Tag: agentic AI

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TWIET 46 – Jan. 21, 2025

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

  1. DOGE is Not a Department. It’s a Service. 
  2. Can OpenAI Influence America’s AI Policy?
  3. Google Gemini Wants 500 Million Users
  4. Microsoft Restructures to Support Agents
  5. ServiceNow Acquires CueIn for Conversation Analysis
  6. ContextualAI Launches for Custom RAG

DOGE is Not a Department. It’s a Service. 

For months, we have heard about DOGE, an effort to reduce government spending. But the current version of DOGE is a rebranding of the United States Digital Service, an existing organization focused on data audit and software modernization. Is this an effort to get closer to the data or a gentle offloading of Elon Musk from the campaign?

The White House: https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/establishing-and-implementing-the-presidents-department-of-government-efficiency/ 

OpenAI Influence America’s AI Policy?

OpenAI is seeking to influence U.S. A.I. policy with an “AI in America” blueprint to encourage investment and minimize regulations. CEO Sam Altman recently donated to Donald Trump’s inaugural fund to gain favor with the new administration. Can OpenAI push the US to accept more Middle Eastern investments for A.I. technology?

New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/13/technology/openai-economic-blueprint.html

Google Gemini Wants 500 Million Users

Google CEO Sundar Pichai wants 500 million users on Gemini before the end of the year. Remember the good old days when it was remarkable to have 100 million users? Hyoun and Charles discuss if the race to gain users is coming at the expense of actually building products that people might want to use. 


Wall Street Journal: https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/google-gemini-2025-chatgpt-openai-b6eb595d  

Microsoft Restructures to Emphasize Agents

Microsoft is restructuring to support its agentic approach. This may be a sign that CIOs may need to start potentially transforming the IT department to also take a more agentic approach. 

Microsoft also seeks to increase the uptake of Copilot. Microsoft has relaunched its free AI chat tool, Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat, to encourage businesses to adopt AI in the workplace. Microsoft hopes that by using Copilot Chat, businesses will see its value and be tempted to subscribe to the full Microsoft 365 Copilot service for $30 per month. But the value proposition still seems confusing as Charles and Hyoun discuss. 

Microsoft: https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2025/01/13/introducing-core-ai-platform-and-tools/ 

The Verge: https://www.theverge.com/2025/1/15/24344214/microsoft-365-copilot-chat-agents-pricing-availability 

ServiceNow Acquires CueIn for Conversation Analysis

ServiceNow accelerates its agentic AI roadmap with acquisition of conversation analysis platform Cuein. Charles and Hyoun are interested in seeing how this signals a bigger step for ServiceNow into customer-facing use cases and speculate how this is the start of a broader goal of developing a set of intelligent, integrated customer facing systems and expanding beyond the internal workflow. 

ServiceNow: https://www.servicenow.com/company/media/press-room/servicenow-to-acquire-cuein.html?ref=runtime.news 

ContextualAI Launches for Custom RAG 

Contextual AI launches its custom Retrieval Augmented Generation capabilities for general availability. This is interesting because it speaks to the evolution of agentic AI and the need for enterprises to support RAG at scale to manage true enterprise-grade agentic AI.

Contextual.ai: https://contextual.ai/blog/contextual-ai-platform-generally-available/ 

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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