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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 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 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/