Commentary
Headlines blare gloom and doom about the impact of AI on employment and our lives. We hear about layoffs linked directly to AI. We hear about AGI—artificial general intelligence—a term many people use, but few can agree on a definition or a timeline. Simply put, it’s a
Let’s face it, every one of the major enterprise SaaS platforms is making a big play for agentic AI. Even as we struggle to define the notion and find examples of the aspirational vision of software moving intelligently through complex workflows, these companies are working hard to be the
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In theory, every consumer-facing business technology decision should be about improving the customer experience. When it comes to Sam’s Club, the members-only, discount food warehouse owned by Walmart, they wanted to find a way to improve the store exit experience using cameras, computer vision and AI. Prior to implementing
While this week has been a bit quieter than last when it comes to technology news, we did have one bombshell drop on Tuesday when Salesforce announced its intent to acquire Informatica for $8 billion. It’s a big chunk of cash for a company born in the 1990s, but
By now, we all know that data fuels AI models, and that SaaS companies like Salesforce, Workday, SAP and ServiceNow all generate valuable operational data. What they are all looking for, however, is robust data integration tooling. Salesforce attempted to solve that problem on Tuesday with its $8 billion Informatica
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Before joining Boston-based marketing automation platform Klaviyo as chief technology officer last September, Surabhi Gupta had already built a career rooted in data. She began her professional life as an engineer at Google, working on the search ranking team before becoming director of engineering at Airbnb and eventually SVP of
What a crazy week this has been with Microsoft Build, Google I/O, Dell Technologies World, SAP Sapphire and Computex all happening at the same time. But I didn’t attend any of those lofty, news-filled gatherings. Instead I was in Cambridge, Massachusetts at the MIT Sloan CIO Symposium – a
Databricks made its third billion-dollar acquisition in less than two years when it announced it was acquiring database startup Neon for a cool $1 billion last week. It followed the purchase of Mosaic in 2023 and Tabular last year in the billion-dollar club. Neon gives them a fast, serverless, Postgres,
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As we move further along with AI in business, it’s clear that companies continue to struggle to use it effectively. As we noted in a recent article, the number of AI projects making it into production has been stubbornly stuck at 25% for months. Part of it is a
It seems like every couple of years, we hear about companies making the move from the cloud back on prem, or at least to co-location facilities where they are content to manage their own hardware and reduce their cloud bills. There was a lot of talk about this in April
While there was lots of news coming out of IBM Think 2025 last week in Boston, one thing that stuck out for me was the emphasis on smaller models. Bigger isn’t necessarily better, especially in the enterprise, where companies need to concentrate on their own data to get an
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Salesforce chief trust officer Brad Arkin has been a security executive for over a decade with stints as chief security officer at Adobe and chief security and trust officer at Cisco before joining Salesforce at the end of 2023. Arkin has seen the security role evolve along with his title.