A Software Insider's Point of View

News Analysis: Sam Altman's Steve Job's Moment And Satya Nadella Just Saved His Microsoft Stock Price

rwang0 — Mon, 20 Nov 2023 09:23:53 +0000

News Analysis: Sam Altman's Steve Job's Moment And Satya Nadella Just Saved His Microsoft Stock Price rwang0 Mon, 11/20/2023 - 01:23

Sam Altman just faced his Steve Jobs moment when the OpenAI board fired him on Friday.

The balance between too much governance and not enough innovation was the challenge OpenAI faced. This was a very immature board with members who had never built companies, never moved from ideology to commercialization, nor had any pragmatic board experience.

The board's big worries were

Ownership of training data
Impact of untested models
Unwanted bias detection
Effective altruism

However, OpenAI's biggest challenge is making the economics work. To get to the next level, the team needed to push hard to commercialize and balance ideology with pragmatic solutions. Sam and Greg knew the teams were not moving fast enough.

To put this all in context:

Google has been the most careful and the most innovative
Microsoft has been very careful and the most adaptive despite a lack of compute
Open AI was the most careful and the slowest at concept to commercialization.

The Push To Move Faster Was Met With Board Resistance

Sam's move to accelerate commercialization was the right next steps. A war between the go fast folks and the go right folks led to the ouster. However, the board's childish approach to letting him go was somewhere between borderline negligence to fiduciary responsibility and the undue influence of effective altruism movement, where there is a belief AI will kill us all.

Let's review what's been going on.

Timeline Of A Steve Jobs Moment for Sam Altman

Friday a Day of Hasty Decisions

Board removes Sam
Greg Brockman says stay but we’re removing you from the board
Microsoft gets a 5 minute warning
AI team protests and supports Sam

Saturday a Day of Regret

Microsoft is working in the background to get Sam back
Investors are suggesting new board members
Speculations that Sam will be back

Sunday Night: The Rise of the Phoenix

Board steps down
New board placed with Emmet Shear named Interim Chief
Microsoft asking for an observer seat
Negotiations with Sam fails
Microsoft most negatively impacted and Satya hatches a plan

Monday: Back to Business or Massive Chaos

Looks like massive chaos without Sam Altman
Satya Nadella snatches Sam and Greg to lead new AI division at Microsoft
Microsoft snatches victory from the jaws of defeat and saving the all so important stock price in its quest to be the most valuable company on earth
Emmett Shear, the co-founder of Twitch, will be named the company’s interim chief, replacing Mira Murati, who was named interim CEO in a management reshuffle Friday

UPDATED

Tuesday: A Day of Reconciliation

Rumors surface that the board wants Sam Back
Satya confirms that he's fine if he stays at Microsoft or goes back

Wednesday: Time to Clean House

Sam Altman is back
Board is let go and replaced
Bret Taylor, Larry Summers and Adam D’Angelo join the board. Bret Taylor named Chairman.

Key Questions Remain For Open AI

Who will pick up OpenAI for a much lower valuation?

Kyle Vogt, CEO of Cruise, and also co-founder of Twitch quits. Is this a coincidence?

Where will all the go fast people go to? Google? Apple? Tesla? Nvidia?

The Bottom Line: Go Fast Acceleration of AI Folks Leave For Commercial Entities As The Go Slow Non-Profit Folks Fall Behind

Founders must build a strong board or face dire consequences. Companies and organizations that can't move fast enough, have inept boards, and fail to maintain trust with customers will perish. In the case of AI the attempt to go slow by OpenAI with an ouster of its founder and CEO has resulted in the opposite effect.The unleashing of massive AI acceleration is about to take place as the go fast folks will end up at commercial entities and leave the non-profit behind. This was not the intention, but the reality is that no one can contain the advancement of technology for too long, especially AI.

Moreover, OpenAI's valuation of $89 billion will probably be cut while MIcrosoft picks up $89 billion in valuation for very little investment poaching Sam and Greg. Kudos to Satya Nadella for saving the market cap of Microsoft and gaining an army of AI Talent.

Your POV

How will we create an even playing field for capitalism to survive in an age of AI? What risks do you see with AI? Will non-profits such as OpenAI be able to hold their ground? Who will win in the AI Wars?

Add your comments to the blog or reach me via email: [email protected]">R (at) ConstellationR (dot) com or[email protected]"> R (at) SoftwareInsider (dot) org. Please let us know if you need help with your strategy efforts. Here’s how we can assist:

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Disclosures

Although we work closely with many mega software vendors, we want you to trust us. For the full disclosure policy,stay tuned for the full client list on the Constellation Research website. * Not responsible for any factual errors or omissions. However, happy to correct any errors upon email receipt.

Constellation Research recommends that readers consult a stock professional for their investment guidance. Investors should understand the potential conflicts of interest analysts might face. Constellation does not underwrite or own the securities of the companies the analysts cover. Analysts themselves sometimes own stocks in the companies they cover—either directly or indirectly, such as through employee stock-purchase pools in which they and their colleagues participate. As a general matter, investors should not rely solely on an analyst’s recommendation when deciding whether to buy, hold, or sell a stock. Instead, they should also do their own research—such as reading the prospectus for new companies or for public companies, the quarterly and annual reports filed with the SEC—to confirm whether a particular investment is appropriate for them in light of their individual financial circumstances.

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Research Summary: The Urgent Case For A Chief AI Officer

rwang0 — Fri, 29 Sep 2023 05:58:01 +0000

Research Summary: The Urgent Case For A Chief AI Officer rwang0 Thu, 09/28/2023 - 22:58

Executive Summary

With artificial intelligence (AI) projects all the rage, organizations must make a strategic determination to create a new CxO role at least at a functional level if not at a title level.. This decision should not be made lightly, however. Although the chief AI officer (CAIO) role is critical to an organization’s success, the level of collaboration across business, IT, finance and operations, HR, and legal risk and compliance requires an unprecedented level of cooperation and orchestration. Boards will also want to consider AI at the same level as CyberSecurity.

After speaking with two dozen CAIOs, Constellation expects the role to be different across organizations and ultimately infused into all aspects of the business by 2026. As the AI field accelerates, organizations that fail to create the CAIO role will be left behind.

Enter the CAIO

The case for a CAIO is simple. AI is still immature; hasn’t been proven in most enterprise settings; and needs many surrounding acts such as security, privacy, governance, provenance, ethicality, and truthfulness before it can offer real value to enterprises. With great power comes great liability: Such is the case with AI. There is a lot of liability in using external tools as well as using decisions proposed by AI with full confidence in real-world applications. A single point of responsibility and accountability will ensure the right orchestration and collaboration across the organization.

Furthermore, organizations need a champion for AI, just as they did for digital transformation. In fact, the C-suite often is not fully aware of the complete AI capabilities, yet they are mesmerized by the possibilities. While improving operational efficiencies—whether in IT, customer support, help desk, incident management, or even bringing in additional revenues by launching innovative offerings—they are sold on the idea that their enterprise can be unique and can be the first. The viral popularization of ChatGPT makes them think AI is so easy that anyone can implement any solution in a matter of days, without realizing the liabilities and consequences to their organization.

A CAIO will balance the opportunities with the risks. For example, AI projects need standardized security, privacy, governance, auditing, legal, and risk management. There also needs to be a center of excellence that can coach the project participants to conduct the AI projects in the fastest and most efficient manner. In addition, a CAIO should be responsible for oversight, strategy, and vision.

Thus, there is a need for a CAIO that in some cases might report directly to the CEO but who will work closely with the technical as well as legal, corporate governance, board, finance, human resources, and other senior-level executives in the organization. These multitudes of requirements need to be under one umbrella and managed by a single responsible executive who will build the case for business necessity, create relevant use cases, assess outcomes, and determine ROI.

Consequently, every organization will need a CAIO to start the process, and eventually the CAIO role will be infused within the organization across business and technology units (see Figure 1)

Figure 1. CAIO Must Find Balance

Take The CAIO Survey

Understand what's next for CAIO's. Complete the survey and get the results!

Buy The Full Report

Executive Summary. 4

Boards Prioritizing AI Projects Above All Else in Many Organizations. 5

The Case for a New Chief AI Officer (CAIO) 5

Enter the CAIO. 6

Who Will Be the Next CAIO?. 8

The Bottom Line: AI Will Be Infused Into All Aspects of the Business by 2026. 9

Take the CAIO Survey Today. 9

Endnotes. 10

Your POV

Who will be your CAIO? Will we end up with a Chief Digital, AI, Transformation, Technology, Information Officer?

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Reprints can be purchased through Constellation Research, Inc. To request official reprints in PDF format, please contact [email protected]">Sales.

Disclosures

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Monday's Musings: Will Generative AI Drive Humanity Into The Dark Ages Of Knowledge?

rwang0 — Sat, 26 Aug 2023 17:33:37 +0000

Monday's Musings: Will Generative AI Drive Humanity Into The Dark Ages Of Knowledge? rwang0 Sat, 08/26/2023 - 10:33

Big Brains In AI Discuss The Risks of Generative AI At Reinvent Futures Event

On July 27th, 2023, almost 300 people gathered at Shack15 in the Ferry building in San Francisco to discuss the actual risks of Generative AI. The event hosted by Reinvent Futures with Peter Leyden and Joe Boggio brought together the biggest minds on AI for an evening of deep discussion.

Speakers included:

The World Can Expect Twelve Major Risks of AI

In general, the opportunities for AI are exponential. There is much good ahead. As with all technologies, the humans behind them can turn them into a weapon or a tool to advance humanity. This forum focused on the risks as a balance to the opportunities of AI. The discussion included many of Constellation's twelve major risks of AI (in order of most likely to least likely):

Inaccurate hallucinations. By definition, generative AI will hallucinate due to limited data and training. These risks require better training models, more training cycles, and dedication to address false positives and false negatives before these systems are put into the wild.
Machine scale security attacks. Security attacks using offense tools by AI will include vulnerability scanning, vishing, biometric authentication by pass, malware generation, and polymorphic malware.
Exponential algorithmic biases. Even with large data sets, AI systems can make decisions that are systematically unfair to certain cohorts, groups of people, or scenarios. Some examples include reporting, selection, implicit, and group attribution bias.
Survivorship biases. History is written by the victors. While survivorship bias is one algorithmic bias, this risk warrants it's own listing. The winners and their promoted narratives will create a bias in the details of a success or failure. Decisions that are based on incomplete or inaccurate information create risks in model formation.
Shifting of human jobs to machine based jobs. Expect massive displacement in jobs as organizations determine when they will chose intelligent automation, augmentation of machines with humans, augmentation of humans with machines, or the human touch. Organizations must determine when they want to involve a human and when stakeholders will pay for human judgment and interaction.
Privacy and copyright liability. Many models have been trained on publicly available information. However, training on private datasets without permission will create major risks in liability.
Reality distortion. AI will create misinformation and disinformation overload. The generation of exponential amounts of misinformation and disinformation continues the onslaught of a warped presence. This distortion field will hinder human judgment and obfuscate reality.
Disruption of governments. With the persistence of deep fakes, lack of lineage of content, poor verification means, and few tools to combat disinformation, some futurists and security experts expect the next revolution to be instigated by AI tools.
AI divides. From social inequities to uneven power dynamics, AI can create a scenario where only those with access to large data troves, massive network interactions, low cost compute power, and infinite energy will win. This pits large companies against small companies and governments versus individuals with no recourse.
Loss of human innovation and creativity. An over reliance on AI will result in a dependence to mitigate risks at the expense of innovation and disruption. Society will choose stability and reliability and lose innate human curiosity and appetite for risk.
Extinction risks. AI has the capability to create a mass human extinction risk and society should be cognizant and proactive in mitigation measures. Recently, the Center for AI Safety put out a statement signed by over 350 AI experts, influencers, policymakers, and the public states that "Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war".
AI overlords and authoritarianism. While the likelihood that a General AI could take over the world or society today, the rapid digitization of the physical world increases the possibility of an AI war. Large organizations with access to the insights of AI and the means to indirectly and directly influence behaviors will have to be combated by systems that protect individual freedoms and liberties by design.

The Race For Generative AI Dominance May Create A Dark Ages Of Public Information

The Internet brought a renaissance of information to the masses. However, AI will create a dark ages of public information. One can speculate that competitors and governments will limit publicly available data for training by rivals in order to "protect" their intellectual property, competitive advantage, or national security. Publicly available information might be limited to ads, promotional marketing, or only the information that someone wants to reveal. Other than government mandated information and disclosures, expect most data to remain in closed silos.

Thus, access to human knowledge will be limited to private networks where the individual's data is the product or the data is being used to incriminate the individual in their governments. This could lead to the dark ages of publicly available information unless policy makers agree on how to bring human knowledge back to the public.

The Bottom Line: Policy Makers Must Consider What Rights Humanity Has In The Post AI World Before Its Too Late

Policymakers have a limited window in the next 18 to 24 months to convene a wide range of futurists, experts, academics, legal scholars, anthropologists, and other disciplines to consider policies that will define, advance, and preserve humanity in an age of AI. For the United States of America, one gathering could convene a convention to discuss how to enhance the Constitution and Bill of Rights in an age of AI. Another global agreement could be reached as to how knowledge is returned back to humanity and society. Similar to intellectual property law with patents, trademarks, and copyright, we may see the insights in LLM's be turned over to the public based on criticality. Some insights may have 30 second protection, others 30 years.

Your POV

How will we create an even playing field for capitalism to survive in an age of AI? What risks do you see with AI? What rights should humanity put in place in advance of AI?

Developing your AI, digital business, and experience strategy
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Reprints can be purchased through Constellation Research, Inc. To request official reprints in PDF format, please contact [email protected]">Sales.

Disclosures

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Monday's Musings: Time To Focus On Revenue Platforms, Not Piecemeal "RevOps"

rwang0 — Sun, 13 Aug 2023 21:15:07 +0000

Monday's Musings: Time To Focus On Revenue Platforms, Not Piecemeal "RevOps" rwang0 Sun, 08/13/2023 - 14:15

Every Enterprise and Brand Is Focused On Revenue Growth While Trying To Achieve Operational Efficiency

There has never been a greater focus on revenue, however, Chief Revenue Officers (CROs) face a dual mandate. On one hand, they must continue to find growth and revenue, on the other hand, leaders must balance operational efficiency and reduced budgets. Constellation's recent CXO Business Confidence Survey highlights how all CXO's face this dual mandate over the next 18 to 24 months.

Source: Constellation Research, Inc. 2023 Q2 CXO Business Confidence Survey

Salesforce Automation (SFA) and CRM Failed To Deliver The Right Tools For Chief Revenue Officers

In most cases, the CRM system and SFA tools built decades ago provided an amazing repository for sales information. Accounts, leads, interaction history, contracts, invoices, and customer data could be easily found in one place. While dashboards and analytics have improved, these systems have provided little automation. In fact, sales and revenue professionals often dislike having to manually enter their information. Sadly, these systems were built for managers and not the sales professionals. As a result, most successful enterprise sales professionals keep track of their contacts on a separate system and enter the bare minimum into their CRM and SFA. Why feed the beast with all of one's hard won contacts and relationships with no direct or indirect benefit?

With that understanding, a plethora of solutions in sales engagement, revenue operations, revenue intelligence, and even revenue ops data automation have emerged with the goal of assisting, automating, and even applying AI to the age old problem of revenue. Despite all these tools, the average Chief Revenue Officer must still buy more point solutions and integrate these tools back to their core CRM or SFA system. And despite millions spent on managing their core CRM and SFA systems along with a number of point systems, they are in integration hell.

Why Are There Insanely So Many Solutions In This "RevOps" Market?

Let's be honest, there are way too many solutions in this space. The sales engagement platform helped with training and consistency but then a new tool was needed to move MQLs to SQLs. While that was happening revenue leakage became a huge issue and all focus was on revenue intelligence. Amidst a push to drive down customer acquisition costs (CACs), increase ARPU, and improve renewals and retention, more metrics emerged from MRR/ARR to Net Revenue Retention and more. Suddenly everyone was measuring and no one was selling.

The plethora of solutions should just focus on the original intent of SalesForce Automation. CRO's want to bring sales and marketing closer together focused around the customer buying cycle, Sales managers want to empower sales reps so they can focus on relationships while the systems automate and use AI to provide insights that benefit both the sales teams and management. These startups vendors have mostly provided features that really belong in the evolution of SFA and CRM but can not exist as standalone features.

So why hasn't any legacy CRM vendor successfully built a revenue platform? Why have startups been so piecemeal? ,

Blame the venture capitalists (VC's) for funding natrow categories that were really features they could sell to Salesforce, Adobe, Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP. Blame the large legacy CRM vendors for focusing on stock prices by raising ASPs, engaging in M&A, and ignoring their core mission. Blame the users for not taking an enterprise approach to the problem and demanding features from the vendors. Blame the system integrators for building large practices that supported CRM and CX failures.

While there's a lot of blame to go around, time is of the essence. CRO's don't have a lot of time to prove themselves in the market. With the average tenure trending south of 20 months, these execs need pragmatic solutions today.

Source: Constellation Research, Inc. 2023 The Future of RevOps Is A Revenue Platform

The Bottom Line: CRO's Need A Unified Revenue Platform, Not Dozens Of Patchwork "RevOps" Solutions

In conversations with over 40 CRO's, a consensus has emerged. The first vendor to fully build a revenue platform that brings sales engagement, revenue operations, revenue intelligence, revenue ops data automation, marketing automation, customers success, and CDP together with a strong automation and AI foundation will win. In the meantime, CRO's will continue to struggle with the patchwork of solutions and integration headaches with no end in sight.

Source: Constellation Research, Inc. 2023 The Future of RevOps Is A Revenue Platform

Your POV

Are you a CRO or working in revenue? Is Revenue Ops really working for you? Do you wish you have a revenue platform?

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Disclosures

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News Analysis: Q2 2023 MATANA Stocks Still Shine

rwang0 — Sun, 30 Jul 2023 16:16:25 +0000

News Analysis: Q2 2023 MATANA Stocks Still Shine rwang0 Sun, 07/30/2023 - 09:16

Three Factors Drive Growth In MATANA Stocks

1. AI Powers Valuation Growth, But Earnings Growth Keeps Momentum Going

On October 13, 2022, the NASDAQ was trading at 10,440.64, the 52 week low. The market was still awaiting a recession and growth stocks were out of favor. The digtal giants were being rotated out for value stocks and many thought that big tech was dead. With valuations down, migrations out of Silicon Valley tech centers up, and a malaise over big tech, the future was gloomy.

Yet, November 30th, 2022 would forever be remembered as the date that changed everything. Chat GPT by OpenAI was publicly released and the AI explosion began as 100M users joined 30 days later. Every tech vendor worth their salt regrouped and pivoted to showcase their AI offerings.

In the latest quarterly earnings, AI was front and center of all the earnings calls. In fact, CEO's Sundar Pichai of Alphabet/Google said it 66 times, Satya Nadella of Microsoft said it 47 times, and Mark Zuckerberg of Meta said it 42 times.

2. Ads Are Back For The Remaining Digital Giants

Alphabet and Meta benefited from being the digital giants left standing. Alphabet had a 5% YoY growth in Google Search and 4% growth on YouTube. Meanwhile, Meta’s revenues jumped 11%. Reels is picking up and generated $10B for the past 12 months. Moreover,Apple and Amazon benefit from Ads as Amazon is the third biggest player in digital ads. While Apple doesn’t disclose revenues, they are one of the top 10 players in this space.

3. Cloudy Times Ahead (For Now)

Microsoft shows a drop in cloud growth from 51% to 26%, While the AI story is being used to boost revenues, Microsoft also needs more compute power and to upgrade its aging data centers to keep up Customers have complained about growing issues with Teams and Office 365.

Google Cloud was flat at 28% but finally profitable which is a big accomplishment for the third place player. However, this is the key area for growth for Google and it appears that Alphabet intends to double down in Google Cloud despite the focus on profitability.

Investors await results form Amazon on August 3rd. All eyes are on two factors - cost cutting and AWS growth. So far, AWS hasn't put a strong AI story as they targeted develoeprs instead of the C-suite. However, their beefed up partner program may prove to be the lever that continues their growth.

The Bottom Line: MATANA Stocks Continue To Outperform

Microsoft, Apple, Tesla, Alphabet, Nvidia, and Amazon continue to lead the market cap rankings (see Figure 1). These digital giants have shown how building the largest networks, disintermediating customer account control, competing for data, winning on digital monetization, and infusing a long term mindset are the secrets to dominating markets.

Figure 1. Market Cap Leaders are MATANA stocks

Source: CompaniesMarketCap.com

Your POV

What other digital giants do you see as winners in the market? Where do the lessons of digital giants play out in the war for AI?

Developing your AI, digital business, and experience strategy
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Reprints can be purchased through Constellation Research, Inc. To request official reprints in PDF format, please contact [email protected]">Sales.

Disclosures

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Event Report: Hexagon Live 2023 Demonstrates Prowess In Digital Reality Solutions

rwang0 — Tue, 13 Jun 2023 20:35:10 +0000

Event Report: Hexagon Live 2023 Demonstrates Prowess In Digital Reality Solutions rwang0 Tue, 06/13/2023 - 13:35

The €5.2 Billion Tech Company Most CXO's Have Never Heard Of

On June 12th to 15th, Hexagon, AB held their user conference at the Caesar's Forum in Las Vegas Nevada. The event showcased how Hexagon has built a foundation for bringing the real world to the digital world using reality capture, positioning, autonomous technologies,design and simulation, and location intelligence. As some enterprises may know, Hexagon was founded in 1975 and has completed over 170 acquisitions. With over 24,000 employees and €5.2 billion in revenue, Hexagon is a relatively unknown major technology player operating in the digital reality solutions space.

Hexagon, AB Brings Two Key Ecosystems Together - Production and People

Hexagon serves nine main ecosystems breaking down into two main categories: production ecosystems and people ecosystems. Production includes farms, mines, industrial & facilities, and manufacturing. People includes defense, cities and nations, infrastructure, and buildings. The core platform is represented by autonomous mobility solutions.

Here's a brief analysis of each ecosystem:

Autonomous mobility ecosystem provides a platform for drones, marine vessels, on-and-off-road vehicles and equipment, and robotics. The goal is to ease congestion and pollution, save lives,, and create safe and efficient worksites. Hexagon claims to have delivered more safe, reliable, autonomous driving research vehicles.
Building ecosystem delivers a complete lifecycle of vertical structures throughout the life of the asset. Value creation comes from optimized resources, less rework, and on plan, on time and on budget delivery. The world's tallest building, the Burj Kahlifa in Dubai, used Hexagon's solutions.
Cities and nations ecosystem connects mission and business-critical data for well-informed decision making. The objective of situational awareness enables always safe environments, highest quality of life, and sustainable economic growth. Hexagon's solutions protect almost 1 billion people.
Defense ecosystem ensures autonomous situational and strategic awareness. Successful outcomes include assured safety, secure and protected environments, and complete situational awareness.
Farms ecosystem build a complete lifecycle for agricultural crops and forests. These digital solutions allow agricultural owners to use data to optimize inputs such as energy and land, drive higher yields with better ROI, and reduce waste by applying sustainable methods. Hexagon hopes to reduce 25% of the world's greenhouse gases through ti's solutions.
Industrial facilities ecosystem applies digital reality solutions to model complex industrial plants and ships. Across design, plan, build, operate, and maintain, operators can lower emissions, deliver longer lifespans, and provide safe and efficient operations. Over half of the world's oil, gas, and chemical plants use Hexagon.
Infrastructure ecosystem utilizes digital reality solutions to support large scale engineering projects across plan, design, prepare, construct, operate, and maintain phases. Users gain optimized resources, less rework, and successful implementation timelines. Hexagon's solutions were used to produce the world's longest railway tunnel and the world's widest suspension bridge.
Manufacturing ecosystem helps asset owners learn and adapt quickly to evolving conditions and optimize manufacturing processes. Success across design and implementation, production, inspection, and digital transformation results in fewer inputs, less waste, and higher quality. Solutions are used in 95% of cars, 90% of aircraft, 80% of orthopedic implants, and 75% of smartphones produced.
MInes ecosystem addresses open pit and underground mines for drill and blast, exploration, material movement, planning solutions, and survey and monitoring solutions. Value creation is enabled through safer operations, higher yields and less waste, and minimum environmental impact. Hexagon protects 40% of mining sites worldwid.

The Bottom Line: Digital Reality Solutions Provide Sustainable and Resilient Approaches To The Physical World

At the conference, users came from a wide range of industries. However, despite the variety of use cases, their common goals were the digitization of their physical businesses and identifying opportunities for automation, efficiency, sustainability, and optimization. Given the push for digital transformation across all industries, the need for digital reality solutions have never been more in demand.

Your POV

Have you explored Digital Reality solutions? Do you need to improve your capabilities in design, build, operate, maintain, and transfer?

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Disclosures

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News Analysis: Global Services Q4 Wrap Up Shows Slowing Momentum

rwang0 — Mon, 01 May 2023 10:13:55 +0000

News Analysis: Global Services Q4 Wrap Up Shows Slowing Momentum rwang0 Mon, 05/01/2023 - 03:13

Temporary Slow Down Ahead

All indications from Constellation's 1000 person executive network show a temporary 3 to 6 month slowdown ahead. This pause in general IT spending impacts mostly the North American markets. The Middle East and Indian markets continue to show strong market conditions. Despite the doom and gloom, clients continue to invest in rojects related to optimization, regulatory compliance, and modernization. Pressure on Europe, South America, and APAC (sans India) continue to hamper growth. The Middle East remains a highlight along with the ANZA and the India market. North America will slow down despite providing the largest market opportunity.

Operational Efficiency and Regulatory Compliance Drive Hot Projects

Despite headwinds, Cloud, Automation, AI, and Regulatory Compliance continue to grow. In the cloud, CXO's focus on spend rationalization. Key projects include contract negotiations, cloud optimization, code refactoring, and in some cases a move back to on-premises workloads. Customers ask service vendors to renegotiate deals with software vendors and consolidate spend. Increasing scrutiny from CFO's drive operational efficiency budgets.

Automation and AI are working hand in hand. Every customer finds new ways to automate and reduce human interaction. Meanwhile, budget continues to grow for exponential opportunities with AI.

On the regulatory compliance, cyber security remains top of mine. Constellation sees a lessening priority on the regulatory burden of ESG reporting and investment. Many CXO's see AI as a means to reduce compliance risk and mitigate future risks.

Services Firms Show Mixed Results

The IT services firms that move nthe quickest will gain market share despite the current slow down. Quarterly results show that decision makers have slowed down decision making. Deals that took months now take quarters to close. Here's a quick summary of the Q4 earnings of Indian majors:

Tech Mahindra is in crisis. Tech Mahindra has had a tough time retaining talent and keeping clients. The company really needs the big deal expertise of the incoming CEO Mohit Joshi. Mohit has a good reputation for designing large deal solutions with clients and inspiring staff.
Wipro increased revenue 11.5% YoY, though the quarter was flat. Thierry Delaporte, Wipro's CEO has engineered a horizontal realignment strategy to service cloud, data and analytics, bio, product engineering, infrastructure sevices, and consulting with more focus. The strategy is beginning to pay off for clients.
Cognizant dropped 9.6% in Q4. With a $59 million "impairment of capitalized costs" related to a large volume-based contract with a life sciences customer and 1% decline in financial services revenue the arrival of new CEO Ravi Kumar S, could not come sooner. Customers have seen attrition slow and a change in morale as Ravi Kumar S sets the stage for an internal transformation of the once venerable services firm.
HCLTech showed some sales finesse in winning 13 large deals. Despite a great showing, Europe and Rest of World continued ot lag. Attrition rates dropped from 21.7% in q3 to 19.5% in Q4, reflecting worsening economic conditions.
Infosys showed a weaker Q4 and spooked the market along with TCS. With 8% net profit growth, the numbers were impressive. However, Q4 revenue and profit numbers were below estimates. Operating margins were down 1.9% YoY. Guidance at 4 to 7% was seen as disappointing. Attrition at 20.9% was within the industry average range.
TCS showed very slow revenue growth. With the slowest in 11 quarters, the market reacted to the industry leader's bellwether forecasts TCS saw a number of projects defer to the next quarter as the current CEO, Rajesh Gopinathan transitions to K Krithivasan on June 1, 2023.

The Bottom Line: Expect A Pickup In Late Q3 and Early Q4

CXO's will most likely take a pause over the late Q2 and early Q3 summer time frame. Savvy CXO's will start their negotiation processes over the slowdown to consolidate spend. Constellation forecasts increasing demand for projects in:

Cloud rationalization
Analytics
Automation
AI
Cyber Security
Contract Negotiations
Vendor consolidation

These projects show the biggest opportunities and must be completed in order to achieve operational efficiency and exponential growth

Your POV

Ready to focus on operational efficiency and regulatory compliance? Where will you find your biggest cost savings?

Developing your AI, digital business, and experience strategy
Connecting with other pioneers
Sharing best practices
Vendor selection
Implementation partner selection
Providing contract negotiations and software licensing support
Demystifying software licensing

Reprints can be purchased through Constellation Research, Inc. To request official reprints in PDF format, please contact [email protected]">Sales.

Disclosures

Contact the [email protected]">Sales team to purchase this report on a a la carte basis or join the Constellation Executive Network

News Analysis: Big Tech Shows Signs Of Stability

rwang0 — Mon, 01 May 2023 09:35:03 +0000

News Analysis: Big Tech Shows Signs Of Stability rwang0 Mon, 05/01/2023 - 02:35

The Q1 Tech Earnings Breathe Life Among The Digital Giants

With just Apple left to report in the tech earnings season, three major trends have emerged

Digital Ad Winter Is Thawing. Alphabet, Meta, and Amazon are the big 3 in digital ads. Alphabet showed declines in ad revenue but posted $69.79B a 3% YoY increase and $1B above what analysts were expecting. YouTube dropped 2.5% YoY in ad revenue but paid subscription sales showed a 9% increase., Meta surprised the market with a 3% increase in the ad business hitting $28.6B for the first quarter. This reversed its trend of three quarters of decline. Meanwhile the 3rd largest player, Amazon showed continued growth in ads with a 27% growth rate at $31 billion.

The winners in ad monetization not only have the eyeballs but also are the dominant player in each business model. Google - search, Meta - social networks, and Amazon - commerce are showing that they are fierce competitors for digital advertising.
Cloud Revenues Slow Down But Are Not Insignificant. Cloud adoption continues to power growth for Microsoft, Alphabet, but not Amazon. While the growth is slowing, double digit gains are nothing to sneeze at. Google Cloud gave Alphabet profits with 28% growth at $5.82 billion and finally was break even after 15 years. Microsoft showed 22% growth in cloud revenues. Amazon's more mature clientele shows that the market is about to enter an era of cloud optimization which means cloud revenues could take a hit. Amazon’s AWS showed this with a 16% cloud growth rate.

The era of cloud optimization is coming. Customers are starting to refactor workloads to optimize for data ingress and egress charges. Expect more rationalization in the next few quarters.
AI Story Drives Valuations - A Tale Of Two AI Stories
The war for AI mind share in a post ChatGPT world is what’s driving tech valuations higher. While Microsoft kick started a war with Google earlier this year with Satya Nadella, MIcrosoft's CEO telling partners in Q1 that he would "bury" Google. Though Microsoft took the fight to Google in public, the reality is that Microsoft may not win the war as its servers are the oldest and it’s not taking a responsible approach to AI. The exponential amount of disinformation and misinformation will create massive cost to customers and society without the proper controls.

Meanwhile, Google has the best team, the best tech, but has been too slow to roll out offerings due to its bulkanized organizational structure and internal incentive system. Unlike Microsoft's command and control structure, collaboration is nearly impossible at a very federated Google. Google believes that creating a new "division" may help expedite innovation. However, Google must move faster, despite the realization that trust is important for AI adoption.

The Bottom Line: Tech Is Alive And Well Despite The Fed

The major tech players known as MATANA (i.e. MIcrosoft/Meta, Apple, Tesla, Alphabet, Nvidia, and Amazon) have shown much resilience despite interest rate hikes, massive cuts in valuations, a reset in earnings forecasts, and layoffs. MATANA stocks are poised for a rebound but will they move past their trading ranges in Q2? All eyes on the Fed Rate discussion this week and Apple's earnings to see what's next.

Your POV

Do you think the tech onslaught is over? Will the digital giants pull the market out of this self-inflicted crisis caused by The Fed.

Developing your AI, digital business, and experience strategy
Connecting with other pioneers
Sharing best practices
Vendor selection
Implementation partner selection
Providing contract negotiations and software licensing support
Demystifying software licensing

Reprints can be purchased through Constellation Research, Inc. To request official reprints in PDF format, please contact [email protected]">Sales.

Disclosures

Contact the [email protected]">Sales team to purchase this report on a a la carte basis or join the Constellation Executive Network

Monday's Musings: Is ChatGPT Hype or The Future Of CX?

rwang0 — Mon, 17 Apr 2023 07:00:00 +0000

Monday's Musings: Is ChatGPT Hype or The Future Of CX? rwang0 Mon, 04/17/2023 - 00:00

ChatGPT or Generative AI Is This Year’s POC And Shiny Object

While generative AI has been around for some time, ChatGPT has captured the hearts and minds of the general population in highlighting tangible possibilities of what AI can accomplish both in the consumer and enterprise world. In fact, Generative AI has the ability to create chat responses, designs, and other new content including deep fakes and synthetic data. Neural network techniques such as generative adversarial networks (GANs), variational autoencoders (VAEs), and transformers work together to create original content based on prompts.

On the languages side, GPTs or what’s known as a generative pre-trained transformer, generate conversational text using deep learning. The pre-training capability allows the AI to take the model from one machine learning task to train another model. These models are then pre-trained on large corpus of text. Transformers, a type of neural network, maps the relationships among all the data sources such as text and sentence patterns.

For images, diffusion models allow images to be created from text prompts. Using random noise applied to a set of training images, the diffusion models allow one to remove noise and create a desired image. Common approaches include DALL-E also from OpenAI, Dreambooth by Google, Imagen, Lensa, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion.

The more organizations interact with these AI systems, the quicker the AI systems will improve their rate of learning.

Move Beyond The Hype And Start With Five Use Cases

Constellation Research sees five emerging use cases for generative AI in CX among an infinite permutation of possibilities:

Marketing. Diffusion models will dynamically generate content, provide translation capability, and run A/B and experimentation tests for user experiences. Personalization models will gain greater context, enabling hyper targeting for campaigns, ad networks, and polling with ChatGPT.
Sales. Sales specific tasks such as pipeline reviews, scheduling meetings, install base analysis, and forecasting will move from manual to automated. Ticklers and alerts will reach out to sales reps to remind them to follow-up on actions.
Service. Crawlers inside one’s internal systems can scan knowledge bases, augment case history, and hasten issue resolution. The AI can create new case tickets, augment missing information, and predict customer satisfaction.
Commerce. Speed of product catalog creation will improve as diffusion models will take prompts from regulatory requirements enabling faster global rollouts of new products and services content. ChatGPT models will serve as the front end interface for order capture.
Customer success. Generative AI will identify accounts with low adoption and automatically identify at risk customers based on their level of interaction to increase the frequency of engagement. Expect dynamic polling to generate surveys based on parameters such as dollar value, length of relationship, past interactions, customer satisfaction.

Choose When to Design For Machine Scale And When To Add Human Scale

Organizational success requires more than large learning models or better algorithms. CX leaders will need to identify the largest corpus of data available, the customer experience questions to be answered, and what skills are required to keep up with human scale in a machine world. In core CX processes such as campaign to lead, lead to order capture, order capture to order fulfillment, order fulfillment to order completion, Incident to resolution, and others, there will be opportunities for generative AI to provide missing content along the way.

Along the way every leader must determine which CX journeys are fully automated, augmenting the machine with a human, augmenting a human with a machine, or instead requiring a human touch (see Figure 1).

Figure 1. The Four Questions Every CX Leader Will Ask In Their Journeys

Source: Constellation Research, Inc.

The Bottom Line: Generative AI Is Here To Stay

Despite the massive amounts of hype, pragmatic use cases for generative AI will emerge. Given today’s labor shortages and need to improve time to market, expect more pragmatic use cases to emerge. Those organizations who fail to build a generative AI strategy will continue to fall behind. Those who adopt early, will have an opportunity to deliver on exponential growth and more meaningful customer experiences.

Your POV

What are you doing with ChatGPT and Generative AI? What's use case will you start with?

Developing your metaverse and digital business strategy
Connecting with other pioneers
Sharing best practices
Vendor selection
Implementation partner selection
Providing contract negotiations and software licensing support
Demystifying software licensing

Reprints can be purchased through Constellation Research, Inc. To request official reprints in PDF format, please contact [email protected]">Sales.

Disclosures

Contact the [email protected]">Sales team to purchase this report on a a la carte basis or join the Constellation Executive Network

News Analysis: Adobe Firefly - A Generative AI Offering For Creators

rwang0 — Tue, 21 Mar 2023 13:06:00 +0000

News Analysis: Adobe Firefly - A Generative AI Offering For Creators rwang0 Tue, 03/21/2023 - 06:06

Adobe Delivers Generative AI With Adobe Firefly

At Adobe Summit on March 21, 2023, Adobe announced and delivered its generative AI offering known as Adobe Firefly. Adobe Firefly (in Beta), is a collection of generative AI models built for creative applications. The offering joins the platform’s AI services. The first Firefly model will focus on image generation and text effects, trained on the hundreds of millions of Adobe stock images, openly licensed content, and public domain content where copyright has expired. Adobe plans to integrate Firefly into their Creative Cloud, Document Cloud, and Adobe Express product lines.

While Firefly is intended to be made up of multiple models, the first model is trained on Adobe Stock images openly licensed content and public domain content, where copyright has expired, and is designed to generate images safe for commercial use. Future models will target additional use cases and content types, potentially leveraging other technology and training data.

Adobe feels, this approach to training differentiates Firefly models from other stable diffusion models where rights, copyrights, and ethical boundaries of an artist’s individual style have come into question. Adobe has also announced new Sensei GenAI services that will continue to expand across Adobe Experience Cloud, deploying multiple LLMs including the Microsoft Azure OpenAI and FLAN-T5 models.

A CRTV Interview With Adobe's Ely Greenfield on Adobe Firefly

Adobe's Takes A Comprehensive Approach To Empowering Creators

What sets Adobe Firefly apart from other offerings is the integration into content workflows such as image creation and text effects. The goal - deliver generative AI capabilities wherever content is created and modified. Moreover, the focus on safe for commercial use ensures that Firefly won't generate content based on other individual's or brand's IP. This eliminates potential legal issues down the road.

In addition, Adobe's Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI)'s provenance technology creates transparency for digital content via Content Credentials. Creators can use Content Credentials to attach important information to a piece of content using meta data to include their name, date, and what tools were used to create it. That information travels with the content wherever it goes so that by the time people see it, they can experience content and context together. They can also add tags to ensure "Do Not Train" as well.

On the monetization front, Adobe intends to take a compensation-forward approach with Adobe Stock contributors. Creators who contribute content for training will benefit from the revenue Firefly generates once Firefly is out of beta. Creators may be able to license and monetize their own style and design in the future.

Advancements In Generative AI Have Rapidly Improved

While generative AI has been around for some time, ChatGPT has captured the hearts and minds of the general population in highlighting tangible possibilities of what AI can accomplish both in the consumer and enterprise world. In fact, Generative AI has the ability to create chat responses, designs, and other new content including deep fakes and synthetic data. Neural network techniques such as generative adversarial networks (GANs), variational auto encoders (VAEs), and transformers work together to create original content based on prompts.

The more organizations interact with these AI systems, the quicker the AI systems will improve their rate of learning.

The Bottom Line: Expect Exponential Improvements In AI Driven Creativity And Productivity

Generative AI will improve content velocity and improve the ability to power content supply chains with improved collaboration in the delivery of precise, high quality content. Creators can easily expand their capabilities from one medium to another while making variations to their work. Moreover, the establishment of creator marketplaces for monetization will augment creativity not automate it.

Your POV

Ready for the new world of creativity and AI? What's your experience to date with generative AI?

Developing your metaverse and digital business strategy
Connecting with other pioneers
Sharing best practices
Vendor selection
Implementation partner selection
Providing contract negotiations and software licensing support
Demystifying software licensing

Reprints can be purchased through Constellation Research, Inc. To request official reprints in PDF format, please contact [email protected]">Sales.

Disclosures

Contact the [email protected]">Sales team to purchase this report on a a la carte basis or join the Constellation Executive Network