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