Category: TWIET

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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/