Tag: pricing

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TWIET 45 – Jan. 14, 2025

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

  1. NVIDIA Makes AI More Accessible with Project Digits
  2. NVIDIA Nemotron: Advantage or Market Tension?
  3. NVIDIA, Google, and the Future of AI-Powered Robotics
  4. KPMG: 2025 is the Year of AI Deployment
  5. Open AI’s Pro Pricing Dilemma: How We’d Fix It
  6. Half of CIOs Struggle to Own Enterprise AI Responsibilities 
  7. Nékojita FuFu Revolutionizes Coffee Ecosystems

NVIDIA Makes AI More Accessible with Project DIGITS

Project DIGITS provides the Blackwell GPU chip to developers starting at the relatively low cost of $3,000. Given the promise of AI and the need to understand AI, it’s hard to ignore the appeal for developers to develop and tune AI models on their own desktops without dependence on cloud-based costs. Charles and Hyoun ask if this is too good to be true. 

NVIDIA Project DIGITS Press Release: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/project-digits/   

NVIDIA Nemotron: Advantage or Market Tension?

NVIDIA announces a new family of models based on Meta Llama with a focus on agentic tasks and designed to support models from edge devices to data centers.  Hyoun and Charles discuss their use as reference technologies and their importance in supporting NVIDIA’s leadership AI role. 

Emilia David’s coverage on VentureBeat: https://venturebeat.com/ai/nvidias-ai-agent-play-is-here-with-new-models-orchestration-blueprints/?utm_source=AmalgamInsights 

NVIDIA Nemotron Blog: https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/nemotron-model-families/ 

NVIDIA, Google, and the Future of AI-Powered Robotics

Google seeks to simulate the physical world with a new set of world models, a hot area in the startup world, but also an area where Charles and Hyoun believe Google has some unfair advantages that could lead to relatively quick success in creating interactive media and realistic simulations to support contextualized digital twin use cases. 


Jess Weatherbed on The Verge: https://www.theverge.com/2025/1/7/24338053/google-deepmind-world-modeling-ai-team-gaming-robot-training 

KPMG: 2025 is the Year of AI Deployment

KPMG’s latest AI Quarterly Pulse Survey provided an interesting snapshot of enterprise activity associated with AI. Perhaps the most interesting data point here, which got Charles’ attention, was about the expectation of investing between $50 million and $250 million on generative AI next year. Hyoun was more interested in the adoption intentions. But all roads lead to the increasingly obvious conclusion that 2025 will be an important year for AI deployments.

Gyana Swain on CIO.com: https://www.cio.com/article/3778320/enterprises-willing-to-spend-up-to-250-million-on-gen-ai-but-roi-remains-elusive.html?utm_source=AmalgamInsights 

KPMG AI Quarterly Pulse Survey: https://kpmg.com/us/en/media/news/kpmg-ai-quarterly-pulse-survey.html 

Open AI’s Pro Pricing Dilemma: How We’d Fix It

Kyle Wiggers from TechCrunch covers how OpenAI CEO Sam Altman reveals that the ChatGPT Pro plan at $200 per month is not profitable. Hyoun and Charles identify several reasons why this should be expected and discuss whether OpenAI should care about having profitable products, given their inability to accurately price and structure their technologies as products.

Kyle Wiggers on TechCrunch: https://techcrunch.com/2025/01/05/openai-is-losing-money-on-its-pricey-chatgpt-pro-plan-ceo-sam-altman-says/ 

Half of CIOs Struggle to Own Enterprise AI Responsibilities 

Based on a study of 125 Chief Data and AI officers, Randy Bean and Tom Davenport find that the majority of Fortune 1000 companies surveyed are not putting technology leaders in charge of AI, preferring to have this in the hands of the business or with a transformation team. Charles and Hyoun discuss the dangers of CIOs being out of the loop when it comes to leading AI efforts, both for the CIO and for the company’s AI goals

Paul Barker at CIO.com: https://www.cio.com/article/3800869/study-probes-trends-around-ai-in-the-enterprise.html 

Nékojita FuFu Revolutionizes Coffee Ecosystems

Perhaps one of the most transformational technologies of our generation, Nékojita FuFu revolutionizes the world of coffee by providing multiple modes of blowing on hot food and drink. At $25, Hyoun is sold on the notion that this device will be more profitable than many AI deployments this year. Charles is more skeptical. 

Brian Heater on TechCrunch: https://techcrunch.com/2025/01/05/this-tiny-robot-cat-will-blow-on-your-coffee-to-cool-it-off/ 

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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