Category: GenAI

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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 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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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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Salesforce Announces New Agentic Management Capabilities

Today, Salesforce announced a variety of agentic management tools to automate testing, prototype in sandbox environments, and manage usage.

The two aspects that I am most interested in across-the-board are:

The AI generated testing in Agentforce Testing Center where I think it is going to be vital for agents to be stress tested with the help of AI. It will obviously be easier for AI to bring up a wide variety of potential tests for an agent.

In the next few months, it will honestly be fairly trivial to build a standard agent within most large enterprise application platforms. But the challenge will be in testing these agents to run at enterprise scale, and with the variety of languages, context, grammar, jargon, and patois that may exist across the world in describing demands.

As George Bernard Shaw said “England and America are two countries separated by a common language”. and that can be multiplied by the countries and rules and backgrounds that global companies are trying to support with their Salesforce agents.

The other part that I most excited about is what Salesforce calls Utterance Analysis. This is a real time analysis on the usage of an agent based on the user inputs, requests, and query outputs. There has long been a struggle in translating event logs into useful data simply because logs are overwhelming. Salesforce’s efforts in this area are an important step forward in incorporating log data into more
practical and consumable analytic form factors.

The one big question this press release does not tackle is around the orchestration and ongoing management of agent portfolios. Is it possible to find duplicate or similar agents and avoid the technical debt associated with managing 100s or thousands of agents going forward? It is a stated goal of Mark Benioff to have 1 billion agents built in a year. That is a great goal, but anyone who has ever worked IT or in sales ops knows that 1 billion custom objects, workflows, tests, agents, or any other documented item is always going to be an administrative burden.

Although I believe that Salesforce is making progress in this area, it is no secret that we look to Salesforce as providing a standard around enterprise governance for CRM and related applications. And I think this is an opportunity for Salesforce to show leadership in the ongoing management of agent portfolios at a time when the data and metadata in Salesforce are increasingly important to the valuation of the company as a strategic partner and to a publicly traded market capitalization.

Salesforce Introduces Agentforce Testing Center: First-of-Its-Kind AI Agent Lifecycle Management Tooling for Testing Autonomous AI Agents at Scale