Category: Data Science

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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 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 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 Episode 44

Welcome back to This Week in Enterprise Technology, Hyoun Park and Charles Araujo analyze the latest enterprise technology announcements and how they will affect your business and your bosses’ expectations.

Join TWIET as we guide CIOs and technical managers through the strategic ramifications behind the vendor hype, product innovation, and the avalanches of money going in and out of enterprise tech. As always, this podcast is available in audio, video, and broken up into sections for your benefit.

As always, if you enjoy this, like, subscribe, comment, and get in touch with us. 

Audio – https://www.buzzsprout.com/2319034/episodes/16394894

Topics for this week include:

  1. How Does Florida’s Pornhub Ban Affect Content Access?
  2. 6th Circuit Kills Net Neutrality: IT Investment Concerns
  3. Has Google Figured Out GenAI’s Killer App?
  4. Agentforce 2.0 Evolves Enterprise Agentic AI
  5. What Is the Future of AI Pricing?
  6. Aaron Levie Clarifies the Value of AI Access to PCs
  7. Bench’s Rough Winter Break: Enterprise SaaS Considerations
  8. Felicis & The Promise of Lights Out Ops
  9. Is AI Your New Organizational Strategist?
  10. Are AI Hallucinations About Being Wrong or Being Creative?

1. How Does Florida’s Pornhub Ban Affect Content Access?

At the beginning of 2025, Florida placed a new age and ID verification requirement for adult content leading to notorious site PornHub leaving the state. Behind the shock value, this is a trend in the United States with 19 states now having specific ID verification requirements for certain types of content. What does this mean for businesses seeking to provide content?

Source:

Jessica Lyons on The Register: https://www.theregister.com/2025/01/05/pornhub_vpn_demand_surge/

2. 6th Circuit Kills Net Neutrality: IT Investment Concerns

The United States Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals decided on January 2, 2025 to repeal the concept of net neutrality, the idea that content should be treated equally by networks. Now that networks have no legal obligation to treat content equally, what does this mean for software providers and for large enterprises providing content over the Internet? Will networks play favorites? Will hyperscalers need to team up with networks?

Sources:

Brian Barrett’s coverage on Wired: https://www.wired.com/story/net-neutrality-ruling-dead/ 

US 6th Circuit Court Ruling: https://www.opn.ca6.uscourts.gov/opinions.pdf/25a0002p-06.pdf 

3. Has Google Figured Out GenAI’s Killer App?

Despite Google’s undeniable groundbreaking work in AI, Google is finding itself playing catch-up in the enterprise AI world. Google DeepMind has unveiled Project Astra and Gemini 2.0  to enhance generative AI. Astra is intended to act as a multimodal universal assistant using text, speech, and images. The technology is interesting and novel, but Charles and Hyoun debate whether Google will figure out how to productize this technology. 


Source:

Will Douglas Heaven on MIT Technology Press: https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/12/11/1108493/googles-new-project-astra-could-be-generative-ais-killer-app/  

4. Agentforce 2.0 Evolves Enterprise Agentic AI

Salesforce announced Agentforce 2.0, one of the first 2.0 products in the Agentic AI world. Among other things, Salesforce upgraded its agentic capabilities, included more of Saleforce’s ecosystem directly into the Agentforce offering, and doubled its commitment to AI sales. Hyoun and Charles discuss how the Salesforce AI technology ecosystem stands up in a heated AI market. 

Source:

Salesforce: https://www.salesforce.com/news/press-releases/2024/12/17/agentforce-2-0-announcement/ 

5. What Is the Future of AI Pricing?

CIO.com’s Grant Gross takes on one of the most interesting topics in tech: the conundrum of pricing for AI. Charles and Hyoun explore a varied portfolio of pricing strategies and maturity models, along with a classic Harvard Business Review article, that will shape the future of AI FinOps and cost. 

Source

Grant Gross on CIO.com: https://www.cio.com/article/3624540/how-will-ai-agents-be-priced-cios-need-to-pay-attention.html

6. Aaron Levie Clarifies the Value of AI Access to PCs

Box CEO Aaron Levie is no stranger to sticking his neck out when it comes to predicting the future of enterprise software. In a recent X post, Levie elucidates the value of AI agents accessing browsers and personal computers from an information access perspective. Charles and Hyoun discuss a future where the agent is more empowered to directly connect users and apps. 

Source:

Aaron Levie: https://x.com/levie/status/1867027506286694539 

7. Bench’s Rough Winter Break: Enterprise SaaS Considerations

Bench was once known for having raised over $110 million to support small and medium business accounting needs and posted of having over 35,000 US customers. But on December 27, all that changed as venture debt became due, and Bench was unable to pay. Hyoun and Charles warn of how this may be a harbinger for the volatility of SaaS solutions in 2025 that have not provided a Plan B to customers. 

Sources:

Bench FAQs: https://www.bench.co/transition-faqs

Josh Scott on BetaKit: https://betakit.com/bench-had-a-crazier-holiday-break-than-your-startup/

8. Felicis Outlines The Promise of Lights Out Ops

IT ops has long been a consuming, demanding, and challenging job to support. Venture capital firm Felicis provides its vision on the future of IT management with a strong assist from AI. Charles and Hyoun are fully onboard with this vision, but we point out some of the challenges of taking on current enterprise stalwarts, such as ServiceNow and Atlassian. 

Source:

Felicis: https://www.felicis.com/insight/ai-it-qa-incident-response 

9. Is AI Your New Organizational Strategist?

On Wired, Wharton professor Ethan Mollick argues that AI can serve as a new organizational management strategist to help connect people, show new relationships between employees, and even help structure the company more optimally. Charles and Hyoun debate AI‘s readiness to serve as the strategist both from a discovery perspective and whether existing employee management systems are ready to support this vision. 

Source:

Wired.com: https://www.wired.com/story/artificial-intelligence-work-organizational-strategy/

10. Are AI Hallucinations About Being Wrong or Being Creative?

What is an AI hallucination? In this recent New York Times article, scientists including recent Nobel Prize winner David Baker are described as using AI hallucinations in their research when they are using AI to design theoretical or prospective proteins. Is using AI to take a defensible and novel approach a hallucination? Or are we starting to overuse the term hallucination when it comes to AI? Charles and Hyoun dig into the problematic nature of the AI hallucination. 

Source:

New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/23/science/ai-hallucinations-science.html?unlocked_article_code=1.j04.sL5u.KAcpuZWQiabS&smid=url-share 

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TWIET Episode 43

Welcome back to This Week in Enterprise Technology, Hyoun Park and Charles Araujo analyze the latest enterprise technology announcements and how they will affect your business and your bosses’ expectations.

Join TWIET as we guide CIOs and technical managers through the strategic ramifications behind the vendor hype, product innovation, and the avalanches of money going in and out of enterprise tech. As always, this podcast is available in audio, video, and broken up into sections for your benefit.

Audio Podcast: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2319034/episodes/16252199

This Week in Enterprise Technology, Hyoun Park and Charles Araujo critically assess last week’s biggest tech news:

  1. AWS Enhances Amazon Connect with Generative AI Tools
  2. AWS Takes on AI Hallucination Challenges
  3. AWS Bedrock Adds Multi-Agent Orchestration and Model Routing
  4. AWS Centralizes AI Efforts with SageMaker
  5. Casey Newton Examines AI Skepticism’s Comforts
  6. Emergence AI Coordinates Multi-Vendor Agents
  7. Exa Redefines Generative Search Experiences
  8. MLCommons Benchmarks LLM Output Risks
  9. South Korea’s Unrest Threatens Global Memory Supply
  10. Werner Vogels on Managing “Simplexity”
  11. Broadcom Adjusts to Minimize VMware Migration Risks

AWS Upgrades Amazon Connect with New Generative AI Features


Amazon Connect has been a successful cloud contact center product and contact center has been one of the clearest areas for AI to provide productivity benefits and increase potential revenue transactions,  AWS re:invent was an opportunity to announce the latest generative AI advancements within Connect. Charles and Hyoun discuss the opportunities for contact centers to adopt AI.

Source:
Maria Deutscher from Silicon Angle: https://siliconangle.com/2024/12/01/aws-upgrades-amazon-connect-new-generative-ai-features/ 

AWS Tackles AI Hallucinations

AWS launches Automated Reasoning checks to cross reference outputs with known facts and enterprise data. Although this is not as novel as AWS was stating, it is a valuable step forward. Hyoun and Charles debate the utility of this Automated Reasoning checks and whether AI hallucinations really matter or are just a sign of AI immaturity and inexperience. 

Source:

Kyle Wiggers on TechCrunch: https://techcrunch.com/2024/12/03/aws-new-service-tackles-ai-hallucinations/ 

AWS Bedrock Updates: Multi-Agent Collaboration, Model Routing

AWS announced interesting AI management updates for Amazon Bedrock. Both multi-agent management and prompt routing across models will be useful for enterprises seeking to expand the utility and cost structure of AI. Charles and Hyoun wonder if this agent management will cover the bill given the wide variety of agents that are starting to appear in the enterprise. . 

Source:

AWS: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/introducing-multi-agent-collaboration-capability-for-amazon-bedrock/ 

AWS Wraps Everything Together Under Sagemaker

AWS create a new umbrella brand that includes data studio, data lake, analytics, and data management. Hyoun and Charles argue about whether Sagemaker, best known as a data science tool, was the right umbrella brand for these data efforts.

Source:

AWS: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/introducing-the-next-generation-of-amazon-sagemaker-the-center-for-all-your-data-analytics-and-ai/ 

Casey Newton Examines AI Skepticism’s Comforts

One of TWIET’s favorite journalists, Casey Newton, weigh in on the false comfort of AI skepticism. Newton argues that the potential harm of AI is being underestimated by those who simply think that AI is full of lies or incompetent.  Charles and Hyoun discuss a more realistic path for IT departments to consider as they deploy AI.

Source:

Casey Newton on Platformer: https://www.platformer.news/ai-skeptics-gary-marcus-curve-conference/ 

Emergence AI Coordinates Multi-Vendor Agents

Start up Emergence AI announced its autonomous multi-agent AI orchestrator. At a time on every enterprise platform seems to be coming out with its own set of agents, Hyoun and Charles think it is about time for a third-party agent orchestration solution to hit the market and get some traction.

Source

Carl Franzen on VentureBeat: https://venturebeat.com/ai/emergences-ai-orchestrator-launches-to-do-what-big-tech-offerings-cant-play-well-with-others/ 

Exa Redefines Generative Search Experiences

The MIT Technology Review covered a startup named Exa taking a novel approach to Gen AI based web searches with the goal of using the web like a database. Charles and Hyoun discuss the scale and results for this approach.

Source:

Will Douglas Heaven on MIT Technology Review: https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/12/03/1107726/the-startup-trying-to-turn-the-web-into-a-database/ 

MLCommons Benchmarks LLM Output Risks

MLCommons has released its AIluminate 1.0 benchmarks to describe several categories of harm including sex crimes, violence, and defamation risks. Hyoun and Charles discuss past challenges regarding model benchmarking and risks. 

Source:

MLCommons: https://ailuminate.mlcommons.org/benchmarks/ 

South Korea’s Unrest Threatens Global Memory Supply

South Korea saw government unrest in an attempted military coup last week. Although we are not expert political scientists, international supply chains do affect our ability to source IT. We discussed the ramifications of South Korea earning 60% of the global memory, check market and considerations for the CIO in looking at geopolitical strife.

Source:

Prasanth Aby Thomas on CIO.com: https://www.cio.com/article/3617847/south-koreas-political-unrest-threatens-the-stability-of-global-tech-supply-chains.html 

Werner Vogels On Managing “Simplexity”

At Amazon re:invent, Amazon CTO pointed out both that complexity is inevitable and that there are two types of complexity that are important for technical audiences to consider, including a new concept of “simplexity”.. Hyoun is reminded of the Nassim Taleb concept of antifragility while Charles digs deeper into the strategic issues of technical debt. 

Source:

Tom Krazit on Runtime News: https://www.runtime.news/werner-vogels-complexity-is-inevitable/ 

Broadcom Adjusts to Minimize VMware Migration Risks

Broadcom has had to call back from its initial plans of making its top 2000 customers all direct and has handed much of that business back to its channels. With help from The  Register and Canalys, Hyoun and Charles discuss repercussions for tech sourcing. 

Source:

Simon Starwood on The Register: https://www.theregister.com/2024/12/05/vmware_user_migration_plans/ 

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The Evolution and Expansion of IT FinOps

At Amalgam Insights, we’ve long championed the Technology Lifecycle Management approach to describe the many areas existing across IT FinOps to reduce costs across hyperscalers, data clouds, Software-as-a-Service, networking, enterprise mobility, and telecom costs. Usage optimization is not enough. Product rationalization is not enough. Contract negotiations are not enough. And when these opportunities are not bridged, additional opportunities fall by the wayside across the IT environment.

Technology Lifecycle Management

One of the most interesting trends of 2024 has been the FinOps Foundation’s initial steps into software management. As cloud FinOps starts entering the already-established worlds of SaaS management and network management, it will be interesting to see both where cloud FinOps’ comfort zone of massive usage and product tradeoffs help the more static worlds of software and telecom as well as where FinOps’ traditional struggles with business taxonomy, detailed sub-user chargebacks, and lack of contract detail start to push against the issues that you, I, and the rest of the IT world have been dealing with for the past 15+ years. Unlike Cloud FinOps, Software FinOps and Telecom FinOps have a long history of multi-user monitoring, usage, and cost management and to avoid cooperating with end-user requests for any type of market-wide billing or usage standardization.

For the past several months, I’ve been working on my SmartList of IT FinOps vendors (thank you to all the vendors and customers for your participation!) with a eye towards looking at vendors focused on bridging gaps between cloud FinOps and the rest of the IT world. Out of the 300+ vendors I look at from an IT expense lifecycle perspective, I’ve narrowed the list down to 15 vendors that I think are really doing something different, which will be our Distinguished Vendors. But I am also starting to find some interesting trends that make these distinguished vendors different from the extremely crowded portfolio of options that IT departments face.

Before getting to those, let’s just define what is not considered differentiated in 2024. Simply ingesting bills is not good enough. Being customer-centric and having attention to detail are considered table stakes if you cannot provide customers that vouch for your approach being quantitatively better than other competitors. Everybody I cover can support tagging. Cross-charging is a standard enterprise ask in RfX activity. Basic dashboards and analytics are standard (and if you haven’t chosen a high-performance analytics solution like Sisense or Sigma or Qrvey, you’re probably behind for supporting real-time changes). And everyone is competing against 2020s-era design standards for SaaS as a standard, especially with the flood of money that has gone into the data and code-centric Third Wave of FinOps.

First, as expected, top vendors are often finding now that they are the second or third solution chosen at the enterprise level. IT buyers have often focused on the “up and to the right” vendor landscape too much in their purchase of FinOps and IT expense management solutions with the assumption that these are commoditized solutions rather than the financial window to the pulse of the digital business. Although every business today likes to talk about how they have “digitally transformed” and are “data-driven,” the truth is that companies have not fully embraced data and digital business until the actual cost of data infrastructure, delivery, and data-related customer activities can be finally categorized and calculated. And without FinOps and IT expense solutions, the comparative data simply isn’t there at the bill of material (BOM) or component level that we take for granted in manufacturing or service level. A digital business lacking formal IT FinOps is like managing a hospital without knowing how many procedures are being done or a discrete manufacturing company not knowing how many parts it uses.

Second, there is a massive effort to utilize and translate tagging efforts into standard business categories. The FinOps insistence on tagging service elements across infrastructure and platform without alignment to larger corporate or IT frameworks is starting to collapse into its own form of technical debt. The combination of poor data quality, inconsistent or idiosyncratic tagging, poor mapping to existing categories, and lack of integration with existing birthright and foundational enterprise applications has led to the need for better metadata definition and mapping. Of course, the goal here is not simply to create a pristine metadata environment (although I do love well defined taxonomies and ontologies!), but to deeply align IT to business so that product, service, and revenue managers know which technologies are vital to their work.

Third, data integrations and a unified data layer are increasingly important across vendors. One of the most salient and welcome aspects of the latest wave of FinOps solutions is the data layer that provides visibility across hyperscalers, data clouds such as Databricks, Snowflake, and Cloudera, as well as observability solutions such as Datadog. From a tactical perspective, this data ingestion helps cloud architects and digital business leaders to track costs. But it also helps set up the FinOps practitioner as a central player in managing the business aspects of digital behavior. The cost of accessing, processing, and utilizing data will only increase with the emergence of AI as a new massive spend area within IT. And although this cost is under the direct supervision of the CTO and CFO right now in many cases, it will all eventually filter down to some level of IT FinOps as the complexity of these ecosystems becomes too immense. Many of today’s top solutions are proactively setting themselves to be this data layer for supporting the future of IT activity.

Fourth, the tradeoffs between defined hyperscalers, defined on-premises services, virtualized services, and containerized services continue to be a challenge and the current answer is often to split each of these categories into a separate management solution. This is not a sustainable approach and Amalgam Insights both expects and encourages market consolidation so that FinOps professionals can see more of their infrastructure and platform investments under the same umbrella.

Fifth, everybody likes to talk about “cloud economics” while ignoring the “economics” part of the puzzle. There is a lot of focus on the mathematical aspects of large scale optimization of usage. And I get it. Techies love working with big problems and algorithmic fixes and finding clever ways to discover null values and aggregating pennies into dollars. This skill set is often what makes technology contributors invaluable both in developing architecture and in root-cause analysis for large enterprise challenges. But it is only a piece of the puzzle when it comes to aligning the financial health of the enterprise with digital and cloud activity. At some point, this optimization needs to be tied to the less exciting tasks of invoice processing, cross-checking billing rates with existing rates and discounts, direct product tradeoffs both within and across hyperscaler providers, comparing contract terms, enforcing contracted KPIs and timeframes, and aligning cloud activity to new accounting rules and tax credits. All of this is part of the microeconomics of cloud. Simply looking at usage optimization makes you a unit-specific beancounter. A true cloud economist needs to understand how the cost of cloud shapes the rest of the business and how it needs to be structured, reinforced, and defined based on all business forces.

Sixth, the cost of IT FinOps is changing rapidly. The first generation of cloud FinOps solutions charged similarly to software management and telecom management vendors where enterprise spend was based on a percentage of spend. But the problem is that these approaches started to outgrow their value for clients that grew their cloud spend to $50 million or $100 million and literally realized they could build their own solution and support it in perpetuity. We have seen solutions like Capital One Slingshot or Netflix’s development of NetflixOSS Ice, now supported by Teevity based on corporate efforts that became commercial products. So, there is a lot of pressure to drive down the cost of IT FinOps back to a flat license rate or user-based pricing once spend gets to an enterprise-tier. This pressure is exacerbated by the vendor sprawl across FinOps. For vendors that are product-based, this will continue to be a trend while companies shifting to a managed services approach will be able to maintain pricing based on the overall maintenance of the FinOps environment across billing, accounting, optimization, procurement, vendor relationships, governance, and IT-business alignment.

Those are some of the big trends I’ve been seeing so far over the last several months. There is a lot of nuance here, which I’m looking forward to digging into as I finalize the FinOps SmartList and get to highlight the Distinguished Vendors: the top 5% of companies that stand out both in their results and their differentiation. Is there anything you think I missed? Or do you want to talk more about either your FinOps product or your current FinOps RfP work? If so, get in touch with me at briefings@amalgaminsights.com.