Week 18 - This Week in Enterprise Tech

This Week in Enterprise Tech

Databricks and Shutterstock Take on AI Images

At Data and AI Summit, Databricks announced an partnership with Shutterstock to develop image models based on Shutterstock’s copyrighted images. But these models still leave questions around IP use for AI in the enterprise, and the risks and potential indemnification issues that enterprises face in using AI.

Databricks: https://www.databricks.com/company/newsroom/press-releases/introducing-shutterstock-imageai-powered-databricks-image
How NICE is Your AI?

NICE came out with an enthusiastic press release regarding their new AI capabilities. But as long-time techies who cover AI, Hyoun and Charles struggled to figure out the practical implications behind the hype. What lessons does this press release hold for enterprise software vendors?

NICE: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20240611678712/en/NICE-Unveils-CXone-Mpower-The-Ultimate-CX-Aware-AI-Offering-Providing-Continuous-Memory-Driven-Human-and-AI-Collaboration
Mistral Raises €600 Million. LLM Soooo Expensive

Last week, Mistral announced a $600M funding round for a soon after its competitor Cohere announced at $450M round (mistakenly stated as $240M in the podcast). Primary LLM model development is both extremely expensive and risky, as many of the inventors face the potential for failure. What do CIOs need to consider given the volatility of the foundational market?

TechCrunch: https://techcrunch.com/2024/06/11/paris-based-ai-startup-mistral-ai-raises-640-million/
Academic Research on LLM Simplification Continues

Several academic institutions, including the American University UC Santa Cruz, recently came out with a paper describing the potential to massively simplify LLM‘s. This finding potentially allows new LLM’s to be supported with conventional CPU rather than the GPU and other specialized hardware currently used to support AI models. This paper serves as an important reminder that the foundational science and techniques behind AI are still changing, and that CIOs cannot get too caught up in trying to optimize the current state of the art in AI.
Ben Dickson for VentureBeat: https://venturebeat.com/ai/new-transformer-architecture-could-enable-powerful-llms-without-gpus/

NetApp Makes Storage Sexy-ish for Business Champions

In the era of AI, one of the big challenges to justifying IT investment is that all the air in the room is being sucked out by AI. And there are many AI products that are asking for investment as well. But the demands of supporting storage, compute, and network resources associated with AI still exist. Hyoun and Charles look at NetApp positioning as a starting point to consider how tech companies can provide a better value proposition for technologies that may be considered commoditized or deprioritized.

WalkMe and Asana Strike Balance in AI Launches

Both WalkMe and Asana have made recent AI announcements regarding their support of the future of work. Charles and Hyoun think this is a fundamental time for future of work technology ventures to put up or shut up when it comes to providing products for the future.
WalkMe: https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2024/06/18/2900355/0/en/WalkMe-Unveils-WalkMe-X-The-Premier-Contextual-AI-Copilot-Designed-For-The-Enterprise.html
Asana: https://register.inc.com/index.php/email/emailWebview?email=NjEwLUxFRS04NzIAAAGTjRU_M3tWgdJj-vNuseHDU5nJS8RTd7UG0-uZR4sU0VQ3Kb7L74CzXU_N5-id-wfOOoZ8bcY3xqkm57dxlMjOQo-XJDbQVamEUA

This Week In Enterprise Tech is hosted by:
Charles Araujo of The DX Report and
Hyoun Park of Amalgam Insights