions or whether data analyst skills can be used to help orchestrate enterprise analytic outputs and requests more intelligently. I’ll be going deeper into the demands on the next generation data analyst in a separate piece, but this is the time to look at your 100 day plan to figure out what kind of data analyst you want to be and the 1000 day plan to get from here to there.

Second, look at the new capabilities across data layer, semantics, and especially the action layer. Data analysts will be increasingly asked to provide more programmatic and automated access to analytics. Although some of this access will be handled through self-service agents, there will still be demands to manually define actions and to translate agentic and generative AI requests into auditable actions and workflows. See how Tableau Action layer compares to existing data and process automation solutions in your organization and determine how much overlap may exist from a functional perspective.

Third, Amalgam Insights believes this is a good time to look at Concierge in terms of how it will fundamentally change analytic usage in your organization. Concierge is both a massive opportunity and risk, as is any technology that can potentially be used by half of your employees without a lot of training. The UX for Concierge is the same natural language that we have all learned in our generative AI experiments. But Amalgam Insights still recommends a careful multi-stage approach with an intermediate stage of testing with trusted users before opening up Concierge to everyone. The concern here is less about whether end users will get what they want and more about ensuring that there are not unintended consequences for the data and analytics teams. But an approach like Concierge is necessary for business data to have its intended impact on the majority of employees. We have learned that even Tableau can’t turn the majority of employees into data analysts in most companies, so Tableau has taken the next step of making data easier to query and explore.

Tableau Next introduces a new set of capabilities for the data analyst portfolio as data responsibilities continue to expand. The integration of Salesforce platform capabilities into Tableau should be seen as a net positive, as the data and agentic capabilities that Tableau Next is inheriting are strategically important to the whole of Salesforce. The biggest challenge that Tableau analysts now face is to figure out how to reconfigure their job responsibilities to reflect what can now be automated. From a practical perspective, it is likely that analysts need to proactively identify and learn the “value-added” activities that should be supported with the additional time that AI and automation make available. Amalgam Insights provides this list as a preview for our upcoming video “The Future of the Data Scientist.”

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Research Note: Informatica’s Spring 2025 Release Focuses on the Truth, the Whole Truth, and a Lot of AI

Though the promise of both generative and agentic AI have captured the imaginations of the vast majority of executive teams, businesses that have taken on substantial AI projects or proofs of concept have quickly found that AI is only as good as the data used to train models and agents as well as the data used to augment generative workloads and tools. In contrast to the past decade of Big Data where quality often took a backseat to the volumes and variety of data owned by the enterprise, the new era of AI forces companies to look at data quality, metadata at a holistic and universal level, and the ability to delete or modify outdated metadata and data relationships to support models and modern AI approaches. In addition, the constant research coming out monthly on the state of AI from every major consulting firm (Accenture, Deloitte, BCG, KPMG, etc…) keeps showing that the biggest reason for AI failure is that companies consistently spend too much money trying to do it themselves and not enough time doing their due diligence on the out-of-box or easily-configured solutions that are already in the market.

In this light, this research brief is intended to provide highlights of the new Informatica Spring 2025 release that Amalgam Insights believes will provide the greatest business value to the IT audience. This note is not intended to be a fully comprehensive overview of the release, but rather focused on the key features that will provide the greatest new sources of business value for Informatica customers.

From a data integration perspective, Informatica has created a CLAIRE-based Copilot for data integration that can generate ingestion, replication, and integration pipelines that are accompanied by the automation of business and technical logic associated with the pipeline. It is no secret that logic documentation is the bane of many an integration engineer as this task massively slows down the productivity of an integration team in creating and editing pipelines. But in an agile technology world where data integration to support timely and contextually shared versions of the truth is increasingly more important than simply creating a hardcoded single version of truth, the ability to quickly interpret, modify, and remove pipelines as needed is a vital capability that will likely save a minimum of one-to-two engineers of work in the first year for the average enterprise moving toward an organization-wide AI deployment.

Strategically, the most important new capability Informatica is bringing to market is the use of CLAIRE Intelligent Structure Discovery (ISD) to find patterns in unstructured data. For the past 15 years, businesses have been collecting data with the expectation that there are hidden gems. But the dirty honest truth is that most companies have lacked the tools or approach or visibility to even detect the patterns that would lead to value. And, true to Informatica’s long-held status as a neutral third-party in data, CLAIRE ISD is designed to allow users to bring their own preferred large language model, which makes sense in a world where everyone from OpenAI to Anthropic to Cohere to Tencent to Alibaba to Meta to DeepSeek are all providing new and better models on a seemingly daily basis. 

On the integration platform as a service side of Informatica, there are some interesting announcements on hyperscaler connectors and a high-performance application integration runtime that will be vital for cloud-based companies seeking greater agility and more flexible API usage.  And there is a Copilot to support the generation of in-app insights and app-to-app integrations that will be useful for more casual users seeking to create basic integrations, find new data, and summarize data environments. But as an analyst, I will demandingly state that I expected Informatica to provide this as an integration leader in the Era of GenAI.

But Amalgam Insights’ perspective is that the GenAI recipes announced are going to be the most interesting new capability for businesses in iPaaS as they enable process integration with hyperscalers, key enterprise applications, and vertical-specific use cases in areas including patient care and insurance claims. It is interesting to see integration players, including Informatica being asked to coordinate supply chain, commerce, and customer service processes while orchestrating data movement and integration, as this is often assumed to be more aligned to ServiceNow’s role in the enterprise. Not to say that Informatica and ServiceNow will directly compete against each other, but there are more similarities on the process automation side than some may assume.

Informatica has also provided updates to master data management in this new release, including the use of CLAIRE GPT for exploring and documenting master data while matching external data to golden records. To be philosophical for a moment, truth can sometimes feel more ephemeral as time goes by, data changes, and our environmental scenarios change. The ability to quickly update golden records of data is increasingly important to provide more potential context for each individual accessing these records for their own use cases. In an AI world, companies must augment data quickly, they must access golden records of truth quickly, and they must be able to expand the value and context of those golden records across all other relevant data and relevant models to maximize the value of their data.

This Spring Release provides upgrades for Data Governance and Privacy (DGP) as well and the capability that Amalgam Insights finds most interesting is actually not the generative AI functionality. Informatica has included CLAIRE-generated glossary definitions to make data more consistently well described and this does matter. But the most interesting functionality here is the integration of data access management with data governance and catalog to get more granular and individually defined data controls.  To make customer experience, user experience, employee experience, and perhaps even agentic experience better over time, each human user or AI agent or hybrid skill capacity needs to be provided with appropriate data access that may be broader or more narrow than someone else with a nominally similar role. This integration has the potential to make data ecosystems and governance more human, which is a bit of a trend in the generative AI world where we are starting to make computers think more like humans rather than forcing us to place the correct bits into the correct bucket of memory to access the appropriate workflow based on predefined computing resources.

On a final note, there have been multiple platform improvements as well, but the one that caught Amalgam Insights’ attention the most was the improvement to the Informatica Platform Units (IPU) consumption by supporting tagging for chargeback use cases. The open-ended tagging is a valuable starting point, but Informatica’s additional capabilities and the data sources it is typically connected to make it trivial to tag IPU consumption with general ledger-based financial categories that the business cares most about, whether it be cost center, profit center, geography, or strategic initiative. And for those in IT who still have to do actual work, integration with GitLab will be welcomed as the tasks of data integration and governance come closer and closer to the rest of the software development lifecycle and need similar versioning and configuration controls.

Key Recommendation: Amalgam Insights’ analysts understand as well as anyone that a vendor like Informatica can often be taken for granted as a core vendor that excels at data integration and governance. And there is nothing wrong with being consistent and reliable for core IT. But Amalgam Insights recommends that Informatica customers take a closer look at the Spring 2025 release as the significant CLAIRE AI augmentations across every major Informatica category, the ability to discover new truths in unstructured data, and the ability to further augment the truth quickly are all important abilities that AI-ready companies will need to support.

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This Week in Enterprise Tech, Week 56

In this podcast episode of This Week in Enterprise Technology, Hyoun Park and Charles Araujo critically assess the biggest tech news for the CIO office:

  1. Databricks + Anthropic Agentify Claude for the Enterprise
  2. Workato Buys DeepConverse to Strengthen Agentic Support
  3. N8n Raises $60M to Open Up AI Automation
  4. Symphony AI + Microsoft Partner to Automate Industrial Environments
  5. Red Hat AI Boosts Model Testing, Governance Capabilities
  6. US House Orders a SAMOSA to Take On Software Costs
  7. Virginia Vetoes an AI Bill: Repercussions for Your AI?
  8. OpenAI Adopts Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol
  9. CIOs Cull Internal GenAI Projects
  10.  OpenAI Goes Viral Mimicking Studio Ghibli

Buzzsprout Podcast https://www.buzzsprout.com/2319034/episodes/16902573

For this video presentation of This Week in Enterprise Technology, Hyoun Park and Charles Araujo critically assess the biggest tech issues for the CIO office:

  1. Databricks + Anthropic Agentify Claude for the Enterprise
  2. Workato Buys DeepConverse to Strengthen Agentic Support
  3. N8n Raises $60M to Open Up AI Automation
  4. Symphony AI + Microsoft Partner to Automate Industrial Environments
  5. Red Hat AI Boosts Model Testing, Governance Capabilities
  6. US House Orders a SAMOSA to Take On Software Costs
  7. Virginia Vetoes an AI Bill: Repercussions for Your AI?
  8. OpenAI Adopts Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol
  9. CIOs Cull Internal GenAI Projects
  10.  OpenAI Goes Viral Mimicking Studio Ghibli

Databricks and Anthropic Agentify Claude for the Enterprise

Databricks and Anthropic announce a partnership where Databricks Mosaic AI provides tools to build governed agents on proprietary data while Anthropic’s Claude models optimize with hybrid reasoning. Charles and Hyoun discuss how this partnership helps both vendors, each facing massive challengers. 

Databricks: https://www.databricks.com/company/newsroom/press-releases/databricks-and-anthropic-sign-landmark-deal-bring-claude-models 

Workato Acquires DeepConverse to Strengthen Agentic Support

Workato announced the acquisition of AI Agent vendor DeepConverse to enhance agentic support. Hyoun and Charles discuss how these customer support automation capabilities are technically helpful to Workato and how this is also a smart talent acquihire for AI.

BusinessWire Press Release: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20250327092892/en/Workato-Acquires-Generative-AI-Support-Automation-Company-DeepConverse-Further-Investing-in-the-Agentic-Enterprise 

N8N Raises 60 Million to Open Up AI Automation

Germany-based N8N raised $60 million to support AI-based workflow automation. Charles and Hyoun discuss N8N in a rapidly growing world of “AI-powered automation” and their “fair code” commitment to open source. 

TechCrunch: https://techcrunch.com/2025/03/24/fair-code-pioneer-n8n-raises-60m-for-ai-powered-workflow-automation/ 

Symphony AI Partners with Microsoft to Automate Industrial Environments

Symphony AI launched Microsoft Azure IOT Operations to push Industrial AI capabilities to the edge. Hyoun and Charles share insights on bringing operational tech and agentic AI together with some special insights from Symphony’s own Charles Araujo. 

Big Data Wire: https://www.bigdatawire.com/this-just-in/symphonyai-expands-industrial-ai-to-the-edge-with-microsoft-azure-iot-operations/ 

Red Hat AI Enhances Model Testing and Governance Capabilities

Red Hat enhances both OpenShift and Red Hat Enterprise Linux with AI capabilities. Charles and Hyoun disagree on how meaningful this announcement is for the AI world. 

Red Hat: https://www.redhat.com/en/about/press-releases/red-hat-boosts-enterprise-ai-across-hybrid-cloud-red-hat-ai  

US House Orders a SAMOSA  to Take On Software Costs

SAMOSA is the tasty acronym for a bipartisan bill to cut government software costs. This straightforward approach to the US government’s $15 billion software bill makes sense to Charles and Hyoun, but will it get enacted?

The Register: https://www.theregister.com/2025/03/28/congress_software_licensing/ 

Virginia Vetoes an AI Bill: Repercussions for Your AI?

The Virginia Governor recently vetoed a bill requiring regulations for using high risk AI systems. Charles and Hyoun puzzle over why this happened and how this helps tech vendors and users. 

CIODive: https://www.ciodive.com/news/Virginia-AI-bill-veto-HB2094-Youngkin-policy-regulation/743518/ 

OpenAI Adopts Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol for Data Connection

In a rare sign of shared standards and adoption between hyper-competitive AI megastartups, OpenAI has agreed to use Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol (MCP) for data augmentation. This may be as close as AI gets to interoperability and Hyoun and Charles discuss why this is a vitally important announcement for the future of AI. .

TechCrunch: https://techcrunch.com/2025/03/26/openai-adopts-rival-anthropics-standard-for-connecting-ai-models-to-data/ 

Tags: Kyle Wiggers, TechCrunch, Anthropic, OpenAI, Model Context Protocol

CIOs Cull Internal GenAI Projects

As Generative AI spend soars, CIOs start to shift from “Build Your Own Model” to “There’s an App for That”. Charles and Hyoun settle a recent debate on why AI projects were failing. 

CIODive’s Matt Ashare: https://www.ciodive.com/news/generative-ai-software-device-spending-soars-gartner/743888/ 

OpenAI Goes Viral Mimicking Studio Ghibli

OpenAI built another event that, in CEO Sam Altman’s words, “melted the chips” with its recreation of the Ghibli artistic style. Hyoun and Charles explored what risks Altman is taking and what should you consider as you seek to imitate copyrighted works or currently famous artists? 

Yahoo: https://www.yahoo.com/news/openais-ghibli-frenzy-took-dark-122253521.html 

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This Week in Enterprise Tech – Week 55

In this podcast episode of This Week in Enterprise Technology, Hyoun Park and Charles Araujo critically assess the biggest tech news for the CIO office:

  1. NVIDIA Strikes an Agentic Pose with Llama Nemotron
  2. NVIDIA Launches a Laser Show with Photonics Switches
  3. NVIDIA, Google, Disney Take on Reality with Physical AI
  4. NVIDIA Open Sourcing cuOPT
  5. Adobe Summit (How Adobe Can Regain its AI Mojo)
  6. Stop It; Operational Efficiency Is Not Innovation
  7. Research Says Teamwork and AI Make the Dream Work Even Better
  8. We Needed an Executive Order on IT Procurement?
  9. SAP Predicts Data Entry Will Disappear By 2027

Buzzsprout Podcast: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2319034/episodes/16855327

For this video presentation of This Week in Enterprise Technology, Hyoun Park and Charles Araujo critically assess the biggest tech issues for the CIO office:

  1. NVIDIA Strikes an Agentic Pose with Llama Nemotron
  2. NVIDIA Launches a Laser Show with Photonics Switches
  3. NVIDIA, Google, and Disney Take on Reality with Physical AI
  4. NVIDIA Open Sourcing CuOPT
  5. Adobe Summit and How Adobe Can Regain its AI Mojo
  6. Stop it. Operational Efficiency is Not Innovation. 
  7. Research Says Teamwork and AI Make the Dream Work Even Better
  8. We Needed an Executive Order on IT Procurement?
  9. SAP Predicts Data Entry Will Disappear By 2027

NVIDIA Strikes an Agentic Pose with Llama Nemotron

NVIDIA launched the Llama Nemotron models to support agentic AI. Some of the biggest names in tech like Microsoft, SAP, ServiceNow, Accenture, and Deloitte have already committed to using models either to support or augment their current AI efforts. 

We wonder if every tech vendor will end up with their own tweaked versions of Llama that end up fragmenting the market 100 different ways? 

NVIDIA Press Release: https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-launches-family-of-open-reasoning-ai-models-for-developers-and-enterprises-to-build-agentic-ai-platforms

CIO Dive’s Lindsey Wilkinson: https://www.ciodive.com/news/Nvidia-gtc-llama-nemotron-model-family-ai-agent-development/742994/?utm_source=AmalgamInsights 

NVIDIA Launches a Laser Show with Photonics Switches

NVIDIA launches silicon photonics networking switches as part of the NVIDIA Spectrum-X Photonics Ethernet and NVIDIA Quantum-X Photonics InfiniBand platforms. If you had told us a few years ago, that Nvidia would bring out the fastest networking equipment for the enterprise, we would have wondered what you were smoking. Charles explains the business logic while Hyoun wonders how long networking providers will continue to be asleep at the wheel. 

NVIDIA: https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-spectrum-x-co-packaged-optics-networking-switches-ai-factories

Optics.org: https://optics.org/news/16/3/26

NVIDIA, Google, and Disney Take on Reality with Physical AI

NVIDIA is also working on physical AI with Google on both AI Robotics and in creating an open-source physics engine. The latter effort also includes Disney Research, well known for translating cutting-edge research into customer experiences. Will this reality-simulating exercise make its way into cars or mass transit?


NVIDIA: https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-alphabet-and-google-collaborate-on-the-future-of-agentic-and-physical-ai

NVIDIA Open Sourcing CuOPT

NVIDIA opens the floodgates for a well-known analytic use case by open sourcing its cuOPT massively parallelized decision optimization engine. As market leaders including FICO and IBM have already committed to this engine, the strategy seems clear  to drive demand for GPUs. Hyoun and Charles discuss how this execution demonstrates NVIDIA’s focus in use cases in a market that often  struggles to get past nonsensical naming structures. 

NVIDIA: https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/cuopt-open-source/

Adobe Summit and How Adobe Can Regain its AI Mojo

We think Adobe has been a vanguard of AI adoption and innovation, but the tech market at large doesn’t appreciate this role. At Adobe Summit, the tech behemoth made its case for Adobe Experience Platform to be the foundation of a new wave of AI agents for marketers and creatives. Charles and Hyoun debate what else Adobe needs to do to make a case for increased Adobe adoption. 

Adobe on Agents: https://news.adobe.com/news/2025/03/adobe-brings-ai-agents-to-adobe-experience-cloud

Adobe on Gen AI: https://news.adobe.com/news/2025/03/adobe-firefly-services-custom-models-unlock-on-brand-content-production

CIO.com coverage: https://www.cio.com/article/3847382/adobe-makes-agentic-ai-push-with-agent-orchestrator-purpose-built-agents.html 

Stop it. Operational Efficiency is Not Innovation

Strategy consultant Michael Bertha argues that by addressing the “missing middle,” companies can bridge the gap between ideas and execution to innovate. Charles and Hyoun discuss how efficiency and innovation approaches can be quantified and framed. 

CIO.com, Michael Bertha : https://www.cio.com/article/3847331/operational-efficiency-is-not-transformation.html

Research Says Teamwork and AI Make the Dream Work Even Better

Professor Ethan Mollick and a bevy of colleagues from Harvard and P&G came out with a fascinating report showing how AI productivity helps both individuals and groups. Hyoun and Charles dig into this study of P&G revenue and research professionals. Don’t miss Charles’ four-part framework for AI innovation starting with why expert augmentation is a core starting point. 

One Useful Thing – Ethan Mollick: https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/the-cybernetic-teammate

We Needed an Executive Order on IT Procurement?

It is rare that IT procurement reaches the level of either a CEO or president’s executive memos and public statements. But in 2025, IT procurement has finally reached that stage with a new executive order designed to provide directive action for federal government operations. Hyoun and Charles discuss where this EO makes sense and where it might not pass standard enterprise logic. 

White House Executive Order: https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/03/eliminating-waste-and-saving-taxpayer-dollars-by-consolidating-procurement/

The Register’s Brandon Vigliarolo: https://www.theregister.com/2025/03/21/trump_orders_it_contracts_consolidated

SAP Predicts Data Entry Will Disappear By 2027

SAP CEO Christian Klein predicts manual data entry will disappear from SAP by 2027 as SAP continues its focus on trying to look easier and simpler to use. Both Hyoun and Charles have their separate concerns with this messaging as Charles wonders how practical it is and Hyoun wonders if it fits into SAP customer desires. 

CIO’s Ji-Hyun Lee: https://www.cio.com/article/3850705/sap-ceo-christian-klein-ai-transformation-in-korean-enterprises-will-be-driven-by-business-data-cloud-and-jules.html

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This Week in Enterprise Tech, Week 54

In this podcast episode of This Week in Enterprise Technology, Hyoun Park and Charles Araujo critically assess the biggest tech news for the CIO office:

  1. Lip Bu-Tan Takes Over Intel with a New Cadence
  2. ServiceNow Releases Yokohama for the Agentic Era
  3. Robert Herjavec Smells Blood in the Hybrid Cloud
  4. Snowflake Ventures Buys Into Making Data Easier to Use
  5. IBM, Intel, Cisco Team Up for New Data Governance Standards
  6. Can Cisco, LangChain, and Galileo Bring AGNTCY to Agents?
  7. Can AI Project Failure Be a Good Sign?
  8. Is 80% Good Enough for AI in Production?
  9. Creatio Leads the Way for CRM LakeHouses
  10. Rex Woodbury Starts Daybreak Ventures

Buzzsprout Podcast – https://www.buzzsprout.com/2319034/episodes/16813636

For this video presentation of This Week in Enterprise Technology, Hyoun Park and Charles Araujo critically assess the biggest tech issues for the CIO office:

  1. Lip Bu-Tan Takes Over Intel with a New Cadence
  2. ServiceNow Releases Yokohama for the Agentic Era
  3. Robert Herjavec Smells Blood in the Hybrid Cloud
  4. Snowflake Ventures Buys Into Making Data Easier to Use
  5. IBM, Intel, Cisco Team Up for New Data Governance Standards
  6. Can Cisco, LangChain, and Galileo Bring AGNTCY to Agents?
  7. Can AI Project Failure Be a Good Sign?
  8. Is 80% Good Enough for AI in Production?
  9. Creatio Leads the Way for CRM LakeHouses
  10. Rex Woodbury Starts Daybreak Ventures

Lip-Bu Tan Takes Over Intel with a New Cadence

Lip-Bu Tan takes over as the new CEO of Intel with turnaround expectations reminding us of when John Chen took over BlackBerry. But there are no illusions that Tan will have to cut costs and headcount to save the company.

Yahoo Finance: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/intel-found-someone-brave-enough-000825480.html 

The Next Platform https://www.nextplatform.com/2025/03/13/lip-bu-tan-intels-new-and-maybe-last-ceo/amp 

ServiceNow Releases Yokohama for the Agentic Era

ServiceNow releases its Yokohama platform edition. Despite some product launches such as its Development Studio and Service Observability, ServiceNow seemed uncertain on how to thematically describe its progress as an agentic company.

ServiceNow: https://www.servicenow.com/company/media/press-room/platform-yokohama-release.html 

Robert Herjavec Smells Blood in the Hybrid Cloud

There is no bigger proof that hybrid data infrastructure is cool than when a shark comes into the tank: Robert Herjavec leans into his enterprise IT roots in joining Zetaris & speaking with the Wall Street Journal’s Isabelle Bousquette.  


WSJ: https://www.wsj.com/articles/shark-tank-star-robert-herjavec-bets-on-data-management-he-knows-it-isnt-sexy-4f1454e1

Snowflake Ventures Buys Into Making Data Easier to Use

Snowflake Ventures puts its money into making data easier to use with investments in Anomalo and Omni. Anomalo’s Data Quality enterprise-grade capabilities are obvious at a time when “AI is all about the data” seems to be a favorite cliche for CIOs. And Omni is proving that a better mousetrap is still worth building for analytic products with a $69 million funding round.  

TechCrunch: https://techcrunch.com/2025/03/13/omni-is-designing-tools-to-help-companies-make-data-driven-decisions 

Anomalo: https://www.anomalo.com/blog/announcing-snowflake-ventures-strategic-investment-in-anomalo/ 

IBM, Intel, Cisco Team Up for New Data Governance Standards

This effort on data provenance by both the Data and Trust Alliance and OASIS Open is led by a Who’s Who of large enterprise tech: Cisco, IBM, Intel, Microsoft. But it’s also interesting that SAP, Oracle, and Google are nowhere to be found here. Charles and Hyoun debate whether this is enough to set a real standard. 

Oasis Open: https://www.oasis-open.org/2025/03/06/oasis-to-advance-data-provenance-standards/ 

Can Cisco, LangChain, and Galileo Bring AGNTCY to Agents?

Cisco stays busy with an open framework initiative, AGNTCY, for AI agents coming from Cisco, LangChain, and Galileo. This standard builds on Outshift by Cisco’s work in discussing an Internet of Agents. This effort seeks to enhance interoperability among AI agents, allowing them to work together more effectively. Hyoun and Charles discuss the value of this framework at a time when agentic silos are rapidly popping up. 

VentureBeat: https://venturebeat.com/ai/a-standard-open-framework-for-building-ai-agents-is-coming-from-cisco-langchain-and-galileo/ 

Can AI Project Failure Be a Good Sign?

S&P Global Market Intelligence states 42% of companies are eliminating their AI initiatives. Hyoun thinks this is a good thing, because it means that the chaff is being tossed as 40% of IT projects usually fail anyways based on the Project Management Institute’s research. Charles is actually worried that this might mean companies are playing it too safe. 

CIODive: https://www.ciodive.com/news/AI-project-fail-data-SPGlobal/742590/ 

Is 80% Good Enough for AI in Production?

Companies developing generative AI applications are realizing that perfection isn’t necessary and 80% accuracy is often adequate. However, Hyoun and Charles discuss how people need to work with AI for this 80% accuracy to become acceptable.

Runtime News: https://www.runtime.news/r/e5851e7a?m=aa74cd61-a873-4485-9028-fedb54b96b1e 

Creatio Leads the Way for CRM LakeHouses

Creatio has launched an “AI native” CRM platform that takes advantage of generative AI  by allowing users to type in requests instead of navigating complex menus. The Holy Grail of having sales people avoid awkwardly structured data entry and simply asking for answers has long been a CRM goal. Charles and Hyoun look forward to this next generation of CRM and how stalwarts such as Salesforce and HubSpot respond. This approach reminds us of how VC firm Slow Ventures adopted NotebookLM as a CRM and how the combination of data lake and generative AI as an insight engine is still relatively new. 

VentureBeat coverage of Creatio: https://venturebeat.com/ai/crm-provider-creatio-launches-first-ai-native-platform-with-agentic-digital-talent-built-in/ 

VentureBeat Coverage of Notebook LM: https://venturebeat.com/ai/is-googles-notebooklm-a-secret-crm-killer/ 

Rex Woodbury Starts Daybreak Ventures

One of our favorites, Rex Woodbury, starts his own VC fund as he focuses on being known as an investor who writes, not a writer who invests. Charles and Hyoun note the synergies between attracting innovative companies and having the funds and audience to enhance startups. 

Yahoo Finance: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/rex-woodbury-daybreak-ventures-unveils-114039062.html 

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This Week in Enterprise Tech, Week 53

In this podcast episode of This Week in Enterprise Technology, Hyoun Park and Charles Araujo critically assess the biggest tech news for the CIO office:

  1. Salesforce Announces Agentforce 2dx
  2. Is Salesforce Going Into ITSM?
  3. ServiceNow Acquiring Moveworks for Agentic AI
  4. Manus, a General Agent for the Masses
  5. IPO-ready CoreWeave Acquires Weights & Biases
  6. Anthropic Raises 3.5 Billion 
  7. Anysphere Raises at $10 Billion Valuation to Push Cursor
  8. LlamaIndex Llaunches LLamaCloud for Unstructured Data Agents
  9. HPE Among First to Bear Trump Tariffs 
  10. No Doubt, IT Unemployment is Rising
  11. Ransomware’s New Target: IT Vendors
  12. Agentic Management is a Massive Emerging IT Challenge

Podcast Link: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2319034/episodes/16770817

For this video presentation of This Week in Enterprise Technology, Hyoun Park and Charles Araujo critically assess the biggest tech issues for the CIO office:

  1. Salesforce Announces Agentforce 2dx
  2. Is Salesforce Going Into ITSM?
  3. ServiceNow Acquiring Moveworks for Agentic AI
  4. Manus, a General Agent for the Masses
  5. IPO-ready CoreWeave Acquires Weights & Biases
  6. Anthropic Raises 3.5 Billion 
  7. Anysphere Raises at $10 Billion Valuation to Push Cursor
  8. LlamaIndex Llaunches LLamaCloud for Unstructured Data Agents
  9. HPE Among First to Bear Trump Tariffs 
  10. No Doubt, IT Unemployment is Rising
  11. Ransomware’s New Target: IT Vendors
  12. Agentic Management is a Massive Emerging IT Challenge

Salesforce Announces Agentforce 2dx

At TrailblazerDX, Salesforce announced Agentforce 2dx, which includes agents that can work on background tasks and a variety of developer and administrator tools to help scale out Agentic usage. And Salesforce also launched AgentExchange, a marketplace for agents.  Charles and Hyoun discuss how this launch speaks to some of the more subtle, but necessary aspects of expanding Agentic usage in the enterprise. 

Salesforce: https://www.salesforce.com/news/press-releases/2025/03/05/agentforce-2dx-news/ 

CIO.com: https://www.cio.com/article/3840122/salesforce-takes-on-hyperscalers-with-agentforce-2dx-updates.html 

Is Salesforce Going Into ITSM?

Is Salesforce going into ITSM? This intriguing article by Bob Evans caught a quick mention that Benioff made on Salesforce’s most recent earnings call. Hyoun and Charles discuss where they saw potential for Salesforce to enter the ITSM market and compare to ServiceNow’s recent entrance to CRM.

Cloudwars.com: https://cloudwars.com/business-apps/salesforce-vs-servicenow-benioff-jumps-into-itsm-as-mcdermott-targets-crm/ 

ServiceNow Acquiring Moveworks for Agentic AI

ServiceNow announced its intention to acquire Moveworks, an enterprise agentic vendor that has successfully gained market share in a crowded market. Charles and Hyoun discuss how this makes ServiceNow a stronger player in the agentic AI market. 


MSN.com: https://www.msn.com/en-ae/money/companies/servicenow-nears-deal-to-buy-ai-assistant-maker-moveworks/ar-AA1AzBEm 

Manus, a General Agent for the Masses

Manus is a Chinese general AI agent that takes on tasks autonomously without long rounds of iterative prompting. Charles and Hyoun discuss how this agent seems to deliver on the promise of Generative AI for everyday tasks. 

Forbes – https://www.forbes.com/sites/craigsmith/2025/03/08/chinas-autonomous-agent-manus-changes-everything/ 

Manus Website: https://manus.im

IPO-Ready CoreWeave Acquires Weights & Biases

While preparing for an IPO, CoreWeave announced that it was preparing to acquire Weights and Biases,, which has been a strong enabler for both models and AI-based applications. W&B has been an important part of the enterprise AI toolkit for years and this acquisition helps CoreWeave become a more strategic provider for AI compared to its current role as an AI hyperscaler and compute aggregator. 

Weights and Biases: https://wandb.ai/wandb/wb-announcements/reports/W-B-being-acquired-by-CoreWeave–VmlldzoxMTY0MDI1MQ 

Anthropic Raises 3.5 Billion 

In the battle of the titans that is the foundational AI model space, Anthropic announces another $3.5 billion in funding. Hyoun and Charles discuss the relative focus Anthropic has shown compared to OpenAI’s grandiose plans for a global data center footprint, as well as the more tactical successes that Anthropic has had of late, including Claude 3.7 Sonnet and Claude Code.  

Anthropic: https://techcrunch.com/2025/03/03/anthropic-raises-3-5b-to-fuel-its-ai-ambitions/ 

Anysphere Raises at $10 Billion Valuation to Push Cursor

The coding assistant space is hot and Anysphere Cursor is considered the market leader in this space. In response to Codeium’s recent funding, which we also covered, Anysphere is also raising money at an estimated 70X earnings. Charles and Hyoun discuss this bubble. 

TechCrunch: https://techcrunch.com/2025/03/07/cursor-in-talks-to-raise-at-a-10b-valuation-as-ai-coding-sector-booms/ 

Prior coverage of Codeium: https://amalgaminsights.com/2025/02/25/this-week-in-enterprise-tech-week-51/ 

LlamaIndex Llaunches LLamaCloud for Unstructured Data Agents

Along with its recent funding, LlamaIndex launched its LLamaCloud offering for structured data agents. Hyoun and Charles discuss how quickly the agentic AI market is evolving, and how structured data is increasingly important from a work and process perspective.

TechCrunch: https://techcrunch.com/2025/03/04/llamaindex-launches-a-cloud-service-for-building-unstructed-data-agents/ 

HPE Among First to Bear Trump Tariffs 

HPE is among the first companies in tech to fall victim to the Trump tariffs as it provided muted guidance based on future facing revenue and the increased costs of doing business and then faced a 20% drop in stock price. Charles and Hyoun discuss the reality that every US based hardware company likely has some relationship with either Canada or Mexico to build its equipment. 

The Register: https://www.theregister.com/2025/03/07/hpe_q1_2025/ 

No Doubt, IT Unemployment is Rising

Based on a recent CIO Dive article that shows that IT unemployment rose in February, Charles and Hyoun discuss repercussions for the CIO office in both training and hiring staff.

CIODive: https://www.ciodive.com/news/IT-unemployment-february-compTIA-2025/741954/ 

CompTIA: https://www.comptia.org/newsroom/press-releases/tech-employment-across-labor-market-increases-while-other-indicators-retreat-according-to-comptia-reporting 

Ransomware’s New Target: IT Vendors

Global ransomware pirates have a new target: IT vendors. Although Charles and Hyoun recently celebrated that ransomware demands were lower last year, this does not mean that they went away. We provide some advice on vendor selection and contractual reviews.

CIODive: https://www.ciodive.com/news/vendor-driven-cyberattacks-losses/741686/  

Prior Coverage of Ransomware Down 35% https://youtu.be/KsVicmSzORo?si=LlWZMCI2cE3IkO8r 

Agentic Management is a Massive Emerging IT Challenge

The CIO piece by Paula Rooney highlights concerns for agentic management from a variety of executives and vendor representatives. Hyoun and Charles note how there are many conflicting and varied concerns associated with the technical and organizational management of agents.

CIO.com: https://www.cio.com/article/3836084/it-leaders-brace-for-the-ai-agent-management-challenge.html 

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This Week in Enterprise Tech, Week 52

In this podcast episode of This Week in Enterprise Technology, Hyoun Park and Charles Araujo critically assess the biggest tech news for the CIO office:

  1. Salesforce Hypes AI Success But Agentic Demand Still Lags
  2. IDC Launches AI-Based TechMatch for Software Selection
  3. IBM Plans to Acquire DataStax, Finishes Acquiring HashiCorp 
  4. Take This Open Source Tech and Fork It
  5. RIP Skype: August 29, 2003 – May 5, 2025
  6. Overcommit and Don’t Invest: Microsoft Cuts Data Center Leases
  7. Wasabi Reports Data Center Costs Out Of Control
  8. Pew: Only 12% of Workers are Trained on AI
  9. Sergey Brin Wants Googlers In the Office Five Days a Week
  10. DOGE Shuts Down 18F, An Agency that Cut Software Costs

Buzzsprout Podcast Link: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2319034/episodes/16730460

For this video presentation of This Week in Enterprise Technology, Hyoun Park and Charles Araujo critically assess the biggest tech issues for the CIO office:

  1. Salesforce Hypes AI Success But Agentic Demand Still Lags
  2. IDC Launches AI-Based TechMatch for Software Selection
  3. IBM Plans to Acquire DataStax, Finishes Acquiring HashiCorp 
  4. Take This Open Source Tech and Fork It
  5. RIP Skype: August 29, 2003 – May 5, 2025
  6. Overcommit and Don’t Invest: Microsoft Cuts Data Center Leases
  7. Wasabi Reports Data Center Costs Out Of Control
  8. Pew: Only 12% of Workers are Trained on AI
  9. Sergey Brin Wants Googlers In the Office Five Days a Week
  10. DOGE Shuts Down 18F, An Agency that Cut Software Costs

Salesforce Hypes AI Success But Agentic Demand Still Lags

A Tale of Two Agentforces. It was the best of times. It was the worst times. Salesforce ended its 2025 fiscal year with a ‘quarter of Agentforce’ with over 3,000 paying enterprise customers   The company reported $900 million in revenue from its Data Cloud and AI segment, up nearly 120% from the previous year. But, Salesforce has admitted that demand for Agentforce is lower than expected, pushing back revenue expectations to 2027. Which of these two realities actually describes salesforce best? Charles and Hyoun duke it out.

Roberto Torres of CIO Dive: https://www.ciodive.com/news/salesforce-agentforce-AI-Q4-2025/741212/ 

Tom Krazit of Runtime News: https://www.runtime.news/salesforce-fesses-up-demand-for-ai-agents-is-slow/ 

IDC Launches AI-Based TechMatch for Software Selection

IDC is debuting a software selection tool based on analyst input. For large analyst firms, software selection support has been a challenge as many junior analysts have practically become contact center representatives taking calls and basing recommendations on Marketscapes, Marketscopes, Magic, and other existing research documents. Does this change the industry analyst market? Hyoun and Charles wrestle with this issue. 

CIO.com: https://www.cio.com/article/3834832/idc-launches-techmatch-to-help-businesses-select-software-vendors.html 

IBM Plans to Acquire DataStax, Finishes Acquiring HashiCorp 

IBM had a good week as they both planned to acquire long time AI data partner DataStax and completed its Hashicorp purchase. IBM has focused on solving large problems regarding IT orchestration and modernizing large data environments. Charles and Hyoun discuss how both acquisitions fit strategically into IBM‘s specific hybrid cloud strategy for large enterprises. .


Datastax: https://www.datastax.com/blog/ibm-plans-to-acquire-datastax 

Hyoun’s LinkedIn Response: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/hyounpark_accelerating-production-ai-and-bringing-nosql-activity-7300215943660552193-Iz6x

IBM: https://newsroom.ibm.com/2025-02-27-ibm-completes-acquisition-of-hashicorp,-creates-comprehensive,-end-to-end-hybrid-cloud-platform 

Take This Open Source Tech and Fork It

Dr Dawn Foster, director of data science at the CHAOSS Project, presented at the State Of Open Con ’25 in London regarding three major Open Source projects – Terraform, Redis, and Elasticsearch – and how they were forked after their licenses were changed for commercial reasons. Hyoun and Charles discuss repercussions for the CIO office in maintaining Open Source with a nod to Tidelift. 

The Register: https://www.theregister.com/2025/02/24/open_source_licensing/ 

RIP Skype: August 29, 2003 – May 5, 2025

Microsoft has officially committed to an end date for Skype, a product that helped define the new world of computer-aided communications, but struggled to keep up with market demands over time. Microsoft transferred a lot of Skype capabilities to Teams and largely crippled Skype’s community over the past five years. Charles and Hyoun lament the end of an era and imagine what might have been. 

Microsoft: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2025/02/28/the-next-chapter-moving-from-skype-to-microsoft-teams/ 

Overcommit and Don’t Invest: Microsoft Cuts Data Center Leases

Based on a TD Cowen research note, Microsoft seems to have both canceled some leases and refrained from moving forward with other leases as Microsoft cuts back on data commitments. Even mighty Microsoft has limits on AI related spend as the financial considerations have changed rapidly. Hyoun and Charles marvel at how data center capacity is still a big CIO concern. 

ForexLive: https://www.forexlive.com/news/here-is-the-td-data-center-note-that-has-everyone-buzzing-20250223/ 

Morningstar: https://www.morningstar.com/news/marketwatch/2025022430/the-research-note-thats-raising-eyebrows-microsoft-reportedly-is-cancelling-data-center-leases 

Wasabi Reports Data Center Costs Out Of Control

Cloud Storage provider Wasabi reports 62% of its research respondents overran their budget in 2024. Charles and Hyoun bemoan how egress fees are a massive cost tracking concern for cloud IT. 

Wasabi: https://wasabi.com/company/newsroom/press-releases/over-half-of-organizations-globally-experience-it-or-business-delays-due-to-cloud-storage-fees-according-to-wasabi-s-2025-global-cloud-storage-index 

Pew: Only 12% of Workers are Trained on AI

A recent Pew Research Center survey shows only 12% of workers have been trained on AI over the last year. But Charles thinks that Pew is asking the wrong question when it comes to AI adoption. 

CIO Dive: https://www.ciodive.com/news/workers-lack-AI-training/740920/ 

Sergey Brin Wants Google Workers In the Office Five Days a Week 

Google co-founder Sergey Brin suggests the Gemini team should work harder in the office. Despite his comments, Google still maintains a three-day office work policy. But both Charles and Hyoun have different reasons to think that Sergey is misplacing his blame for Google’s struggles in AI.

New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/27/technology/google-sergey-brin-return-to-office.html

DOGE Shuts Down 18F, An Agency that Cut Software Costs

DOGE takes a look at  government software license utilization, a topic that both Charles and Hyoun have plenty of experience with. We were… not impressed with the approach. And Elon Musk shut down the 18F agency & got rid of FinOps pros who had a variety of big wins both to reduce the cost of government and make access to government services easier, such as its recent free tax filing service. 

Wired: https://www.wired.com/story/doge-software-license-cancel-federal-budget/ 

Silicon Angle: https://siliconangle.com/2025/03/02/elon-musks-doge-shuts-gsas-technology-unit/ 

Mark Cuban’s take: https://bsky.app/profile/mcuban.bsky.social/post/3lje6uqhmdc2w 

18F Guide to Software Selection: https://guides.18f.gov/derisking-government-tech/ 

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This Week in Enterprise Tech , Week 51

This Week in Enterprise Technology, Hyoun Park and Charles Araujo critically assess the biggest tech news for the CIO office:

  1. Microsoft Quantum Takes a Majorana Step Forward
  2. Alibaba and Apple Both Commit $50B to AI
  3. Avaya Cuts Off Customers with <200 Seats
  4. Gitlab Being Sued For Providing Believable AI Hype
  5. TMobile Wins NYC 911 Contract with Network Slicing
  6. Ready for a Personalized AI Agent? PIN AI thinks so
  7. Codeium Raises at Near-$3 Billion Valuation to Assist Coders
  8. Is Your  Most Important Customer AI
  9. xAI Plays Fast and Loose with Grok 3 Benchmarks

Audio Podcast: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2319034/episodes/16688357

Microsoft Quantum Takes a Majorana Step Forward

Microsoft made big news with its quantum announcement of the Majorana chip, which apparently is not marijuana. Charles and Hyoun discuss the quantum science behind this chip and what it could mean for the long-term feature of the CIO.

Source

Wired: https://www.wired.com/story/microsoft-just-claimed-a-quantum-breakthrough-a-quantum-physicist-explains-what-it-means/ 

Alibaba Commits Over $50B to AI, while Apple Goes Further

Alibaba committed $52 billion to AI for the next three years. Although this is more than Alibaba has invested over the past decade in the space, is it enough? Hyoun and Charles discuss the increasingly heated global AI Cold War.

Sources

Morningstar: https://www.morningstar.com/news/dow-jones/20250224715/alibaba-to-spend-more-than-52-billion-in-ai-cloud-over-next-three-years 

The Register: https://www.theregister.com/2025/02/23/asia_tech_news_roundup/ 

The Verge: https://www.theverge.com/news/618172/apple-500-billion-us-investment-tariffs-trump 

Avaya Cuts Off Customers with Fewer than 200 Seats

Avaya plans to cut off cloud-based contact center customers with less than 200 seats in an ongoing trend for large companies to focus more on the enterprise and abandon their smaller customers. Charles and Hyoun ponder what this means for CIOs in managing key business technologies. 

Source
Avaya: https://news.avaya.com/axp-evolution-update-partners 

Gitlab Being Sued For Providing Believable AI Hype

Gitlab is facing multiple lawsuits because they were apparently too optimistic about their AI capabilities. Charles and Hyoun ponder whether this is justified and if the CIO faces potential liability or due diligence concerns. 

Source

The Register: https://www.theregister.com/2025/02/20/gitlab_thrice_sued/ 

T-Mobile Wins NYC 911 Contract with Network Slicing

T-Mobile has won the New York City contract for 911 services based on its ability to provide a capability called network slicing on its 5G network. This allows New York City to carve out a portion of the network for emergency services. Hyoun and Charles wonder if this is a precursor to network slicing used either by vendors or enterprises to gain preferential access to networks and Internet.

Source

Fierce Network: https://www.fierce-network.com/wireless/t-mobile-pushes-network-slicing-major-nyc-deal-announced 

Ready for a Personalized AI Agent? PIN AI Thinks So

PIN AI has an interesting vision for a secure AI agent, including both a local app and large language model to become your personalized intelligence network. Charles and Hyoun discuss how this looks like the future of AI, not just at the personal level, but the enterprise as well.

Source

Fast Company: https://www.fastcompany.com/91278338/pin-ai-encrypted-assistant-app-launch-llm 

Codeium Raises at Near-$3 Billion Valuation to Assist Coders

Codeium, an AI code assistant, is raising money at a $2.85 billion evaluation, making it another new AI unicorn. But what makes Codeium so much more valuable than every other code assistant? Charles and Hyoun wrestle over what makes Codeium special when Anysphere, Microsoft, and Google have all made waves in this market. 

Source

TechCrunch: https://techcrunch.com/2025/02/19/ai-coding-startup-codeium-in-talks-to-raise-at-an-almost-3b-valuation-sources-say/ 

Your Most Important Customer May Be AI

Scott Mulligan of the MIT Technology Review takes on the interesting idea that our most important customer is now AI. Hyoun and Charles discuss why this is so difficult as every AI is starting to establish its own preferences, biases, and limits. 

Source

MIT Technology Review: https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/02/19/1112076/your-most-important-customer-may-be-ai/ 

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TWIET 50 – Feb. 19, 2025

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:

  1. The Dissection of Intel Begins…
  2. AWS Marketplace Changes Affect SaaS FinOps Strategy
  3. Glean Releases Agents to Manage Data
  4. Snowflake Brings Cortex Agents to Public Preview
  5. SAP & Databricks Team Up to Unlock SAP Data
  6. Workday Releases Agent System of Record
  7. Outshift by Cisco Discusses Internet of Agents
  8. PegaSystems Points Out Employee Concerns for Agents
  9. Anthropic Economic Index Measures Enterprise AI Usage
  10. Microsoft Research Discovers AI Atrophies Cognitive Confidence
  11. 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. 

WSJ: https://www.wsj.com/tech/broadcom-tsmc-eye-possible-intel-deals-that-would-split-storied-chip-maker-966b143b

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. 


Glean: https://www.glean.com/press/glean-makes-horizontal-ai-agents-for-enterprises-expands-work-ai-with-glean-agents 

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 

Workday: https://investor.workday.com/2025-02-11-The-Next-Generation-of-Workforce-Management-is-Here-Workday-Unveils-New-Agent-System-of-Record 

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/ 

Microsoft: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/uploads/prod/2025/01/lee_2025_ai_critical_thinking_survey.pdf 

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 

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TWIET 49 – Feb. 12, 2025

This Week in Enterprise Technology, Episode 49, Hyoun Park and Charles Araujo critically assess the biggest tech news for the CIO Office:

  1. Good News:  Ransomware Down 35%!
  2. AWS S3 Bucket Registrations: A Sneaky Backdoor Threat
  3. Zoho Day and the Race to Agentic AI
  4. Fei Fei Li: “It Takes 50 Dollars to Distill A Reasoning Model”
  5. Will Semiconductor Tariffs Force CIOs to Close the Deal?
  6. Is the CIO a Policy Strategist or Rubber Stamp?
  7. Will the Windows 10 Sunset Force AI PCs into the Workplace?
  8. CIOs Bullish on AI, IT Employees Not So Much
  9. Where Salesforce AI’s Super Bowl Ad Missed the Mark

Good News: Ransomware Down 35%!

Some good news from 2024: Ransomware payments were down 35% last year, as no new large cartels got into the business and law enforcement was better at tracing down threats. Are we safe now, or is this the calm before the storm? Charles and Hyoun put on their strategy hats and explore the future of Ransomware. 

Chainalysis: https://www.chainalysis.com/blog/crypto-crime-ransomware-victim-extortion-2025/ 

AWS S3 Bucket Registrations: a Sneaky Backdoor Threat

Watchtowr Labs found a lot of examples of software update and binary requests associated with abandoned S3 buckets that could have been replaced with malware or backdoor access. Hyoun and Charles discuss how challenging it has become to manage cloud infrastructure.  

Watchtowr: https://labs.watchtowr.com/8-million-requests-later-we-made-the-solarwinds-supply-chain-attack-look-amateur/ 

Zoho Day and the Race to Agentic AI

Zoho has introduced Zia AI Agents to automate tasks across its products, while Sridhar Vembu has stepped down as CEO. As long-time observers, Hyoun and Charles discuss what this makes for Zoho’s 900,000 global customers. 


CX Today: https://www.cxtoday.com/crm/zoho-previews-ai-agents-commits-to-low-pricing-shares-more-on-its-ceo-transition/ 

Fei-Fei Li: “It Takes 50 Dollars to Distill A Reasoning Model”

Researchers at Stanford and the University of Washington developed an AI reasoning model for under $50, training the s1 model with Gemini and Alibaba Qwen 2.5. Charles and Hyoun raise questions about the future of AI innovation, as smaller teams can cheaply replicate advanced models. 

TechCrunch: https://techcrunch.com/2025/02/05/researchers-created-an-open-rival-to-openais-o1-reasoning-model-for-under-50/ 

Will Semiconductor Tariffs Force CIOs to Close the Deal?

Tariffs are now a strategic concern for the CIO. Get your timing wrong and your data center costs could spike unexpectedly. With potential tariffs on Taiwanese semiconductor chips on the horizon, Charles and Hyoun debate the strategy and timing for purchasing new compute or just outsourcing to the cloud.

The Register: https://www.theregister.com/2025/02/04/nvidia_trump_tariffs/ 

Is the CIO a Policy Strategist or a Rubber Stamp?

The Trump administration wants to change the CIO position from a “career-reserved” or merit-based position to a political appointment with the logic that the CIO ends up defining how policy is deployed. Charles and Hyoun consider how important the CIO should be considered as a strategic executive for deploying policy, or if the CIO should be considered a rubber stamp for the CEO’s work.

CHCOC.gov: https://tinyurl.com/OPMCIOMemo  

Will the Windows 10 Sunset Force AI PCs into the Workplace?

Now that Microsoft has announced a sunset date for Windows 10, CIOs need to figure out their next PC refresh. Of course Microsoft will push for AI-ready Windows 11 devices, with room for small or distilled models in the OS. Charles and Hyoun discuss the Microsoft AI PC strategy for the enterprise.

Paula Rooney on CIO.com: https://www.cio.com/article/3812887/will-the-end-of-windows-10-accelerate-cio-interest-in-ai-pcs.html 

CIOs Bullish on AI, IT Employees Not So Much

IT employees are not excited about AI, but CIOs and CTOs believe they will soon be essential in businesses. However, many IT professionals are skeptical due to concerns about deployment challenges and past AI project failures. Charles and Hyoun debate the real time frames for realistic AI success. 

Grant Gross on CIO.com: https://www.cio.com/article/3815935/cios-are-bullish-on-ai-agents-it-employees-not-so-much.html  

Where Salesforce AI’s Super Bowl Ad Missed the Mark

Salesforce’s ad featuring Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson highlights the confusing role of AI in everyday life. Instead of solving real problems, the ad portrays a bizarre scenario where AI is needed for basic tasks like dining and making reservations. Hyoun and Charles ponder why AI ads are spending so much just to miss the mark. 

Defector: https://defector.com/salesforce-is-using-a-hallucination-to-sell-ai 

Salesforce AI Super Bowl Ad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s4JNLL7U8H8

Google Gemini Super Bowl Ad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7e6g11BJc0

ServiceNow AI Ad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8IqR735mAo4