Global Tech Tales: What Buyers Want | Episode 1: Artificial Intelligence
Hi everybody. Welcome to Global Tech Tales: What Buyers Want. I'm Keith Shaw here to moderate a discussion with other editors from around the world about the hottest technology topics. Joining me for today's show. Matt Egan, he is the global content and editorial director at Foundry, representing the UK, and he's also my co host on this show, Lee Rennick, she is the executive director of CIO communities who interviews CIOs in the US, Canada and the UK through our CIO Leadership Live podcasts. And Martin Bayer, he is the editor in chief for B2B for Computerwoche
in Germany. Welcome all. So the topic for today is artificial intelligence. We're going to talk about what's going on, what we've seen over the past year before we start. I want Matt to explain why we're doing this show versus some of the other shows that we do within foundry. Go ahead. Matt, Sure. Thank you, Keith. Really appreciate that opportunity. So look, I'm really fortunate because I get to work with fine people like Lee and Martin and the other 160 or so editors that we have all around the world, in the biggest markets for it. And the reason that I'm fortunate is because these guys, they just speak to it leaders the whole time, right? Every day, we're speaking to literally hundreds of people who are leaders of organizations, leaders in the IT, departments of organizations, strategic leaders, business leaders. And what
they're doing the whole time is helping their organizations succeed through it, and so what that gives us is this unique insight into what really matters, right? Forget the marketing hype. Forget even sometimes what you hear from the analyst side, right? This is the real world, lived experience of what it means to be working in it today, in any of the major markets in the world. That's what we want to bring together and chat and share today. All right? And I like the global perspective part of it as well, because sometimes we get bogged down here in the US on just focusing on us stuff. So it's really cool that we're going to have a lot of different voices for this show, plus future episodes where we're going to tackle some other topics and bring in other people. So it won't just be these four faces that you'll see on the show, it'll be it'll be me and Matt and probably a few other people as we go through these these episodes. So we also wanted to start the episode with a couple of statistics to to kind of
frame the discussion around this. And so for the first stat for artificial intelligence worldwide, spending on AI is forecast to reach $632 billion in 2028 This is according to IDC, our sister company that we work with here. This includes AI enabled applications infrastructure and related IT and business services. Again, this is going to be a compound annual growth rate of 29% from 2024 through 2028. Gen AI is going to outpace the overall AI market with a five year C AGR, 59.2% yet with all of this enthusiasm, we're also seeing a lot of surveys that are indicating that companies are not succeeding initially with the technology. And we're also seeing some some some
surveys that say employees are not adopting this. So there seems to be a little bit of a balance I want to just show you. There was a at the 2024 CIO 100 and symposium. Meredith Whalen, who is the Chief Research Officer of IDC, opened her keynote on Gen AI. Lee, you were actually at this conference, and basically she said that, one year later, companies are reporting 37 POCs, five production launches and a 68% success rate of Gen AI predicting that in 2025 and 2026 companies were going to be in that AI pivot adoption phase. So it feels like we do have two sides of the same coin. So let's start the discussion there. You know, what are you seeing around the world of AI. Is
this the best thing since sliced bread? Or are we taking a more of a cautious approach? What are the IT leaders that you speak with saying, Lee, I'll start with you, since you were at this conference. Yeah, great. So I was at the conference. It was amazing. This year, a three day conference, we had sessions on AI, building teams, de and I lots of great topics that we were covering off data and cloud, which is huge, right? So, yeah, what we're hearing from organizations, and what I've been hearing from a lot of CIOs, is this year was a year where, you know, what IDC said was last year was kind of the scramble stage, right? We were scrambling. Now we're pivoting. And what you're hearing from CIOs is they really looked at utilizing Gen AI, excuse me, for building internal productivity, right? So really ensuring that their internal processes were increased or they were better, you know, they could do work better, which meant the bottom line of their businesses were in better shape because they were just enhancing this productivity. Now I pulled some stats here, some a few little discussions I had with some CIOs at the conference. So Kari Ekberg Gallagher said,
you know, they were doing a cloud migration program. They had a code base of 220,000 lines of code. He said it would have taken money. To do the work for that migration. They did it in days, days. Okay, so, huge transformation for them. There. Mike Aiello of SecureWorks,
he's the CTO there they, they're a company that works in cyber events. You know, they have 4 trillion events a week that was filtered down and many and manually processed in the past. Now, 60% of those investigations because of Gen AI are fully automated. So there's a huge transformation in how businesses are looking at building internal productivity. What I'm hearing and sort of seeing
is there's a couple of factors here with that data, right? If you don't have your data in a good shape, forget it. Jenny is just not going to do what it needs to do for you. So we still have some companies going through that data transformation. A lot of companies during COVID put their data in the cloud. Now they're looking at the word repatriation, back to servers, right? So they're kind of, I think, figuring that out. And now they're looking at ways of, okay, we've done this internal productivity. What does that mean for our external clients? You know,
those customers, those end users, outside of our business. And I think that's where we are right now, and that's what I'm hearing from many leaders and many CIOs Martin, you got some some stuff to add. Are you hearing the same kind of thing? Are they? Are they still in that spending money phase? Yeah, that's That's right, really there. But from my point of view, the time for experimentation is
over. Ai projects are complex and expensive, and it's not just about asking a chat bot a question on the on the internet. Data must be prepared for use in the company. It architectures and infrastructures must be redesigned, security concepts must be developed, and above all, employees must be trained. All of this costs money, in view of the difficult economic situation here in Europe, and especially in Germany, CFOs are asking very carefully, what the return on investment in AI is it? Budgets are also generally under pressure, and the challenge for CIOs is therefore to find the right KPIs to prove the added business value and benefits of AI. That's the critical point at the moment. Yeah, I agree. And like those two gentlemen I spoke to at the event the CIOs,
that's exactly what they were saying. We were able to prove to our C suite and show that we have this internal productivity within our organization that's saving a lot of money, a lot of time, so therefore, it's been hugely successful for us, and we're tracking those use cases to then show the benefits to the business, right, and help the business grow. So I agree totally. Yeah, everyone says how important AI is, but after all the hype over artificial intelligence, the value is still hard to find. Do
you feel like that? A lot of the IT leaders and the buyers are being pressured from the business side to adopt this. And maybe some of them are saying, well, wait a second, we we're still in the middle of our transformation projects here and now you're throwing, you know, Gen AI at us, or all of this other AI stuff. Do they feel that pressure? Or do you feel like that? They can get on top of it and be the spokesperson for the AI movement within, within companies. Well, you know, with state of the CIO report, we researched 1100 leaders from around the world about, you know, technology. And this was earlier in the year, right? This was in early 2024 and what they said was, 79% of those surveyed said that they felt the CIO had an educational partnership with the CEO and the C suite. And I asked that question to every CIO I interview, and they absolutely shake their head and say, Yes, that's exactly what it is we have an educational partnership whereby, you know, they have to the C suite has to understand what we're working on, how we're implementing this. It's not a matter anymore. I think of that pressure,
many told me about it, like we need to do this because, obviously generative AI was democratized, right? It's a very different thing. Now those CIOs are really researching getting those people on the board. One CIO told me at the CIO 100 she has a board appointee that just deals with the technology first, right? And they meet on a weekly basis to talk about what she's working on. So I think you have to look at that aspect of it. You know, these individuals are so instrumental to running business. Now, their roles have completely changed. You know, they are at the C suite level,
and they're in their educating and partnering in that, in that respect. But I, I just interviewed Tony Olvet, who's the Group Vice President of Worldwide C suite and Digital Business Research at IDC yesterday, which is really cool. And IDC just released a Gen AI use case, a really special survey they researched over 3000 people around the world. And the question of who decides around the investment, it was pretty much equal, an equal investment to. Decision between business leaders
and IT leaders so that, just based on some of our really amazing research we put out. So, you know, I think that's what I'm hearing as well too. That educational partnership has been there now this year. And then, of course, that decision buying becomes sort of 50-50, all right, I wanted to, I wanted to ask Matt this question as well as Martin, because they are over in Europe. So I've got a couple of European questions. But first,
do IT leaders and buyers feel like that they're properly training employees on the use of general generative AI tools. I know that training is one of the issues that or training in the end, slash the skills gap is one thing, and then all. We're also hearing concerns around accuracy of these these tools, especially with the idea of hallucinations. So, you know, obviously the three big concerns too, would you know, are basically training skills, skills gap, accuracy and then also security. They want to make sure that their data isn't going to be leaked out by these tools, especially in Europe, I think, with all of the regulations that they're moving versus the US, what are some of those concerns? One of the things that's really interesting from my purview, I have the privilege of, I'm based in Europe, but I get to travel around the world, and actually, these are pretty consistent concerns, and it's borne out in the AI priorities study we did earlier last year, where, I think I'm going to quote this accurately, like skills was one of the biggest barriers, and it was like 50% of respondents says that was an issue, and security was the biggest concern. I think that was 51% of respondents. And that's across the world, right? That's in all the various different markets. The
Skills thing, I think, is really interesting, and it kind of relates back to one of the questions you asked before Keith, which is, you know, this is one of those rare occasions where a technology has passed over into the mainstream, and therefore business leaders who aren't technically minded are asking their IT leaders, what are we doing with AI, right? You don't often get business leaders asking, you know, what are we doing with edge computing, or, what are we doing with, you know, veg, right? But AI, is that thing that's kind of crossed over because chat, GPT, right? No, because it can do this cool, crazy, right? And so there's an element of pressure there. And exactly as, as Lee said, like a lot of people, have focused very early on, on return on investment, so can we just do what we're doing now more efficiently, and to the point that Lee made, if your data and your infrastructure is in a sufficiently clean state. Like, yeah, you can like, that is, that is totally achievable. But I think the more interesting kind of challenge now is, is to move on to those projects where it's built with AI ingrained from the ground up to solve a problem. But there is no doubt that skills is a big challenge. I was speaking to some IT leaders when I was in Singapore, admittedly, a few months ago, and they were talking about the fact that, how do you hire for something when you don't know what the it is going to be? Right? Like you like, what you need is people who've got really good core skills and they're curious, and they've got the right values, and they're comfortable solving problems like that. That is a challenge, and it's, and you're
starting to see, you know, we see this in our kind of online engagement, how IT certifications are becoming valued in some ways more than college degrees. Because, like, how can you teach someone in a in a three year course, something that three years ago wasn't like a key thing to worry about kind of thing? So the skills gap is definitely there, and and it's it's also compounded by the fact that a lot of these kind of operational efficiencies that are being driven by AI through IT implementations reduce the need to have junior people. So in a way, you're kind of reducing the pool of people who might become your skills leaders. And then on the security side of things, I mean, Martin should definitely speak to this, because, like living in mainland Europe, there's a whole other set of compliance issues there. But the reality is, AI can let you do anything at
scale, right? And if the thing you're doing isn't correctly set up and ethically set up and doesn't have the right amount of human oversight, like the risks are exponential, just as a potential for success is exponential. But I'd really like to hear from you on that, Martin, because living in working in Germany, you have a different and maybe more acute perspective on that. I guess. Yeah, regulation here in Germany is very, very hard sometimes, and it's an important aspect at this point to give employees a framework for how they should use AI. This framework
must leave room for experimentation and not prohibit too many things, but at the same time, must ensure that no rules, for example, regarding data protection are violated, and this framework is very important, because otherwise a kind of shadow AI can emerge very quickly in the company, and cleaning this up can be very tedious, and we saw this in the early years of the cloud. Yeah, we hear, we hear the same thing here. When I talk to a lot of companies in the US, a lot of them want a framework, or want some regulation. So they look at like, are we going to see what Europe is going to do? Because I think that there's a realization to that, that waiting for our government here in the US to do something, it's probably not going to happen given, given, not only the political side of things, but also a general attitude around regulations and, you know, capitalism and free spirit and innovation, all that other stuff that that I think we have sometimes gets in the way of that. I think a lot of companies in the US and around the world have had to, you know, go have strict regulations around where they store their data in the cloud, right? So I would disagree little a little bit. I don't think it's like, I Yeah, entrepreneurship and all of that is great,
but the reality is, is that many companies right now have to have very strict regulations around their data around the world and where they store it, right? So, yeah, that's that's one thing maybe that will help inform the security side of it a little bit more. We'll have to anyway, because they'll have to have security overlay of that look. I mean, just on the Europe side of things, I just thought maybe I'd share a conversation I had with Elizabeth Akorita, who's a group Deputy Director of Digital for Department of science and innovation, and a few departments in the UK. So she works with 13 organizations and 17,000 employees, and they've developed this shared services model, right? So they're sharing out across these these organizations within the UK, they did do a whole comprehensive change management plan. People were, excuse me, at the center of it. So what she said was, you know, the team skills and the expertise were paramount
to the success of the project, and they invested in training and development programs to ensure that the teams had the knowledge, the capacities to support the new platform and also assist users, right from all bits of the government. Because remember, when you're doing some sort of you're trying out a new type of technology, you're also, you know, prompt engineering comes into this, right? Because, you know, this has been a problem with many companies, right? They they let people use chat GPT, maybe lawyers are using it, but they don't know how to prompt it to do what they need. So, you know, she really drilled down on the fact that, you know, under this model, that they had training development programs, all of that were so key to the success of the platform and sharing the other reason, and this is very related to entrepreneurialism. And like, certainly, we all work for a company that's headquartered in the US, like, the other thing you've got to think about is intellectual property, and it's related to security, because it's, again, it's how you handle your data when using an AI tool and thinking and thinking three steps ahead in terms of what can happen to your intellectual property using tools like chat, GPT or any of the other models that rely on large language models. So it brings us back to where Lee was there, which is like what sounds like a very well executed plan, which is surprising to me, as a UK citizen from the UK Government, but excellent. Glad to hear that some of our tax dollars are being spent well, but a well executed plan requires a level of education of everybody, right, technical or otherwise, as to a what you're trying to achieve, but also, what are the guard rails within which you're trying to achieve it? And with that, Keith, I'm going to let you speak now, because we both spoke over you.
So because, because the show is called what buyers want, or, you know, global Tech Tales, and then what buyers want, I want to ask if you know the IT leaders that you're speaking with when they're developing their AI projects, do they want vendors to add Gen AI to their existing tools and software that they're using? Do they want to build it themselves? Are they in that that built, you know, build or buy mode? And they say, No, we can do this better if we build it with our own people, or are they looking kind of in between there, and they're looking for consultancies, you know, the big, you know, the big three, or the four of those, to then guide them through the process. Because, you know, each of the vendors that we talked to, they would raise their hand and go, of course, they want vendors, you know, the vendor would say that. I'm just wondering if this is a decision that's even being made at this point. I think it's all of the above key, and it depends.
I don't like all of the above answers. Okay, let me pick it a bit. I'll bring in some research afterwards, but go for it. Matt, okay, I think it is all of the above, but it's all the above on a horses for courses basis. And
if you flip it around and you think about it from the vendor perspective, right? What I'm seeing where some of the most successful vendor relationships with IT leaders, and that includes vendor CTO, is working really closely with it. Departments like IT leaders, is where you get organizations would be really smart about building, like, ecosystem products. So yeah, like, it definitely is all of the above, because at one level, it's like a I PCs, right? Great or or adding AI capabilities to existing software platforms. These are great for what we were talking about before, which is the kind of almost at the edge, building increased efficiencies into output and to workflow. But like, what IT leaders are wanting for the next stage is the environment
and the plan. Platform and the infrastructure from which they can innovate. And so I look at, I'm going to name loads of vendors now, because I'm being vendor agnostic here, but I look at some of the work that, for instance, Dale, Microsoft, Nvidia, are doing together to create like combinations of hardware, software and cloud and cloud and on prem, which which, in principle, at least out of the box in Amazon and Google, they're doing similar things with their hardware partners, often the same hardware partners, but in principle, allow IT leaders to have all of the above right. They're going to they're creating platforms for where, yes, there is efficiency in the way that things are processed. The infrastructure is working in a way that supports
the use of AI in all of the kind of process driven approaches. But also, if you're trying to innovate, on top of that, to build your own products and solutions, in principle, at least, you've always got best in class technology. You've always got the compute that supports and supports the AI. So that's from the vendor side, like but Lee, I really do want to hear your actual facts. Like I said, I just interviewed Tony Olvet, who's our, you know, one of our top researchers within our organization. So look this report they just put out. 47% of those surveyed said they would compose the solution, either by by leverage and tweak. So when I looked into that stat, what they were saying was that they would definitely partner with a vendor. They would leverage that
and then they would tweak it to their own internal needs, which is kind of what you're saying, Matt, it's like they're going to look at it and say, how do we increase productivity? For our sales teams, for our finance team, for, you know, our legal teams, for our end user customer, whoever that is, because the end user customer is everything. So I think, you know, that's really interesting. And what I've heard from CIOs is, yeah, we're working with the vendors and the partners. Um, I interviewed a CIO here in Canada, who said, you know, I actually meet with all the vendors I want to work with. We have a good working relationship. We look at how we can leverage what they have to offer. And then, yeah, we look at tweaking it for our various use cases we need internally for our organization. So yeah, depends on the kind of
solution as well, right? Because I think there are maybe, maybe three different levels to this, right? There is the, and we talked about this a lot, there is the, we have an existing process, a thing we do, can we do it Quicker, quicker with AI, right? And then that is definitely where you're either looking for tweaks to existing, hardened software products, co pilot in, you know, in Microsoft's products, it is the AI PCs that are coming out that just then you can start to spin the wheels quicker, right? Then there's creating a new process that is somewhat, that is somewhat enhanced by AI, right? And that's similar, right? But you kind of get moving more towards where you might need all of your infrastructure and platforms to be aI enabled. And then there is the showstopper, which is, I think, where we're moving to now, which is where we think in the customer journey, we're thinking of a new product, service or solution within our organization, and for that, from the ground up, we need like vendor support to give us, like aI capabilities that can allow us to really fundamentally change the way our business is operating. And that's where I mean this is a massive land grab, right from the vendor perspective, it's it's both exciting and terrifying, because there's going to be big shifts in terms of who, who provides services to all these, all these customers, but it's a huge opportunity, right? Because that is what it is looking for. That level of support. I wanted to,
I wanted to bring up another question. And, you know, obviously we don't live in a bubble here with a lot of these technologies. So while all of these companies are making decisions around, you know, what vendor to use for generative AI, what projects to do, whether, whether someone is using an existing software package and waiting for Gen AI to be added to that. At
the same time, all of these large scale AI companies open AI, Google, anthropic, all of those companies continue to update their models. In fact, this week, we just heard a story that open AI is going to be starting to add AI agents, or agentic AI, and all of a sudden, all of the news comes out. We're like, oh, well, you know they're already at the next phase. So when you talk with it, leaders and buyers, do you do you hear that any of them, are any of them on the fence about waiting for the technology to get better? Or are they just basically saying, We'll take what we can get now and we know that in the future, maybe that'll be better, or maybe they'll be moving on to other other technologies within this space. Martin, I'm going to start with you. Yeah, I've hardly seen any other technology in recent decades that has developed and spread as quickly as Gen AI. But this is also a problem for the user companies that want
to utilize this technology, it's very difficult to keep track of the various developments and to evaluate and categorize them. Every month, new models come come onto the market, or there are new versions of existing models. Last year, we talked a lot about chat bots and CO pilots. Today, it's all about agents systems, and when Mark Benioff tells us that millions of AI agents will soon be flying through the Salesforce universe, it confuses me at first. What do these agents do? Who controls them through the Salesforce? A. Agents get on with agents from other manufacturers like SAP or Microsoft, and with every news item, dozens of new questions arise that CIOs have to answer for the company. I think we must be very careful that AI does not become a nightmare
well, and also, yeah, I completely agree with that, Martin, and it's interesting, I was at a vendor event not long ago. There are lots of CIOs there, so they're kind of talking a slightly different way at a vendor event, right? But what? But this, this one person said to me, like, it feels a lot like these are really impressive technologies, looking for a killer app, right? And, you know, like the best, IT leaders, the best, the best people in those roles. Yes, they're ambitious and they're strategic, but they're also kind of pragmatic, in the sense that, like, we're using a technology and we use an IT strategy to solve problems, to improve things, not just because they can do stuff right. And I was thinking cloud is such a good analogy for
this, because I know it's not. It was never nearly as big in the public imagination, but it was another, there was another period of time where everything was cloud for a bit, right? And that's all everybody said. And the whole idea was, Cloud is going to solve all your problems, everything's going to be more efficient, everything's going to be cheaper like and, no, it's a whole other set of problems. But who would have thought that an online bookstore, you know, would revolutionize enterprise cloud, right? But that's what Amazon did, almost by accident. And
so when I look at the continual technological updates that these, these AI specific vendors, and I include Google in that, and include open AI, even despite their relationships, when I think about the more than iterative improvements that they're making the whole time, I still feel like, yes, there is a, there is a winning killer app solution out there, but this is so much kind of window dressing to show what we can do, rather than actually solving a problem for a customer. And that's what, in my experience, it see leaders really care about. I would say anybody that says this will solve all of your problems, typically, just be skeptical and take a grain of salt, because, you know, anybody that's been in this industry for a number of years knows that that's never gonna, yeah, right, yeah, right. You're either gonna create new problems or to solve some problems and then, and then give you new ones too, anything to add on that, like, you know, yeah, go ahead. I was gonna say often the things that really cut through, and I talked about Amazon to AWS there, right, which was kind of an accidental thing, like, think about something as fundamental as Google search, right? That was not like a well structured business plan to do the thing with technology, right? It was, it was, it was a tool that solved the problem really well and then took over the world, and then, as a consequence, change the entire way that the world works, right? You don't get many Googles, but I do think this time with AI, you're going to see some things emerge like that, that fundamentally change the way we do things, but we have to rethink how we're doing things. And if I'm an IT leader, and I hear this often enough from these people, right, like they're ambitious and excited, but also it has to solve a problem. Otherwise,
we're just spending money to spin our wheels. Yeah. And so Lee, I want to ask you a you know, in terms of next year, do you start seeing we talked about ROI in the beginning of the show? When does that, that three letter acronym, start to rear its ugly head with a lot of these companies? Because you're seeing a lot of this money being spent and spent and spent. At some point, the CFOs are going to get involved, and they're going to be like, Wait, where's where's this return that that was being promised to us, whether it was the vendor or whether it was the internal IT group, like, do you see that happening next year, or is it still going to be a little bit of the the Wild West in terms of what, what they can spend in the budgets and that kind of stuff. Well,
look what I'm hearing, what I'm seeing from CIOs is, look, if they, if they have that educational partnership with the C suite, right? That's the first winning objective here, if you're a tech leader, right? How are you communicating to your C suite? What are you telling them? How are you working with the CFO on this? You know, the companies that are really most of the companies I spoke to at the CIO, 100 in in the US were implementing Gen AI. They were seeing, as I mentioned at the top of the show, great, you know, great work around increased productivity within their own internal teams, which in which, in that respect, has savings from a financial perspective, right? So I think many of these organizations have already got some internal productivity going. They're making game changing, you know, work with their internal teams, saving money there. The question is, is like, what maybe, to Matt's point, what's going to be added on to this? Right? Is this, like, where is this on the Technology S Curve, right? Where is this right? Now, it's probably somewhere down here, right? And it's going to go up here. Is it going to fall off? Is quantum the next big thing, right? And everyone laughs at me, but it's like quantum, you know, the speed at which we right, very related. So, you know, I guess what I would say. Right now, I hear that many organizations have developed
really great use cases. They've implemented them. They're seeing some savings. I don't think there's any person that have said to me, Oh, my board or my CEO doesn't want to continue to invest in this and look at ways we can improve increase productivity in our business. But the question is, to your point, Keith, with these vendors, where are they at? How are they going to improve this, and what's coming next, right? One, cio just said to me last week, it's fine. We're doing it, we're implementing it. We're going to keep using it. It's going to keep evolving. But what's coming behind it, right? And what's the next thing on the technology, S curve and and he said to me, you know, yeah, maybe it is quantum, but so I think that's, that's where I would sort of wrap it up. For 2025 we're going to continue to see that increased productivity. We're
going to see it being used. We're going to see benefits of it. The CC, the CIO, will still be very connected in the CTO to the C suite, and, yeah, they'll keep using it as the organizations and vendors keep developing it, increasing it and making it a better product to use. Yeah, Matt, any anything else that to add that you're hearing, or are you hearing that any the CFOs are, are they? Are they keeping out of this for a while? I think the CFOs are very deeply involved in this, because, like, they're looking at that again, it's crossed over to the mainstream, and they're looking at AI, and I think now, specifically agentic, AI, I can never say that word and thinking, I know I'm not a big fan of that, that phrase, quite frankly, thinking about removing humans, right? I've said this before, like, as a senior executive, I've spent many years, you know, answering questions from well meaning board members about about, you know, where our employees are based in the world, right? Can we move into a cheaper market? And now it's about, can we replace them with AI? Not in our world, I should say, but, but I know that's the question. You don't know that I'm you don't know yet if I'm in AI, really smart one.
She's giving me some food for thought. But I think we did a poll survey on CIO.com last month. And, you know, 74% of the CIO respondents said they, you know, they really bullish on the critical, critical nature of AI for their business. That's the plus point. The negative point is ahead of that were things like security and skills and it business alignment, which I think is a really critical point here. And what I think about when I think about 2025 is,
and I'll butcher it, but there is a Bill Gates quote about people always overestimate the amount of change that's going to happen in a year and underestimate the amount of change that's going to happen in five years, which I always read as just, just look back five years, right? And I promise you, five years ago we were talking about GPT. We were talking about generative AI, but we as enterprise technologists were talking about it in a way that nobody was interested in, right? And we're not there now. So I think I couldn't tell you what it's going to look like, but I really expect acceleration in 2025 to be honest. Yeah.
Martin, any, any final thoughts on 2025 what, what to expect? I'm a little bit skeptical, as I think companies will realize that Gen AI is not, not the holy derail that solves all business problems. And for for many use cases, companies will realize that they don't need large, expensive AI models, but the Lean search or automation tool is often completely sufficient. So I think the hype will come down a little bit and a much more realistic view of AI technology will prevail. From my point of view, we should put this date in the diary and come back in a year and re record it, and let's see. The last thing
we want to do on the show is we want to have everybody vote. So this is just a simple yes or no question. It's unrelated to the buyer part of it. But I am I do want to think there's been a lot of stories about the disillusionment around AI. And, you know,
have we reached that trough of disillusionment? The word bubble has been thrown out a lot. So my vote. My question for you, will the AI bubble burst in 2025 mainly from the giant vendors that have been getting a lot of money to develop a lot of these models. I'm not saying that AI
is going to burst within companies, but do you think that we might see a minor bubble burst where some of these big companies are in trouble. The investments are going down, or companies are going to be pulling back their spending. Any one of those could contribute to a AI bubble burst. So just give me a yes or no. I'm going to vote. I think at the moment, I think we will see one. We'll see maybe a pullback of some sort. So I vote yes. Martin, yes or no, yes, yes. Well, yes,
okay, Martin's on my side. Market cap from from Nvidia, $3 trillion it's absolutely crazy, from my point of view. Well, yeah, I agree with that. So I would say yes. In a sense, I don't think the implementation of AI within the enterprise. Going to slow down. I do think the the level of investment in AI specific tech will because I think, again, as always, often happens, the big vendors are hoovering this stuff up, right? They're figuring it out, and they're going to provide solutions rather than exciting technologies. Okay? And Lee, no bubble burst. Anyway, I'm not, like, really good at these little phrases. So I just hope I'm voting the right way. But I don't think the bubble will burst. I think we'll continue
think of vendor companies. We'll continue to innovate or try and partner with as many organizations as possible, build in new solutions, and we'll still have a pretty robust year with generative AI being part of the whole business platform. All right, I want to, I want to modify my vote just a little bit, and allowed to, because I'm the moderator, the host of the show, I don't think it's going to be a burst in the same way that we saw a bubble burst in the early internet days. Remember, like in the 2000s I think we are going to see some, some company, pull back, or there's going to be an adjustment, is that a good word, a readjustment of some of the money that coming out. But it's not going to be a, you know, we're not going to be launched into a recession in the in the AI world, and we're not going to get an AI winter like we used to, you know, we did years ago.
Are you telling me I should sell my shares in Netscape at this point? Is that? Wow, there's, there's a reference, yeah. Listen, I want to thank everybody for participating in this. It's, again, very brave of you guys to do this. Thank you all for participating. And we're going to be back
next month with some additional editors. So the faces you see here might not be the same faces, and we're going to talk about the world of cloud computing. So that was even brought up by Matt, so we're going to kind of jump off that. And so again, thank you all for participating.
Thank you. Thank you. All right, that's all the time we have for the show today. Feel free to add any comments you have below. Check out our other TECHtalk shows, such as Today in Tech, CIO Leadership Live and DEMO if you're interested in seeing B2B product demonstrations. I'm Keith Shaw. Thanks for watching.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
2024-11-28 12:12
