Techstrong TV – February 18, 2025

Hi, everyone, in honor of President's Day. Let's go Imperial in terms of our it, that's where we're headed here on Text Drug Act. Hi everyone.

Happy Tuesday. We hope you enjoyed your President's Day. You know, I'd like to do a survey.

How many of you out there took off for President's Day? Raise your heads. We do my Romper room thing.

Oh, yeah, I see Tom and Dick and Harry. Okay. I, you know, it is a federal holiday.

I think if there's any federal employees left, they probably took off, but I don't know how many are left. And that's what we're gonna talk about on this fine Tuesday. Let me tell you who we're talking about it with.

We've got a nice gang assembled, first of all from Hudson, Ohio, where he's officially, uh, in cons before he heads out to this week's Tech Field Day, which I believe is a cloud tech field day. It's the CEO founder of Tech Field, day of FU and Company Steven fst. Good morning, Steven.

How are you? Hey, I'm pretty good. Um, you know, president's Day, I had to come up, uh, I was trying to tell my team like, uh, you know, what's your favorite president?

Um, you know, how about Jimmy Carter didn't have a great presidency, but he seems like a decent guy. Um, but of course, if you, if you broaden the scope, um, how about Bertrand Russell? He was the president of Pugwash, uh, an all around great guy.

Okay, so presidents don't have to be US Presidents, Presidents of anything. Yeah. Yeah.

That's like people who, who, you know, maintain or look at eliminating government waste don't have to be appointed or, or, or approved or anything either. Nobody, Just let that guy fire everyone. Well, he is.

All right. Moving on from Steven. We'll go right over.

I see we're starting early. We're moving over to Harrison, New York, where we have our chief content officer in residence. Mike Vizard.

Good morning, Mike. I hope you enjoyed President's Day. I enjoyed President's Day and the Valentine's Day before that.

So it was kind of a lovely set of bookends in some ways. Yeah, It was. So he was with a good president.

Come on. A good president. Well, of course, there's always George Washington who started this whole thing, but behind that, um, I kind of miss Abraham Lincoln not having his own day.

You know, you mentioned that when I was younger, we had Washington's birthday. Lincoln's birthday, and then they just combined it in the President's Day. Well, this is offic.

It was, it's officially Washington Dash Lincoln Day in Ohio, if that makes you feel better. Is it? Well, yeah, that does make me feel better, actually, Steven.

Good. I'm glad they did that. Let introduce though.

Well, she's not the president. Well, she is the president of Echo Site, echo Tech Insights, but she's also our analyst for all things sustainable and green. Bonnie Schneider.

Hi, Bonnie. Welcome. Thanks, Alan.

Great to be here. Great to have you here. Big day for you today.

We'll be getting to it a little later. Um, so gentlemen, lady, it is the day after President's Day, and, you know, Washington warned us about this stuff, speaking of Washington, and, uh, I've been talking and writing about it now for a couple weeks. You know, I'm, no one raises their hand and says, I'm for fraud, or I'm for waste, or I'm for paying more money that doesn't get used well and winds up in people's pockets illegally or, or immorally.

But there's a right way and a wrong way. And so, Mike, let me kick it over to you. Have we reached an age of an imperialism in government?

It, I think we're gonna have to sort this all out with some sort of Supreme Court ruling, and the sooner the better. But a lot of folks are walking around to your point, and they're saying, what's the big deal? I mean, it's, the Department of Government efficiency has been unleashed on these agencies with the approval of the heads of those agencies to go look for this waste.

So on a certain level, they're saying that it's all above board. It's just being super aggressive, and the average person is standing there going, well, yeah, most of what we think is spent by the government is wasted anyway. So why not apply analytics and all this stuff to come to some better outcome?

And, uh, maybe the only way to do it is, you know, what a blunt instrument. So that's one thought process. The other thought process is, of course, you know, this is executive overreach and things that have been approved by Congress to be spent are not being spent.

So, Alan, which side of this equation are we up? I stand on the right side of the correct, the correct side. Yeah.

Not right or left, you know. Um, so Mike, I agree. No one raises their hand and says, I'm all for fraud.

I'm all for waste. I'm all for spending more money. Of course not.

But a nation of laws that does not follow their laws is a nation that will not stand. I think Lincoln said something like that. Right?

The house divided, house divided right. A nation of laws. We are a nation of laws.

Now, the right side, i I do mean left versus right rejoiced over the last couple of years is the Supreme Court, on more than one occasion, has said these federal agencies cannot overstep their charter given to them by Congressional acts. Right? We've seen it on several different agencies.

While I'm telling you that the flip side of that is correct as well, these agencies cannot overstep their charter as given to them by acts of Congress. So when an act of Congress publishes an agency with a specific purpose and budget and, and charter, it is, the executive branch is, does not have the ability to go against or overrule that act of the legislature. Now, you wanna say, well, the heads of these agencies gave them permission.

The heads of these agencies are no more than the leftovers of the Saturday Night Massacre that's gone on here. The same way we dropped the, they had to go through seven assistant attorney generals to drop the charges against the mayor of New York, because the first seven said, we don't nce that kind of unlawfulness, and that kind of, that's fraud. Which more than anything else.

So eventually they find someone to sit in these agencies who's a loyal collaborator, who say, go ahead and do it. That doesn't undo the will of the legislature or Congress absent an act of Congress. That's number one.

Number two, though, you know, I had a good discussion with my friend Tony Bradley about this, and there's an excellent article that I think every single person watching this needs to read by two people that I know pretty well in the security space, and that I respect an awful lot. Bruce Schnier, who, if you're in security, needs no introduction. Bruce has been, you know, probably one of the foremost, uh, personalities, thought leaders in security for as long as I'm in security, 25 plus years or more.

And another really smart guy, Dave Heimer, Heimer Dave is, was one of the original security bloggers network members in 2005, has been with us. I think it was Security Penguin is his block, but he, he does a lot more than that now. But Davi and, and Bruce wrote a really great article.

It's in here on government over, excuse me, me, um, it, it's, it's in here on declaring Do unconstitutional. And I will put the, well, the URLs in there, read it. They lay it out.

What we're doing here for the sake of reducing fraud and waste is giving a backdoor to our, I don't wanna call 'em enemies, but our adversaries, China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, by putting classified information on machines and systems that have not been certified, that have been hacked already. And, and graffiti put on them that are Swiss cheese. And, but it's okay.

I, I've had conversations with fairly smart people who say, well, you know what? In the name of progress, we gotta do that again. Not in a nation of laws.

We have laws about this. People have gone to jail for releasing classified information like this. This is being done without an act of congress, without due process, without hearings, without following our rules.

I'm all for reducing waste. You wanna go do a fact finding thing, not to mention that you invited Mr. Fox into the hen house.

You invited a man who has 400 million plus dollars, whereas the government contracts annually, and you are asking him to police government contracts. Do we, you know what, when I took political science, I had a really great teacher who taught us modern political theory, including communism. He was a former socialist in the thirties.

He was blacklisted, didn't work for a long time, became a college professor, and then he became a violent anti-communist. 'cause he said, you know what the problem is with communism? It, it only works if you have a society of atheistic saints.

Are we to believe that Elon Musk is an atheistic saint? That he's doing this out of the kindness of his heart? A man who owned who, who is in bed with the Chinese Communist Party because he needs them for his Tesla business.

You know, this, there used to be rules about conflicts of interest. There are rules, there are laws about conflicts of interest. Just because someone has a lot of money, money doesn't mean they don't follow the rules.

That's what this country's based on. But yet we're saying it's okay. 'cause it's Elon.

And, and what, what, what could he possibly do wrong guys? Have we have we, have we all gotten stupid? I, we, we have forgotten about the absolute power maximum Corrupts Absolutely.

Let's let this, this, I mean, if this stands, I'm telling you, it, it bodes very ill for a nation founded upon the rule of law. Yeah, absolutely. And, and remember too, that, you know, I mean, the United States has spent, uh, centuries lecturing every other country in the world about how to build a nation and how to be a nation of laws and how to have a proper democracy, a proper functioning democracy.

Um, you know, the, the stuff that's going on with Elon Musk and the Doge is just unconscionable because, you know, allegedly, we are a nation bound by the Constitution. Allegedly, we are strict construction. I mean, remember, remember when people were all talking about, you know, people, Republicans we're all talking about how, uh, you know, we're, we're getting beyond the, uh, the, the, the, the Constitution.

And we have to return to the strict, you know, what it says in the Constitution, strict. And, and, you know, all these, you know, Supreme Court justices as well, um, have said that they are strict constitutionalists. But, uh, where's that, where that, where's that now?

Um, you know, is it, doesn't the Constitution enumerate which powers or belonging to which, uh, branches of government? Doesn't the Constitution talk about the, uh, powers of the, uh, executive branch? And, and I'm sure that they have, uh, people who are willing to twist themselves into a pretzel, uh, deciding that somehow this is constitutional, but it's clearly not.

It's also, uh, asinine, uh, to have someone go in. Um, I heard one of the things at the education department. They, uh, canceled a grant, um, that was central, a central data collection system, if we can get back to it here for a moment.

They canceled a grant that was, uh, central to handling, um, data collection on the demographics of American school, uh, children, because that was, uh, fundamental to the mission of the education department and all other aspects of government, because, you know, you have to know who these kids are if you're supposed to be supporting them in any way. Um, the reason they canceled it was because the title of the grant was Common Core of Data. And Common Core is a popular, I mean, you, you've heard, you know, that there's all this DEI, anti DEI stuff.

Well, common Core is a, is a popular, um, phrase for a certain type of teaching that is, uh, frowned upon on the right. Um, the fact that they named this grant, common Core of Data, made it canceled. And it's like, that is just, you didn't even know what it was.

And, and it's true of most of these, uh, grants from the national, from the education department that have been, uh, canceled last week. A lot of the people who've lost their jobs, um, you know, it, it's, it's basically a global search and replace. I can just see somebody sitting there.

I don't wanna give 'em any credit, but I can see there with vi, you know, search for this, uh, search for that. And, um, and then D-D-D-D-D, we don't need any of that stuff, you know, it's just, it's just ludicrous. Um, Mean when do you ever declare fraud and everything else before the investigation is done?

And Steven, I think they got rid of that list. So, because we're afraid we might track what kids have vaccines means, I don't think that's what was included in that particular one that I, well, I just wanna throw That out there. Um, I, I gotcha.

You know, the other thing that's bothering me here is I don't wanna be all, both sides. It's true that there's waste and there's fraud in the government. And it's true that that should be rooted out.

But it should be rooted out competently. You know, it should be rooted out by somebody who goes in and looks at things and considers what it is and considers whether it's waste or fraud. I'm sorry.

SLS should have been shut down a decade ago in favor of SpaceX and Blue Origin. I, you know, you can say what you want about Elon, Elon Musk, but SpaceX freaking works, and s sl s is just a giant cash cow. That being said, having Elon Musk be the one to cancel SpaceX that Stinks.

S-L-S-S-L Ss SL s but yeah. Space Launch System, right. Our big stupid rocket.

I mean, It, it, it's just inherently a conflict of interest. Yeah. Yeah.

So, Alan, in effect though, constitutionally, I mean, if the President is now exercising what amounts to a pocket veto by not spending money, in effect, we have turned the executive branch into some sort of equivalent of a king. Well, it's an imperial presidency. That's, and, and that's, let's face it, that's what, that's what our current president thinks.

And, and, and you know, he's also appointed three of the eight Supreme Court Justice is, and two of the others are slightly to the right of, of Hitler. So you've got a majority of the Supreme Court that is far, far right or beholden to this man, and they're our last best hope Obi one. Right?

If things don't work the next, the next thing is the rebellion. Well, the, the funny thing is, the prosecutors who quit in New York, were all clerks for most of the hard right justices. So go figure.

Well, you hope that you, you gotta hope that the decency and the law abiding nature of our judiciary from an impartiality, you know, there's outliers like that crazy woman down in Florida who we appointed that somehow every case got assigned to her. I don't know how that happened, but for the most part, our judiciary, our US attorneys are, I think, law abiding decent people, right? Before nominating people for the judiciary became a political sport.

Over the last eight or 10 years, we had, we had, you know, to get, to become a federal judge, generally I'd have an a BA American Bar Association recommendation. You had to have some experience. You there, there's good people on the bench, Let's call it competence.

That's a good word, that we seem to have forgotten. Competence. Um, I just wanted to add something.

Go ahead. You know, it's something that Steven said, but they're looking through, you know, the waste or whatever. They're, they're looking, they're using an algorithm to detect certain words.

And what Steven was pointing out, something with education could be triggered by the word common core. What, what I'm hearing from my colleagues in weather and climate is a concern for the word climate. Yes.

Of the trigger word. And then losing funding for that. And I just got an email, I haven't looked at it, but my dad sent it this morning that Bloomberg, um, as Michael Bloomberg was gonna step in and fund a lot of the climate projects that, um, that, that, that are probably gonna be canceled.

So, um, that is a big concern. Number one, with just the funding already that's been designated for climate. And number two is a meteorologist.

Another huge concern within the community that I'm in is the data, uh, for, oh no, weather data has always been free to use. And it's something that private weather leverages as well. And public weather, if that becomes completely privatized, that's gonna be a real problem, I think.

So we'll see what happens. But I just wanted to give you that perspective also. Absolutely.

I mean, I mean, quite frankly, if they're eliminating everything, 'cause climate change doesn't really exist, and we nothing man with fossil fuels, what does that do for Tesla? Mm-hmm. Well, gee, uh, it didn't quite get 400, uh, million dollars worth of Tesla vehicles get sold to the State Department, though it almost did.

Um, it, it, though, it should be pointed out that that program was, uh, came up up in the Biden administration. Um, but still, uh, that was another new story from last week. Um, but talk about self-dealing.

Um, you know, I mean, ultimately, you know, I I I'm reminded of the Onion article, uh, the Facetious article supposedly written by Jimmy Carter. It was not saying, you know, they made me sell my effing peanut farm. Um, I'm, I'm thinking of that, you know, I mean, it's like, you know, he had to sell his effing peanut farm.

And, um, and yet this, Because I, I think, and this is the biggest thing, I I've had this conversation with numerous people on social media. They're willing to overlook obvious craziness like this for the sake of, we won an election and we could do whatever we want. And that, that's a problem.

And I wanna, And I wanna leave you with one more thing. I think, think the reason that Elon is doing all this, I don't think he's political at all. I think the reason he is doing all this is so that he can get to Mars.

He will cozy up to the Chinese Communist Party. He will, he will support, uh, right wing, uh, nationalists in Europe. He'll, you know, fund Trump's rise to presidency because he knows that that is the only way that he gets to Mars.

And he, that's all he cares about. I think he cares about making more money. Nope.

He wants to get to Mars. That's my thought. Okay.

I would just say, I would just say to all our IT friends out there who might be anywhere near this, be careful. There will be lawsuits. You will be called to testify and you will have to explain what you did and didn't do.

So think twice. Mm-hmm. Agreed.

All right, let's take a break before they come and censor us. Thank God we don't rely on any federal, uh, on any federal subsidies or anything. But we're gonna come back and let's talk about something Easy Tech Field Day was live, it's Cisco Live last week in, over in Europe.

There's still a Europe, isn't there? Yes. Yes.

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Welcome back to Textron Gang. Uh, so we were, uh, in Amsterdam for Cisco Live last week. And, um, I brought a few tidbits to share with the Textron community from that show.

Now, I wasn't there, but Tom Hollingsworth, who runs our networking mobility security events, was with a great group of tech Field Day delegates along with some of our staff. We did, uh, livestream a bunch of presentations on a channel you might watch called Techstrong tv. We also are uploading those to YouTube if you're interested.

com. But, you know, here's sort of the, the takeaway, the TLDR of, of Cisco Live. Now, as you can imagine, it's 2025.

So Cisco spent a lot of time talking about ai. In fact, uh, according to the folks that have talked to the insiders and management at Cisco, all the way up to the top, Cisco is all in with ai. Now, you could probably substitute almost any enterprise tech company and say exactly the same thing, but what is Cisco actually doing?

Well, as you can imagine, they're a server vendor. Uh, or did you forget that? Yes, Cisco's UCS is one of the leading and, and probably the, the most, uh, advanced, uh, integrated blade type system out there.

The UCS is actually, uh, adding more capabilities for GPUs. You can add now have, uh, up to eight Nvidia H 100 GPUs on those, um, UCS, uh, servers according to, uh, Tom's, uh, reporting. Um, and they're really trying to go after the market for not just AI training, of course, but, uh, the, the emerging market for, uh, inferencing AppSec, uh, basically using AI to do productive stuff.

One of the more interesting aspects to me, um, was that Cisco announced something called AI Defense a few weeks back, which is essentially a, um, a system, let's call it an agent that looks for AI applications running in your environment and allowing you to, uh, uh, you and IT manager to control some of that. It also, uh, helps service providers and others to try to figure out, uh, how AI is being used. This is an interesting angle for Cisco and one that I think is pretty smart.

Now, Cisco also did some really cool stuff with, uh, DPU and a new, uh, their own homegrown silicon. But let's, let's put a pin in that for a second because I wanna hear what, uh, the other folks here have to say about Cisco's place in the AI centric data center. Uh, what do y'all think?

I think this is a battle for the control plane that's coming around and, um, you know, Cisco and HP and Dell like to talk about the data center and on premises if, uh, AWS and Google and Microsoft have no ambitions in that space, when in reality they seriously do. And then the question's gonna come down to, do I go with a control plane that enables me to manage a unified cloud from Microsoft AWS Google, or do I go with something from Cisco HPE or Dell and I manage that hybrid cloud infrastructure that way? Um, and the, you know, honestly, the cloud guys have a lot more experience with that kind of control plan than the H hps and Dells and Ciscos do.

So, um, the question is, does the customer view those people as the center of their IT universe or now just kind of hanging around the edge of some other IT universe managed by somebody else? That's, to me where the battle's gonna be. To me, Cisco has always been a company that sells picks and shovels to gold miners, right?

They, they sell the hardware that made these data centers run. And even early on in the cloud, you know, the, the, not the server per se, but the connectivity hardware and security hardware where Cisco, they've lost a lot of that business, right? Um, but the hardware business or the, the hardware networking infrastructure business is not what it was.

Yeah, there's a lot going on with servers and how many Nvidia can you stuff into a rack and, and all of these things. But the traditional Cisco business is not enough for Cisco anymore. And so the question they face is, do they wanna just continue selling picks and shovels, though there may be different picks and shovels.

Maybe they're more servers, they're more, you know, not just the traditional networking gear or do they enviously eye what Google and, and AWS and these others have, which is the service layers on top of that hardware. So it's not enough just to do the hardware, right? We're gonna layer on services there with, and, and they've, look, they've tried this with WebEx and, and their security and Splunk now, right?

The Cisco's remade itself or trying in the process of remaking itself to be more than just that pick and shovel seller. So we could talk about their latest, greatest hardware, but to me, the real action at Cisco is what are they doing service wise on top of the hardware? And that will determine whether they go the way of Intel or Microsoft.

Well, it's interesting that, um, you mentioned that because the other half of what was announced, the nerdy half is really hardware. And, um, let's, let's dive into that for a second. So Cisco is actually ripping a page out of Apple's playbook here.

Uh, they've introduced their own, uh, Silicon One is, uh, what they're calling it their own, uh, switching platform. And this effectively is, uh, um, you know, a, just like Apple was able to push Intel out of the max, this is a way to push, uh, Broadcom and cloud scale and companies like that out of the Cisco switches. Those were a pretty big cost line item for Cisco, I'm sure.

Also, um, you know, it's a kind of a generic platform. You know, if you, if you're using an enterprise switch, asic, it's uh, pretty much, uh, you know, Broadcom's been good at differentiating them, but ultimately, um, Broadcom is happy to sell them to your competitors as well. So Cisco has done some pretty cool stuff on the switching side here.

The new, uh, nexus 9,300 line, uh, includes their, uh, their new switch, uh, asic, which again, like Apple incorporates things that the generic hardware wasn't incorporating. In this case, it's dpu. Now, we've talked in the past, I'm sure, on, uh, Textron Gang, certainly on, uh, tech Field day events and so on about dpu.

Um, you remember, um, the Penson group, which was, uh, made up of the, that group of, uh, Cisco execs called MPLS that typically develops things and then Cisco buys them back and all that. Well, when it came to Penson, it's interesting, A MD was the one that bought it instead of Cisco. And so a MD has basically these client offload card, you know, networking cards with offload engines.

Incredibly powerful. We've seen a lot of use cases for those things to, uh, as you know, in the AI space, but also in conventional networking. And, um, as you mentioned in the security space in, um, you know, new networking technologies.

Well, Cisco is now integrating that same type of technology into the Switch ASIC for themselves. And so basically you've got a DPU on both sides, which accelerates everything. Again, very Apple-like to do this, but also it enables Cisco to be a little bit more of a master of their own destiny when it comes to where they're going with their, uh, Cisco, with their, with their underlying hardware.

Now, there still needs to be a bit of a rationalization here because, you know, now Cisco has multiple different, uh, fabrics, multiple different operating systems. You know, the Nexus portfolio now supports N-X-O-S-A-C-I and Sonic, uh, which is a, a, a new up and coming, uh, platform for networking. So it, it's really gonna be interesting to see, uh, how Cisco rationalizes those things.

I expect there'll be more announcements at Cisco live us, which will also be covering. But, um, overall, uh, you know, again, I feel like what we're seeing here as a company, again, like Apple, that's trying to focus on user experience, trying to focus on the, on the value or the, the, the high margin part of the market, trying to make sure that those customers are the happiest customers, bring more to services, more to software and control the platform all the way down to the chips, which is something you don't see as much of in the enterprise tech space as you do in the consumer tech space. What do you guys think of this?

I think that it'll take Broadcom in short order to kind of converge DPU into their own networking processors. And well, They certainly have that capability, don't they? And they, and then they will turn around and commoditize the pricing to the point where it's very difficult, as we've seen in the historically, right?

Cisco's done a good job for creating their own networking chips for a long time, but the map, you know, from a manufacturing point of view seems to be against them. And the speed at which the other guys can copy that is getting faster and faster. So I'm kind of not seeing the cycle of how they're gonna like, get enough scale on their processors and that architecture to kind of make it worth competing head to head against a Broadcom and else decides to come out that.

And remember, the cloud guys are also all making their own networking chips now. And so there a lot of that business that Cisco might have had over the years. There's just a lot more options.

And the cloud guys are right there with DPU as well. I think you should point that out, that, you know, a lot of them are really making hay with this same technology. So in a way, Cisco is almost following them.

Cisco will not achieve its corporate goals on hardware. They, they have got to put a bigger bet on services and software. That's the bottom line here.

The hardware business, if it was a commodity before, it's even more of a commodity now, because you, you no longer have certain, I don't wanna use the monopoly word, but powerhouses that you did before, there were the, the barriers to entry to, to burning your own silicon, designing your own silicon, fabbing your own silicon, or, or, you know, subbing out the fabrication piece of it are much, much lower than they ever were. So if you are going to stake your claim on purely, uh, custom silicon without corresponding software, you know, what makes the Apple chips great, is because they're optimized for something called the Macs and iOS right There. Yep.

Right? Without Mac, OS or iOS, who the hell needs a, an M four? Mm-hmm.

Exactly. And, and well, that's obvious everybody who bought an M four iPad, um, it, it, it's, it's also exactly what I'm seeing too, Alan, that, that the goal of this platform is to enable Cisco's software and services. And if they can do that, then they have a sustainable differentiation in the networking market.

I mean, they're still the 800 pound gorilla. They still sell more than anybody else in pretty much every, uh, market they play in. And, um, and they can maybe use that to, you know, claw back market share and, and, and, and so on.

But if, if they can't, if this is just a way to extract a little bit more margin from those switches, it, it ain't gonna work. It needs to be a truly integrated product or platform all Apple. And we're gonna be keeping a close eye on that.

So Rightt, Don't forget that there's this little Chinese outfit called Yahweh that's trying to close off half the market. No, Yahweh. Yahweh, it's wwe.

Yahweh's a different guy. Ywe people pray to. All righty on that.

No, let's take a break here. Mike's mixing metaphors with Gods and, and, uh, service providers. We need a break.

We're gonna be back. Get some big news for Bonnie, from Bonnie coming at you. You are watching Textron gag.

Hi everyone, welcome back to the Textron Gang. Well, this week I have an exciting announcement that's coming my report. I've been working on this for quite a while now, and it's called Executive Strategies that, uh, I'm sorry, I'm already getting my report's name wrong.

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I've been, uh, showing some previews of it on LinkedIn starting on Monday. And one of them is this preview video I'd like to share with everyone right now. Sustainability is now a business priority, Bonnie Schneider latest report decisions that define Executive Strategies and Innovations Driving corporate sustainability based on exclusive interviews with 100 industry leaders reveals how companies use technology to cut emissions and improve efficiency.

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Driving corporate sustainability demonstrates that sustainability is no longer optional, but a catalyst for resilience and growth. com to read the executive summary. The full report releases on Wednesday, February 19th.

You can also go to Ecotech Insights on the blog. I have a brand new blog up there now, which also talks about some of the findings in the report decisions that define, I'm very excited to share this with everyone on, like I said, I've been working on it for months and it's, it's kind of long, it's 31 pages, but has less pictures. So it's, uh, it's easy to digest and a lot of companies that are in it, you've heard of, maybe some you haven't, that that was the exciting part to talk a little bit about some of the more cutting edge AI startups that are looking to do climate mitigation, climate risk mitigation.

And one of the companies featured, actually two focused on wildfire mitigation. And I wrote this before the wildfires in California. So it's very timely indeeds, and I'm looking forward to everyone's, uh, you know, feedback on it.

And, and I also wanna thank everybody on Textron Gang because our conversations also we're always in my head when I was putting it together. Thank you, Bonnie. Well, you know, it's interesting, right?

This is what makes the world go round. The government could try to take out anything with the word climate in it or sustainability or any of these things, but yet we're at a point in the, in the world right now where this is staring us in the face and, and the time for us to do something meaningful that will mitigate this somehow, or I don't even know if we, I mean, we can't solve it. I don't know how much of an effect mitigation we can have, but the time for us to do something is now.

And what what's nice about this is you do, you have over a hundred interviews, over a hundred executives you've spoken to, and they, they run the gamut right around sustainability, you know, very heavily weighted in the IT and technology space. But it, at least it's clear at that level that sustainability, you know, mitigation of, of, of, uh, global climate change and so forth, and trying to be more renewable. And all of this is important.

And we, you know, all kidding aside, we, we argue when we yell about what's going on in our federal government right now, sustainability is important. The work you're doing is important. And it's not just important for me or Mike or Steven.

It's important for our children and their children and for this world because doing the same old, same old is not gonna end well, and it's gonna end quick if we don't jump ahead of this. So I would highly recommend not just leaders out there, but tomorrow's leaders and wanna be leaders. Go take a look at the report, see what leaders are saying, see what, you know, the actual facts on the ground are.

You know, an interesting thing that goes on in our society today, and I think it's one of the reasons we're in the mess with red, is everyone says, well, I wanna listen to all sides and then I'm gonna form my opinion. And that's my opinion. You know, opinions are like buts, my grandmother used to use a different word than buts, right?

But opinions are like that. We all have one, but truth is eternal. There's true and there's false.

Everyone could have an opinion, but what's true is true. I don't really care what your opinion is or my opinion. It's, it's truth.

And when we're talking about stuff like this, I, I think that's the key to what Bonnie is. There's this truth here, and we need to do something about it. So, great work.

Thanks. I'm really excited to see how it comes out and, you know, people's reactions. I am coming to an, arguably an opinion, but, um, have we reached a point where the mitigation side of this thing is just, we're not gonna get there.

So we need to focus more of our energy on things that take carbon out of the atmosphere and kind of the more the effort has to be on the fixing. I think it's a combination of both, because on medication for the impacts of more extreme weather events, um, we're talking about wildfires, dry conditions and things like that definitely add more fuel to it. But the, the mitigation in the technology of detection, early detection with drones and, um, detecting any spark that's on infrastructure to prevent power outages, that's all I think very valuable.

And then on the climate tech side, there are incredible innovations happening to remove carbon, to capture, um, solar energy and, and, and things like that, that are, that are all happening at the same time. That's why this sport, it's funny, when I was writing it, it turned out to be much longer than I expected because there were so many different sides to this story. So Mike, I, I think you make a good point that there's, there's that, that side of it and, and then the others.

Well, Yep. Wait, Wait, wait. Let's ask Steven Windmill fst what he thinks.

Is that my little name mail? I thought it was Solar. I thought so I, Steven Solar.

Yeah. Now I, I, um, I was just gonna jump in on that too. I, I, I, I have to say that, um, you know, one of the things that is evident in this report is that it's not all driven by, uh, I mean, and you guys can throw stuff at me.

It's not all driven by feel good, liberal hippie dippy do better for the children kind. This is also driven by solid business reasons. Sure.

You know, you look at some of these things, you know, I wanna call out one of the companies that, that Bonnie focuses on the report, and that's pure storage with their evergreen architecture. I, I know those guys, they're not bad people. Um, but I guarantee that they didn't come up with Evergreen for hippie dippy, feelgood reasons.

They came up with Evergreen because it was a solid differentiator. Um, and their customers love it. And I've been to the Pure Conference, I have talked to their customers.

They absolutely do love it. Mm-hmm. The idea that your storage array can be migrated forward to such an extent that you can have the, literally the latest and greatest product from Pure and parts of it, components of it are still the original product they came out with over a decade ago is powerful.

And, you know, I think that that's a, a, a business reason. Mm-hmm. To look at the circular economy, it's, it's the same with HPE, which is another company you focus on in here.

Mm-hmm. HPE is a huge corporation. They're not driven by do-gooder.

They're driven by business reasons, and they are doing a lot in the circular economy and sustainability. And like I've said many times, you can call me windmill FoST or solar panel FoST if you want, um, those technologies, you cannot stuff them back down because they make good business sense. They're not just good for the environment, they're good for, they're good for business, they produce power cheaper.

They, you know, and it's the same with a lot of these other things. You know, you look at, um, in many ways, I think that we can look at problems and find ways that are ecologically sound right. And we will find that they're also good business and no new, uh, political administration, no smears and, and, and assaults on that is gonna change that.

And I am optimistic that ultimately, you know, the cat's outta the bag on some of these eco-friendly technologies, you can't stuff 'em back down. That's a great point. I I, I definitely, I'm glad you said that because that, that's one of the thesises of what I put together, that it's, um, not just about, um, you know, the do-gooder mentality that there, there are solid ROI that I stated I have, you know, data to back it up.

And, um, I think that's gonna be something that's more looked at. We always talk about on the show that, you know, it depends in the end is it cost effective? People don't wanna spend the money.

And what I found was there were multiple examples just in the report, and there's more that that weren't, didn't even make it in there, that they were getting that return on investment. Um, another one is delphix with their virtualization, um, and, and, and storage and how that is much more efficient and it's been successful. And Perforce, um, acquired Delphix.

So for, for that technology, that was one of the reasons they acquired them. So, um, as you, as you look through the examples, um, there are many. So I think that is changing, right?

But you ruined the view From the golf course out onto the ocean. I mean, what are we gonna do about that? And won't somebody think of the imaginary whales that are killed by imaginary wind turbines?

Well, no, I thought they just cause cancer. That was my opinion. Anyway, what's the website?

com. Go check it out. Until then, this is your hippie dippy weather, dude saying stay away from the brown as you've got my reference.

Yeah, we'll, uh, we'll, we'll talk to you all tomorrow. Enjoy the rest of tech strong tv. Where Stephen, you are a tech field day cloud, tech field day.

Yes, we're gonna live, Live streaming cloud Field day on Textron TV and LinkedIn Wednesday and Thursday this week. Uh, we've got a great group of people, um, really looking forward to it. Tune in.

Fantastic. Mike, I'll see you in New York this week, right? Absolutely.

Looking forward to it. Until then, everyone enjoy the rest of the day. This is Alan Shimel for Textron Gang.

We're out. I am Tiffani Bova, chief of strategy and research at the Futurum Group with 2025 upon us, I'm reminded of one fundamental truth. Disruption waits for no one organization and leaders who can anticipate, adapt and act quickly will thrive.

At the Futurum Group, we are focused on helping you decode the complexity of today's digital first world, so you can stay ahead of the curve. This year's predictions dive deep into the trends, reshaping industries from AI's pervasive influence across enterprise applications to seismic shifts in hardware, cloud, and customer experience. Our team of analysts, some of the brightest minds in research and strategy have dissected the forces driving change, and outlined actionable insights for what's next.

Whether it's the rise of agentic, AI disrupting software consumption, cloud marketplaces revolutionizing go-to-market strategies, or the accelerating impact of IPCs on productivity, the message is clear. We are entering a new era where business agility, intelligence, and innovation are the ultimate differentiators. The insights shared in our prediction series are not just about spotting trends, but about preparing for transformation As customer expectations soar and the competition intensifies.

Companies that embrace change as an opportunity rather than a challenge, will set the pace for the next decade. I invite you to explore our predictions, listen to our analysts, share their insights, and download the reports so you can reflect on how your organization can harness these shifts to drive growth, improve outcomes, and elevate experiences for customers and employees alike. Don't forget to download our Futurum 2025 prediction ebook, and we look forward to meeting the future head on to together.

Hi, I'm Keith Kirkpatrick, research director and enterprise applications for the Fuge Bone Group. Today I'd like to talk to you about the market and offer a bold prediction that I have for 2025. Now, there's a lot going on in the enterprise application market.

Generative AI is predicted to deliver exponential productivity. Efficiency in accuracy and in large measure has dominated nearly every buying conversation. Now, gene AI technology is being delivered either as an add-on feature at an additional cost, or as a fully integrated or embedded capability directly into business applications such as C-R-M-E-R, PCDB, and countless other line of business applications, though without a discreet additional charge on top of the base license.

Now how generative AI is actually being delivered to customers, it's largely dependent upon the individual vendors' technology stack and footprint. Some vendors such as Oracle or Zoho, while they own the entire technology stack, including the data centers and compute, that will power AI model training, tuning, and inference test, all the way to the end user facing applications. Now, other vendors, they only own the application itself and they have to procure or cobble together compute resources, AI model training and development and other ancillary services to actually deliver real value to organizations.

This ladder group, there are significant concerns around balancing these costs being heard for delivering AI, while actually ensuring that they can deliver new innovations on a continuous basis, not just on a quarterly cadence, but on a continual basis to satisfy their customer's thirst for quickly utilizing new innovations. Black prediction for 2025 is that we're gonna witness the introduction and growing usage of new packaging and pricing models in terms of how software is actually delivered to the market. This will largely be based around the growing utilization of generative ai copilots for assistance, AI agents, and embedded AI technology.

Now, if you'd like to learn more, please be sure to download our ebook future and research 2025 key issues and predictions. Thanks and we'll see you throughout the year. Hello, I'm Krista Case Research director on the team here at the Futurum Group, and I'm here today to walk you through three of the key trends that we're going to be watching in the cybersecurity space.

The first topic is the fact that AI is accelerating the race between attackers and defenders. The second topic is the fact that attack surfaces are sprawling, and this is really creating the perfect storm. Number three is the fact that data protection is evolving into cyber resiliency.

So let's look at the first topic. AI is accelerating this race between attackers and defenders. The meteoric rise of deep seek so far this year in 2025 has really shown a limelight on the fact that attackers are not only using AI to kind of up their game, create more innovative and more efficient, you know, attack techniques, but at the same time, they're also targeting large language models and things of that nature to be able to do things like capture user, um, personal identifiable information and other things.

The other flip side of this coin is how we're seeing enterprises use AI from a defensive perspective to try to, as much as they can, keep a step ahead of how attackers are evolving their techniques. I think a lot with practitioners and they're really looking to their vendors to be able to make capabilities like detection of anomalous activity and to be able to identify, you know, potential breaches sooner, and also to be able to respond to them more quickly. So again, certainly something that just as attackers are not sleeping on, the opportunity for AI defenders certainly are not as well.

The second topic, sprawling attack surfaces an explosion in the number of SaaS applications in use by the given enterprise. For example, we have the rise of remote work and the myriad of devices that enterprises are accessing corporate data from. We have a growing number of iot devices and growing OT environments, for example, we also have supply chains that have become more sprawling than ever before.

So as attackers have become more innovative in their approaches, the potential attack surface is also much more difficult for security practitioners to be able to get visibility into an established control. Over our third topic, data protection evolving into cyber resiliency. This topic is very closely interweaved with our first two topics because it is naturally the data at the end of the day that attackers are targeting as it becomes more difficult for enterprises to stay ahead of attackers and prevent them from getting in.

The precedence is placed on recovering data as quickly as possible and getting these critical business services back up and running. So for data protection companies, what this means is it means baking in capabilities like that anomalous detection that we talked about of potentially nefarious activity, and then to be able to potentially take action like creating a snapshot as soon as that activity is detected and automatically uncovering the best recovery point. There's also a growing correlation between data protection vendors and incident response that we've seen both through partnerships and acquisition activity.

So the takeaway from these three key trends is really that there's new technology requirements that really have been emerging over the last 18 to 24 months. Buyers are evaluating all of the vendors that they're working with across the cybersecurity space, and they're really looking for ways to address these new threats, shore up their security posture and any potential goals and to be able to mitigate any business impact if they are breached. So with that, I wanna thank you for joining me.

Please make sure to also check out the video from Fernando Montenegro, our VP in this space. He's gonna be covering some other trends, um, that we're gonna be watching in cybersecurity this year. And make sure to check out our ebook, um, for a discussion of all of the trends and topics across, um, the technology space that we're watching.

Thank you so much again, and I look forward to seeing you in the next video. Hello and welcome to the digital CXO podcast. I'm Amanda Razani, and with me today is Mario Pania.

He is the CEO of Anello photo tonics. How are you? Hi, nice to meet you Amanda.

Good to see you again. Happy new year to see you. Yes, happy new year.

So we have been on the show before. Can you share a little bit with our audience though, about anello and what y'all are providing and working on maybe a little bit about what we talked about last time and then we can move on? Sure.

So here, Anello, what we've done is we created, there's two types of gyros. There's a MEMS based gyro that's in your phone and your watch, your EarPods that measures gyros measure position and rotation. Uh, um, and so these are billions, you know, billions of units a year.

They're not very expensive, but they're not very accurate. And then on the high end, there's these fiber gyros, right? This is a 3D print of a fiber optic gyro.

It's about 30, $40,000, but it's used for the high end fighter jets, submarines, ICBMs. And what we do is the world is moving autonomous. We want more and more precision, but you can't afford the big, bulky, expensive thing.

So what we've done is we've created the world's smallest fiber optic gyro on a chip, as we call sfog silicon photonics, optical gyro. 3 volts, but it has the same precision of the fiber jarrow, but it's based on integrated silicon photonics. This is the same silicon that's used for integrated circuits.

So we fabricate these devices in the same factories and fab fabrication facilities as integrated circuits. We put this with some electronics around there, and then we have a little laser in there that shoots light into this chip. And now we can very accurately measure position or rotation.

We then put that into systems. And if I put three of those into a cube, you can sort of see here three, you now have a three Actis. This is for things that fly drones.

And just to compare, this is, uh, a 3D print of an LN 200. This is our X three. You can see here, size, weight, area, power, right?

It's a third, the fourth to size, fifth to weight, fifth to power, same performance. Um, and this allows you now to bring that what was previously high performance capability into smaller things and bigger markets, right? Higher volume.

So obviously drones, this is a use case here. We have land vehicles. This is a, a, a unit we call genus, SINS as GPS chips.

It's a sealed unit, salt spray. We're shipping this into construction for land vehicles. The heading matters.

So while you're moving around on the ground, you're still constrained your wheels unless you have a flying car. We're not there yet. Um, and so it's the heading is the key.

So this has one optical gyro technology in the, in the drive axis. So here we're doing and shipping to construction, farming, agriculture, and then we have another product, um, that we use for, uh, robots that is similar, but if you're already indoors, there's no GPS. And this is a unit that we're shipping into, uh, construction robots and hardened things.

Um, and so this is now about being able to navigate with GPS or more importantly, when you lose G-P-S-G-P-S constrained GPS denied or GPS spoofed environments. And what we have, because you have this high precision gyro, you combine that into a box with CPUs and algorithms, and we have algorithms that say, Hey, we're driving, for example, and I'm starting to lose GPS, whether it's a canyon, urban canyon, downtown, Barnes orchards for agriculture, mines for, uh, for construction. As you start to lose GPS, well, algorithm says, Hey, we're losing GPS weigh the algorithm more and more on the anello technology, and now we can navigate for extended periods of time without GPS, I can imagine this being used for, um, mapping underground unexplored tunnels and caves or, uh, finding people that are trapped in, you know, tunnels and caves with putting this into little drones.

Yes. And so what we're doing is we started off as an industrial, uh, application construction farming. Uh, then there's a bunch of interest that's happening with the DOD.

So if you're in conflict areas in Afghan, if, uh, you know, Ukraine or Israel today, all the GS is jammed or spoofed, if you take your phone and in Israel today, it sends you to Beirut, right? It's all being jammed and spoofed. And then there's all these other use cases that your indoor buildings, right?

We're talking about, uh, uh, uh, a handheld unit for, for soldiers or emergency, uh, people that go into buildings that you can't find. You gave a perfect use cases, is that whether it's underground or underwater, six feet underwater, there's no GPS. You can start going into tunnels, um, whether it's search and rescue or other things you wanna navigate.

So we brought this capability now that we can navigate extended periods of time, like we're talking 30, 60 minutes of navigation at a price points that you previously couldn't think of and, and form factors. So there's a perfect example. And what really excites me when I do these interviews or when we talk to customers, is as we announce these in, uh, advances, and I'll talk about a new product we just announced, people and customers come to us and say, Hey, we have this use case, right?

An example, we have robots that we put into tunnels, and we wanna know where in certain places in the tunnel. And if you have a tunnel that's dark, that looks the same, cameras don't help, LIDAR doesn't help, right? Because the image is the same, there's no features.

So how do we know where we're going in terms of position? How do you know where you start? And so these are use cases, um, that we're finding all enabled by this, you know, wonderful thing which we call sfo, which was this breakthrough that we developed that, uh, this, you know, team here, uh, has developed over the last couple years.

Fantastic. So now tell me a little bit about the new product. Okay, so I said what we had before, we have stuff for land, right?

This is our vehicles. We're shipping robots, which are, these are also somewhat land, these are robots on the ground air, which we launched last year. This is the X three product, which predominantly for drones and things that fly.

And now we just launched a product that cs, which we call our maritime product. So this is now for things that are above water. Thinking about this, you're bouncing around and there's this new activity of, of USBs unmanned surface vessels.

That seems to be a very high interest. Now that's the same thing. If you're in a, you're, you're an unmanned vessel, and on the ocean, cameras don't help you, right?

All looks the same. You can go 360 degrees, you can use lidar, maybe you can use the stars. But we've done here is we've taken our sfog, but three of those in here.

So it's the same concept as the cube. But in addition, we've created a navigation system. So this has two GPS chips where we actually have GPS.

It's a sealed unit. We have a, a navigation system and, and, and software in here. And this now it's also watertight and sealed.

So now we can actually navigate on the water. We have algorithms that take into account currents and drifts, but also allows, the reason the three axis is depending on the speed of the boat that you're using, you know, there's some of the smaller boats that go two to four knots. There's the bigger boats that go, 15 to 20 knots, you're bouncing around.

But now we can operate and navigate, um, on the water or underwater with anello cylo technology and operating in GPS denied or contested or spoofed environments. Fantastic. So can you give an, uh, any examples of, uh, real world use cases this is already being used in?

Yeah, so we're just launched the product where we'll have samples. There's quite a bit of interest. We're launching engineering.

We have test boxes that we've shipped, uh, that customers have been testing with. And then we, we launching this product ramping up in Q2 with early engineering samples. And in full production in the fall, uh, the interest level's quite high, but we've taken our technology, for example, just recently at, uh, west 25, which is an event, uh, was put on in San Diego, I think January 27th, January 28th.

Um, this was in conjunction with a partnership with Saab, SAB, if your readers go and look up, uh, on our LinkedIn posts at Anella photonics, or if you look at our website or if you go to a Saab, uh, this was in partnership with scpa, which is their, uh, innovation group. We put our technology on their boat. This was then sent out on, you know, people were watching real time.

We sent the boat out, you know, many, many miles out on the ocean from San Diego, turn off the GPS. And then we navigated back in based solely on Anello. And we were talking, I think 30 or so miles of navigation, or kilometers I think I should say, with less than 1% error.

Um, when we came back into the dock, you know, we sort of measured how far we were off with the turning on off GPS. Now in San Diego, the testing was done by just disconnecting the antennas, right? We're not in a, a contestant environment.

The same technology and partnership with Naval X and Task Force 59, uh, this is, uh, a navy, a task force 59 is the innovation unit of the Navy that's out in Bahrain, out in the Middle East. Our technology was flown out there was then flown to Jordan, and then we had a partnership with Seasat, where they have a UUV unmanned surface vessel, USV, sorry. And it was just driven up to the tip of Israel and the Navy that was following behind it.

People's phones were, we could tell when they were being spoofed, we detected the spoofing. So spoofing is when you can still get, there's two things. Jamming is when you lose satellite signal and you can sort of tell that, you can tell by number of signals.

The number of satellites. The weakness spoofing is you get GPS signal, but you don't know if it's real or not, good or not. And so what we can do here, because we have real time information, we compare every 10 milliseconds, what is the position that Anella says, and what is the position that GPS has?

And for example, in this case here, we were navigating and we were getting close to Israel, and the, the spoofing detected that all of a sudden GPS says, you're in Kobad Jordan airport, or, uh, I, I think Kobad is the base. You were at the Ahma airport, which was 300 kilometers away. We immediately detected it.

We said, Hey, we're being spoofed, poured over to Anello. And then we navigated. It was just some testing that was done by taskforce 59.

And there's an example in a real environment that our technology technology has been tested and we navigate solely based on Anello. So it's quite exciting. And there's a few more customers that are doing testing that are not public.

Um, but you know, we now have, you know, land, which we've been, you know, a product we shipped a year and a half ago. We introduced the three axis product specifically for drones. And we have lots of customers testing, unfortunately, lot customers aren't public.

Um, and then we just launched a maritime product that is a combination of testing we've done with customers, both in field trials with Naval X, with other customers out in San Diego on the east coast in Rhode Island. And then some of this is actually being shipped over the next quarter. We have about six or seven pretty big customers testing this in field trials, and then looking at, uh, ramping that into production, uh, in the summer and then wrapping through the fall.

So quite exciting again. Yes, all based on this little thing called Cy fog. Silicon photonics.

Optical gyro. Absolutely. It sounds like your technology is making a large impact around the world.

Yeah, and you know, I think, uh, as you said earlier, what's really exciting is if you think about it, we thought about maritime a year ago. There was a bunch of interest over the summer. Uh, people came to us and we said, Hey, we can build something.

We build a test box first. That took, you know, a combination of the X three A, a discrete board for GPSA discrete board for our navigation software. And then as that evolved where there was interest, we ended up building a real product.

And this is, you know, like I said earlier, the real excitement of working with customers, putting it our technology onto real use cases, and then together with the customer, building a product that's optimized for the use case. And I think from that schedule I just showed you also gives you a sense of how fast and nimble we are, how we're really customer focused. And you know, I urge any of your customers that are listening, if you have new use cases or new applications, you know, I think between these three products or derivatives, we can find how we can quickly app adapt our technology.

Maybe it's tweaking the algorithms or maybe, you know, obviously every boat is different. Every USB is different, every land vehicle, but you know, 90% of it is the same. And then we can work with the customer to tweak the, the algorithms.

And also these are, these are designed to be very easy to install, 15, 20 minutes, put it in, there's standard interfaces, there's no proprietary, uh, interfaces. So we, we try to make this as, as easy to use, easy to install, and, and then take it out to the, to the, the mass market So you can custom build for a client, You know, if there's a business case that that makes sense. Absolutely.

Right. And, um, we have, uh, one or two projects that are slightly taken our existing product and then we, we do some custom stuff for customers. Yes.

So what's next? Do you have anything in the works for the future? Is there any reason you would try to get even smaller for any reason?

Yeah, I mean, it's sort of the first thing is just, you know, we're ramping up, we just raised a funding round, um, and we're ramping up our existing product portfolio and bringing this new customer on the new product line and then ramping that into production. So there's a lot of stuff happening here, but if you wanna look forward, you know, we, we are here in Silicon Valley, it's not, uh, uh, the Wizard of Oz in Kansas or something. But you know, this is, you know, this is unfortunately the, the beat we live on, this is the state of, state-of-the-art.

Today is a 3D printer of an L 200. This is an ALOS X three, which we just launched, and I think you set me up, but this is our next generation, right? Oh wow.

Yes. We're talking about shrinking the X three to even the smaller. So this is something that's in our roadmap.

It's not something we're focused on today, but this is something that we've had from customers of how do we scale it? And this is something probably in the next three plus years, you know, we have a roadmap that we continue, as you said, we're gonna continue to reduce power, we're gonna continue to reduce size, and as you shrink those, you end up with something. And by the way, we don't trade off on performance.

So this is talking about something one inch square from a two by two, you know, eight times smaller, uh, fifth po, maybe half a third, the power, same performance. So what this does is opens up new applications, right? Things you want the same precision, but maybe you want on consumer drones, or maybe you want it on, you know, handheld and personal people that can carry it or other things.

And so as you go smaller, you keep the same performance, but it opens up volume markets. And this eventually we'll keep integrating and integrating eventually we're make it small enough that we'll put it on every phone, on every watch, and then you can track everybody anytime, any place. Not track, but you can use it to navigate with everything you do with the same precision, whether you're in contested GPS denied or not environments.

Alright, great. So if someone wanted to reach out to you, uh, where would they go? Can you give the, the web address?

com. There's a, a, a link there for info. Uh, you can download the spec sheets, get on our mailing list.

There's a also a pull down for mailing list. And then if you have any questions or applications, we look at that every day on the info page. And then we usually send it off to our applications engineer, depending on the topic, and someone will get back to you and, um, look forward to hearing from you, and more importantly, look forward to seeing how Anello can solve your navigation solutions.

Alright, great. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing all about these products. Well first of all, thank you, Amanda, for, for having us back on and look forward to, to hearing more from you and in the future we'll keep you updated when new stuff comes out, but I look forward to talking to your viewers and your customers and our future customers.

How's that? And thanks to our audience, stay tuned. There's more.

Hi, I am Nick, patience, vice president and AI practice lead at rum, and these are some of my predictions for AI. In 2025, agen AI will take center stage. This is the evolution of the, the generative AI revolution that started in late 2022.

And now we're getting to the stage where AI enabled agents are gonna be able to take decisions, they're gonna be able to interact with other agents, they're gonna be able to interact with other kinds of software applications and interact with humans. And this is the, the, the, the evolution of this. So we actually get to the stage where AI can execute business processes, and that opens up all sorts of new opportunities.

This year we're gonna see, uh, a successful IPO of one of the AI focused companies. The IPO market has been, um, fairly fallow in the last, um, few years. There's been a lot of venture capital invested, obviously, and that also needs to go somewhere.

And we were expecting the IPO market to open up a little bit in 2025. We're also expecting one of the smaller large language model companies to get acquired. OpenAI has obviously stormed ahead here and, and is the dominant player.

Um, but there's quite a few others that are fairly small in comparison to OpenAI, but might make attractive acquisition targets probably for application software vendors, but maybe also for infrastructure, uh, vendors as well. Agents and reasoning models, these reasoning models where they kind of act sort of like a human with chain of thought reasoning and show they're working and show how they're actually coming to a decision. We think both those kind of trends, A, they're related, and B, they're gonna drive an increase in need for inference infrastructure.

So you have more power at the inference stage because of this, this chain of thought, uh, process going on. This is not as just a simple putting in a a simple question into a an LLM and text and getting the answer back or, or anything like that. This is gonna require more investment, we think.

So those are some of my predictions for 2025. Thanks for taking the time to listen, and if you wanna know more about these predictions and all of our predictions, you can check out the future and research ebook, which is available now. Hi, I am Olivier Blanchard.

I am the research director and practice lead for AI devices automotive and AI device semiconductors at the Future and Research Group. And so what we're thinking here in our holistic practice, looking at all of our diff different technology categories is that AI devices is actually taking off this year. Uh, and it's, it's probably going to be one of the bigger trends in, uh, in the overall tech sector.

Up until now, we've had AI living in the cloud, in, in terms of training inferencing services. Most of it has been handled in the cloud through data centers and cloud services. But what we're doing this year, or what we're seeing this year rather, is a, a migration not away from the cloud, but into devices towards the edge.

So essentially it's an expansion of, uh, of the AI ecosystem from the cloud outward to the edge to devices. And these devices are AI PCs. That's obviously one of the big, uh, developments for this year.

I'll come back to it in a second. Another one is, uh, AI enabled mobile devices, which actually isn't new, but we're going to start seeing a lot more on device age, agentic AI entering the market this year, and also all of the other devices that are sort of peripherals to, uh, PCs and mobile. So that's the wearables like your watches and xr.

So smart glasses, it's also drones, it's also smart cameras, smart speakers, all of the, the, the little ecosystem of, of intelligent devices that you can interface with either by voice or, or other types of, uh, of interfaces. And we're also seeing an expansion of that into the automotive space where cars aren't just about self-driving and a DAS, they're also about agentic experiences inside the vehicle for the drivers and passengers. So all of these things together are essentially driven by advancements in two areas.

One is, uh, semiconductors. So the small semiconductors, the semiconductors that go into your devices, your PCs, your mobile phones, your watches, your smart glasses, your speakers, your, all of your wearables and in the vehicles are getting much better. Uh, a lot of them are equipped with, uh, something called an NPU, which is a neural processing engine or unit that allows AI workloads to happen on device.

And increasingly what we're seeing is not just inference, which is sort of the AI interacting with you on devices, it's also the training itself. And, and we're, we're now able with IPC's mobile devices and, and, and vehicles to train AI directly on the device without necessarily needing a, um, a cloud connection or connection to the cloud or, or to a data center. So that's, that's a huge thing because it allows training of AI to be remain local, to be secure and to be a little bit more immediate.

And that's also with the inferencing, which is kind of the interactions that we have with ai. AI models are becoming a lot more efficient to trade. And so what used to have to be trained in the cloud a year ago that required, you know, 70 a hundred billion parameters can now is, is much smaller now and can run directly on devices or can be trained directly on a device.

So we're gonna see an expansion of training AI models from the cloud into smaller solutions like small servers, more local, and also some of that training being, uh, being moved to AI devices. All of that and more, uh, can be found in our ebook about our predictions for 2025. Uh, we're talking about not just AI devices, but a lot of other technology categories as well that all play into this big AI revolution that we have.

Also, I recommend that you follow us on the socials, so we're on LinkedIn, obviously, uh, we're on X anywhere. You can find us, uh, anywhere you can find me where I talk about AI devices and also follow us on our websites where you'll find a lot of other resources. com.

Thanks a lot, happy reading and I hope to see you at. Hello, I'm Fernando Montenegro and I recently joined Futu Research at Vice President and Practice Lead for cybersecurity research. You may have seen the video from my colleague Krista case, so this is a bit of a compliment to that.

I also encourage you to check out our ebook. We want to highlight several crucial areas for the security landscape in 2025. First up is the discussion around security platforms.

We emphasize the, the very nuanced discussion to be had about what is actually a platform and how do you consume one. We typically think of a conversation of a dichotomy between platform versus best of breed, but we think that has actually evolved into a much more complex decision matrix besides choosing on functionality, pricing, et cetera. We argue that there are now at least three dimensions that people should consider.

First one is, do we buy it as a platform or as a point product? Do you consume it and, uh, as a product and then you have to integrate it yourself? Or is it integrated into a platform?

Which one evolves quickly? Which one, how gives you more, uh, faster time to value? The second conversation is, are you buying something that is best of breed versus quote unquote good enough?

Of course, we all want best of breed, but that comes at a cost. So how can organizations choose with where they want to pay for a premium versus where good enough is? Well, good enough.

Lastly, you have the, the, the topic of how do you consume it, how you do, how do you deliver it? Is it something that you're choosing to buy from a vendor directly or is it's something that you are working with a service provider or a channel partner on? Each of these dimensions have pros and cons, and you have to evaluate based on specific organ organizational requirements.

We argue that a fiber security becomes much more strategic. These types of decisions become much more tied to an economic angle to them, and we have to frankly just navigate what the economic trade-offs are between these choices. Another key area for us for 2025 is the evolution in the convergence of application security with cloud security.

Now, cloud security best practice in general is encouraging us to use more automation and infrastructure as code as principles, and that by itself fits really well with how application security already works. Also, the developers that are typically outputting, uh, front end code H-T-M-L-C-F-F, JavaScript or backend code go Python know what have you, they are also very comfortable creating Kubernetes configurations in yml or helm charts or cloud formation templates with cloud formation or Terraform, et cetera. So it's not that big of a jump to include those configurations into the software supply, uh, pipeline.

This alignment is really interesting because it creates this proximity between consuming application security and cloud security functionality. That being said, this convergence is also interesting because we have to rethink how teams are structured, how responsibilities flow from one to another. So that's another area that we're looking at.

Third area I want to highlight, if the evolution of third party risk management, we think that modern third party risk management is much more about addressing both the business level risks as well as the technical risks across your value chain. So this includes evaluating, for example, security libraries or cloud posture or SaaS components that you're using as well as vendor reliability, financial viability, et cetera. The challenge is here is how do you as an organization maintain this complex, uh, information set on first party, second party, third party, first party relationships?

So it's really interesting. One more point I want to mention before you wrap up, and that is that there are quite a few security areas that actually are very good at spanning multiple domains, if you will. We all talk about AI security, for example, as one of these, but that said, we think there are other areas.

Ransomware response and, and uh, and protection for example, is one of those. It's not just an endpoint security issue, just like it's not a only a data security issue, it actually flows into a bigger conversation around risk management and cyber resiliency. Also secure access service edge implementations, SAE, right?

They themselves are interesting because they stand from network security to cloud security, data security and so on. All of these are really interesting areas that require us to look at them with different perspectives and, uh, from different lenses. As we look into these in 2025, we here at, uh, at Futurum are paying very close attention to the needs of all the stakeholders in this, in this area.

As I get to wrap up, I want to thank you very much for your attention and I want to encourage you to do three things. First of all, if you can please review Crystal case's video for some other cyber predictions, please review our ebook for a complete set of predictions from cybersecurity and other areas. com.

I often like to say, I mean, there is never a dull day in the fiber security industry, so thank you very much for your time and I wish you all a great day. Hi, my name is Richard Gordon, I'm vice president and practice lead for semiconductors here at Future Own Group. Today I'd like to talk a little bit about what's going on in the semiconductor industry and we'll maybe have two or three predictions as well.

So first of all, let's start with the state of the industry right now at the end of 2024, and as we enter 2025 last year, the industry grew at around about 20% and that growth was driven by a boom in data center semiconductors, particularly AI chips, and uh, also from a boom in, in memory from the likes of Samsung, esky, Hynek, and Micron. The industry growth rate's gonna slow down a little bit and we'll probably see growth of around 10% this year. Overall, that's gonna be driven, um, I think by a pause in investment in the data center space and also a, a a, a recovery in the rest of the market as supplied and demand comes more into balance.

So the industry going from strong growth last year to slightly more moderate growth in 2025. As we head towards 2030, I think we'll see another upcycle in the industry pushing the market towards a trillion dollars or so in the early 2030 timeframe. Second prediction I wanna talk a little bit about is to do with the technology roadmap over the, the, the past few decades in the industry, technology has been driven by Moore's law.

Investment in semiconductor scaling is what drove chip performance and cost reduction. However, it's increasingly challenging for companies to invest and keeping to the Moore's law curve. Really only the leading foundries and leading memory players can afford to do that these days.

So we're gonna see increasing investment in advanced packaging to drive the technology roadmap. In fact, one of the equipment manufacturers reckons that by 2030, around a quarter of foundry revenue will come from the triplet space. Benefit of triplets is that semiconductor devices can be partitioned up into functional blocks and then recombined in advanced packaging so that there's different types of semiconductors with different properties available in a single package.

The last thing I wanna talk a little bit about is geopolitics. Of course the industry has is very much a globalized industry and has a globalized supply chain, but increasingly we're seeing semiconductors seen as a driver of economic growth and also very important from a national security perspective. So what we're going to see going forward is more onshoring of semiconductor design and manufacturing.

We're gonna see increased technology transfer restrictions around the world and also increased tariffs and trade as well. Uh, uh, that won't apply just the semiconductors, of course it'll apply to to business more generally, but it will affect, affect the semi space. So that's a little bit of a a look into what's going on in the industry right now.

If you wanna find out more, you can download, uh, our ebook, um, where we have some more detail on these predictions. That's futurum 2025 key Issues and predictions. This is Textron tv.

Hey guys, thanks for the throw. We're here with Eran Yahav, who's CTO for tab nine, and we're trying to sort out what is the future of application developers in the age of AI because, well, there's a lot of talk about how much is gonna be automated and just what is the job function gonna be. Ron, welcome to the show.

Thank you for having me, Mike. I think everybody has the same basic conversation when it comes to ai. They all have some understanding that their quote unquote cheese is about to be moved, but they don't know to what extent and are they gonna be completely obsoleted or is the role gonna change?

And you have a lot of hands-on experience with ai. So what are you seeing and what should we expect? Yeah, the role is definitely gonna change, but uh, AI is not here to replace you.

AI is here to amplify you. And in fact, the role has been changing for years, right? And maybe before we discuss, um, about know how the role changes, we can start with the basics of what is the definition of the role anyway?

What is the job of a software engineer, right? Or we say that it changes, let's agree on what is it that is being changed. And uh, the definition of the job description has always been solving business problems using software.

And that job description is not going to change. We are still going to be solving business problems using software. We're just gonna do less of the boring stuff, less of writing the code itself, dealing with the syntax problems, dealing with program that does not compile because you forgot the semicolon, right?

All this stuff is going away maybe, uh, for many domains. And we're just gonna focus on the higher level planning, on the higher level, what needs to be done and maybe less in the nitty gritty details. So that's a high level answer and we can dig deeper.

Definitely In effect, am I gonna become more of a supervisor of the development of a piece of software rather than spending all my time trying to figure out how to write a specific line of code better or testing this, that and the other, or creating the tests and there's gonna be this kinda series of AI agents that will take care of a lot of these functions. How will that kinda work out in your head? Yeah, in my head, I think it's, it's gonna be basically the shift from an individual developer.

Every developer should think of himself or herself as, um, engineering manager or as a team lead. And they're going to be a team lead of a team of AI agents, basically, that are going to be delegated certain tasks and hopefully the AI agents can complete these tasks with, uh, high reliability, producing high quality code. But this is definitely not always going to be the case, right?

And just like any team lead, you'll have to make sure that the problems are well-defined when they're delegated, and you'll have to make sure that what you're getting back is actually satisfying the requirements, right? And as any team lead, you'll have to say, Hey, you know what, Mr. Ai engineer, you kind of missed on this part here and that should be improved and have another iteration with the delegated tasks, right?

So it's really more from managerial responsibility, architectural thinking, understanding your requirements, the constraints, the trade-offs. These are still going to be very much at, at this point, uh, human tasks, right? And then we're gonna basically have the AI agents deal with the low level details of the implementation coming back to us with something that hopefully works.

There's a little bit of cynicism in the air when it comes to ai. Folks are basically saying that instead of going to some website and hunting around looking for, uh, code that I'm basically just gonna copy and paste, I'm now using an AI agent to do that. But the problem is, um, the AI agent doesn't have any context for the production environment.

So when I go to debug the thing, um, I don't know how it was written and I'm more or less confused by all the code written by the machine. So I kind of throw up my hands and say, well, maybe I was just better off doing this myself. So I know we're on the journey here, but what, what are the practical use cases for AI these days?

I think we're already seeing AI pop across the entire SDLC. So we have AI generate code, generate tests, generate documentation, review the code, uh, solve review comments, all those things are done by ai. I think, um, the cynicism is understandable and expected, um, given that we are far from perfect on all of these tasks, right?

So part of the human skill in the coming years is to know where to apply AI and where to actually dig in and do the stuff yourself, right? Because the AI is either gonna give you a partial result or something that you'll have to debug very carefully anyway, right? So I would not use it for my super duper one-off sophisticated algorithm that requires a lot of, uh, contextual understanding of my company, et cetera.

That's maybe not the best use case right now. It will be, things will mature, uh, but we're already seeing, again, increasing autonomy across tasks across the entire SDLC. Things are improving all the time.

Uh, I think things that were science fiction just a couple of years ago, like having ai writing entire application from scratch are pretty common place now. As soon as, as long as the specification is clear enough and the environment in which this is happening is isolated enough. So there's still way to go in terms of ai, understanding the context of your organization, right?

Understanding what code already exists, what libraries should be reused, um, how to not generate things, uh, if you can use an existing microservice out there in the organization, et cetera. And these are part of the things that top nine is focusing on making top nine, making the AI more contextual to the organization, having the AI engineer in a sense onboarded to your specific org so it really does work that could be maintained, uh, downstream, right? Something that is really matching the best practices of the organization writing code that is not foreign.

To your point, it's very easy to generate code that may be functionally correct, but is completely foreign to the organization, right? Something that doesn't use the right library is something that doesn't call the right microservices. So it may work, but whoever needs to maintain it downstream is gonna have a hard time At the other end of that spectrum.

I can't help but wonder how quickly are we gonna move to a scenario where people may be skeptical at the moment, but I can see a world where I may not wanna be an application developer without using these types of tools because there's a lot of toil involved in being a developer that's not a lot of fun. I think like previous tools in previous, you know, revolutions, let's call it. I think the main thing we're gonna find out is that we can accomplish much more and it opens the kind of the way to new ways of doing things.

Like, let me give an example. Today when I have to develop an application, I maybe have some wire frames. Somebody gives me like the basic flows of the app, et cetera, and I develop it and I get one application because the cost of the development is so high that I basically get one bite at the apple, right?

It's kind of, this is the application, but imagine that the co co cost of generation is like low, is like maybe a push button. I can generate a hundred different variations of this application with different UIs, with slightly different behaviors, with slightly different logic maybe. And now the new developer, the the empower developer by I can basically spend time choosing the right application out of the 100 variations, refining it, maybe iterating on it some more, so you can produce maybe 10 x or a hundred x more options than what you used to be able to do without ai.

I think this is really the way in which it's gonna change. And maybe you can even have multiple versions of the same app that are personalized for different personas, right? This is the kind of empowerment that you're getting from AI that you can basically get stay in the spec level, kind of define what is it that you want, and maybe get the rest done by the AI agents.

We all talk about, well, isn't it gonna be awesome that AI can generate code? But you know, I feel like that's just going back to the old, you know, let's measure people on how many lines of code that they're actually creating. And I kind of think, I thought at least, and we kind of proved that that was pointless.

There is this goal that says we're gonna build more applications per developer, but each application is a problem that needs to be solved. And what is the cognitive load that a developer can really carry simultaneously? How many problems can I solve regardless of how much AI I have?

How much can I carry that, um, thought in my head at the same time? Can I really work on instead of three things, 20 things at the same time? Or is that just not how it's gonna play out?

Yeah. So again, I was not implying that you'll have to like, you know, really fully develop a hundred AppSec and deal with all the details, but really, but, but there are many variations that are relatively small as, um, consumer of the app, right? As a user, but may make a huge difference in like how you code the app, right?

That was what I was referring to. It, it is, maybe it is the same calculator app or it is the same Tetris game, but maybe the it's 3D instead of 2D. Maybe, you know, the buttons looks slightly different.

Maybe the the keyboard or the mouse controls are different. These are, it's the same app, but kind of you get a lot of variation, a lot of strength or power uplift by the AI to try these different things without having to rewrite the whole thing yourself manually. So again, cognitive load is definitely a thing, though.

I don't want to dismiss that, right? Like imagine, uh, I'm now Iran and I'm using ai. I give it some tasks and it comes back with 1 million lines of code that it wrote for me, right?

Um, now what, right? Uh, if there's a bug there, who's gonna maintain it? Who's gonna understand it, right?

To your earlier point. And so I think one of the challenges that we're facing as we're moving into this more independent or autonomous agents is how can we trust the results that we're getting back from ai? How can we guarantee that the code that is being generated is actually an asset and not technical debt, right?

That's a central question. And that I get asked by engineering managers as well, right? And I have top nine, it generated whatever, 15,000 lines of code for me.

Like how can I guarantee that this is something that we can maintain, uh, down the road? And this is why we put a lot of emphasis on what we call top line coaching, which is a way to define rules and best practices that are enforced by the AI as code is being generated and also actually for human written code, right? So you want to be able to define kind of like what are the rules for acceptable code in the organization?

And these rules are org specific, right? They're not the kind of rules that say, well, you know, your function has five nested if conditions. So it's a, so it's a bad function.

This is not the kind of code review comments that you would like to get from top down. It's more like, Hey, you know what Mike looks like you are sending customer data without encryption. This doesn't look like good practice in organization, right?

Or looks like you're accessing accessing the database without authentication or without logging. This is again, not good practice. So you want all of that level of control, um, and oversight to be built into the AI product such that the human engineer can have more control on what's going on and not just watch the AI generate arbitrary code.

Uh, that may or may not be maintainable downstream. To your point, it seems also that people are struggling a little bit with the LLMs are probabilistic, and so they're scratching their heads going, well, how come it doesn't gimme the exact same code every time I send the prompt, I get a different answer to every use case. And, and they're kind of like looking at it going, a lot of what we do is deterministic and I kind of need the same exact piece of code the same way every time.

So how do I kinda marry these things together? Yeah. F first of all, again, think about it as delegation, right?

And so if I as an engineering manager delegate the task to five different developers, they may give me five different pieces of code. Again, functionally may be equivalent or nearly equivalent for the requirements that they've been given, but they are gonna be different. And so having different results is not necessarily not inherently, uh, a bug or, or a bad thing as long as it's, uh, it's gets a job done.

Uh, but being contextualized on the organization, getting like the right code for my setting or a right code for the, for my setting, it may not be, again, like a single unique solution. Maybe multiple solutions, but something that matches my specific org requirement. I think this is something important, uh, to, to get from the ai.

Yeah. So if, if you go again, if you go to say charge GPT and ask it to write a piece of code to accomplish a task, it does that completely in a way that is completely disconnected from the context in which you are operating, right? So let's say you ask it to write a sorting function, so it will generate a new sorting function, maybe quick sort me sort whatever it is that is the favorite algorithm that you'll get from Chad g pt.

But maybe you already have mic sort somewhere in your code base that is your specific sorting algorithm with all the edge cases and and whatnot for your organization doing it in, yeah, maybe sorting is too generic of an example, right? But you, you get the idea like something that could be specific to your org creating employee or something like that, rather than the generic one that you'll get of a developer that has not been onboarded to the organization. So AI, just like any other engineer, has to be onboarded into the organization in order to give you the consistent, relevant results that, that you'd like to see from an employee.

So in that example, might it not be a better way to say, okay, well maybe I will ask four or five different AI models to create something for me and then I'll compare the output and I just need a platform that lets me kind of navigate those things to determine which of those outputs actually fits better in my use case. 'cause it seems to me each of these LLMs is slightly different and maybe better at a given task at any given moment. Yeah, I think it's not as much a question of the model, because the models, of course, they have their nuances and difference in, in behavior.

Uh, but it's more a question of the context that is given to, to the model, right? Uh, you can run the model with very different context and get dramatically different results. Uh, example is, again, what code base already exists and can you contextualize on the organizational code base for getting new code to be generated and maybe, you know, in one code base, the result is calling an existing microservice in another code base.

The result is generating a new microservice, right? Depending on in what context exactly we're operating. So to me at least, it's more about the context than it is about the specific LM and LMS are, you know, rapidly changing, improving all the time.

And it's, uh, it's more the question of what you feed them when you're looking to accomplish a task. We of course, have been talking about shifting as many things left as we can possibly do, and developers of course don't always appreciate that 'cause they're like, I am trying to write code and I have a few thousand things I'm trying to do here, and you're adding one more. But where is the right place to like add things like testing and observability.

Now in the age of ai, can I just drop that into the IDE so it sits alongside in real time as I'm developing and it's just something that sits over my shoulder and I don't need to do those things later in the cycle? Or am I trying to just do those things everywhere across the entire cycle? Yeah.

So actually, you know, you can shift further left from the ID to the, the requirement stage, right? And you can maybe, uh, just write the requirements in the detailed enough way so you don't have to write the code. And the AI will write code that already has observability built into it, already has some, uh, security, uh, hardening built into it, et cetera, et cetera.

So a lot of the, let's call it non-functional properties that they'll expect from the code being generated could in fact be handled by and expect observability to be one of the first ones that, that gets integrated automatically because that is first annoying to the human developer and second, easy enough to, to get pretty decent results with automation. So we started this conversation talking a little bit about what an application developer does, but in the age of ai, well, won't everybody more or less become a software developer? I mean, what is the, the scope of that role could expand considerably because all I need to know is how something works then maybe, you know, mere mortals like me or application developers.

Yeah, I think the, the, the realm of like system thinking, large scale software design, architecting the system, all those components are very much still, uh, human endeavor, uh, understanding, you know, also existing code bases and how to interoperate with that is a combination of what the AI understands together with some, uh, human guidance, um, there's still gonna be a bunch of like understanding and improving and integrating the AI generated code, right? We're still not in, in a place where, you know, we push a button and get really an entire enterprise scale system generated by the ai. So there's still gonna be a lot of putting together the components, whether they're human created or AI generated.

So I think we're just moving one level up in terms of engineering, just like we don't have to worry for the most part about memory management anymore. And we don't have to worry about many of the low level details that I had to worry about when I started, uh, programming. Uh, I think it is the same way we just moved up.

One level, don't have to worry about syntax. Maybe programming languages become less foreign because, you know, maybe you don't really care if it's Python syntax or c plus plus syntax. It's roughly, uh, equivalent to the ai, right?

You write one level higher, not necessarily completely natural language, but something that is between natural language and problem languages at this point, some mixture. Mm-hmm. So there's still a lot of work for the human to guide the ai, understands the understand the result, uh, refine them, integrate them, et cetera.

When I talk to a lot of folks, they're a little intimidated by a lot of this, and they don't know where to get started. So what's, I mean, what's your best advice other than the fact that I'm gonna go tell a bunch of developers to start experimenting with things? Is there kind of a, a method to the madness as it were that, you know, you're seeing people put together that has a better outcome?

Yeah, I think that the first step is to start using something, get something in your id, uh, get familiar with the capabilities in, in a very real sense here, resistance is futile, right? Like AI is here, AI for software engineering is here to stay. Um, the, the main thing in getting experience with the tools is to understand where they do not work right now, right?

Like everything else, the hype is over the top. Uh, the skepticism is under the floor and the the truth is somewhere in the middle, right? And so kind of finding for your world, whatever your job is, what AI can do for you today right now, and kind of starting to refine your intuition on, oh, oh, here is a place that I should actually use ai, and no, this is not a good place to use it.

I think that's the, the most important thing that people should do right now, really start collaborating with AI and understanding where delegation to AI makes sense and where it does not make sense, right? So that's, that's really the first step. And the earlier you take it, uh, the earlier you get on the train that is, has definitely left the station, right?

This train is just accelerating and you need to be on it. All right, folks, you heard it here. The only wrong answer when it comes to AI is doing nothing.

Hey, rah, thanks for being on the show. Thank you for having me. All right, and back to you guys in the studio.

com. And here are my analyst predictions for 2025. I've got three of them.

We're now moving into a new domain called agent-based ai, and this is the next big wave generative ai. And instead of generating content for you, it's this AI that takes direct action on your behalf. So actually getting work done and, uh, using a browser or using applications and actually accomplishing tasks autonomously across multiple applications.

And it can be multi-step tasks and it can be for a long period of time. And so this has implications for the digital labor market very significantly, a large, uh, percentage, and by our estimates about 4 trillion globally and labor can be automated in this fashion. So a a lot of rote tasks that before might've had AI advising you or, or telling you how to best complete that task using content now the AI can just go and actually do it for you.

That has major significance in terms of how CIOs are gonna automate in the future. We've been following all the latest Agentic AI product announcements from the top enterprise vendors. Uh, we have a report coming out in a few weeks, so we'll cover them.

But, uh, what organizations have to be doing is getting experience now and making, uh, agentic AI perform and do it safely with guardrails. My next prediction is also about ai, something called super intelligence. Then the next step beyond that, uh, we may reach, which is artificial general intelligence.

And this is a conversation I I don't see enough people focusing on because it has major strategic impact to our organizations. And this is the top vendors like OpenAI or philanthropic who are, have the stated goal of eventually getting to the most advanced, uh, type of ai that's the A GII just mentioned. But on the way, and we're seeing signs that we're actually starting to reach it is this concept of super intelligence, which is AI that is smarter than our best PhDs, uh, smarter than our best geniuses who can do things, they can solve problems that humans cannot have not been able to solve so far.

And this is we're seeing as, uh, the AI models climb to IQ benchmarks to, you know, run every day on all the new models that are being released. Uh, new versions of models that are being released all the time. We're seeing that, uh, they're closing in on that super intelligence and should be in the lab by the end of the year.

And that's something organizations have to be contending with, uh, preparing for because, uh, these super intelligence can allow your organization to do things your competitors can. It's very significant, uh, and this, this, um, milestone will be reached here shortly. Um, and it'll be in production and available to, to all enterprises sometime next year.

So definitely not to prepare for that. And my last prediction has to do with the cloud modernizing existing workloads and moving new workloads out to the public cloud. And that now is because of the cost of, of these new types of workloads, AI workloads are always on.

Uh, we also have a lot more, uh, compliance and regulatory issues, data residency we have to deal with. And so private cloud is return to the conversation using the same technologies, but running inside co-location or inside a enterprise data center to really manage costs or optimize performance or do deliver on constraints like data residency, um, that can't be delivered easily any other way. And so private cloud is not not gonna be the next new destination.

Public cloud is still the primary destination, but we see private cloud emerging as a major Alternative for certain types of workloads. Those always on those highly perform at those, uh, things like AI training, it'd have to be run for months, uh, often makes sense just to, to, to cut out the middleman and, and, and there's, there was significant cost savings in in that regard. And so see private cloud as really being added to the mix, to the whole spectrum of the cloud computing conversation.

Uh, it's part of a continuum, uh, where before we only saw public cloud, so that's a, it is a major shift. 71% of CIOs say they're reconsidering where we're gonna run their workloads this year. So that shows you how, how big a trend.

Uh, so I predict our organizations will be adding a lot more to the mix going forward. And so those are my, my analyst predictions really focused on the CIO for 2025. com.

Hello everyone. Alex Smith here with the Futurum Group, and today we're gonna be sharing with you some of our predictions in going into 2025. And I'm specifically gonna be talking about cloud marketplaces and the role that we expect them to have in the technology industry.

In fact, we think cloud marketplaces will become as important as a route to market for the software industry as traditional distribution has been for the hardware industry. And there's really three main reasons why that's the case. The first has to do with marketplace fees, which have been coming down over the past decade.

You go back a number of years when marketplaces first came on the scene and fees were around 20% north of 20%. Now they're around 3% for many as standard and even as low as one and a half percent, uh, depending on marketplace, depending on scenario. And in this price point, they're operating in a similar margin stack to what, uh, traditional distributors would offer for their customers.

So overall, it is becoming a more cost effective route to market. And vendors can bake this fee into their pricing. They can offer their sales force comp neutrality, many do, and that again, makes it overall a more cost effective, uh, route to market, uh, compared to what it was in the past.

So that's driving some momentum. The second factor has to do with cloud commits. And by this we mean, uh, long-term commitments that customers make to spend in the hyperscaler environment.

And increasingly, this part of this c commit can be used on third party software products that exist in the cloud marketplace. So that is an additional way for customers to burn down these long-term commits. And this commit amount continues to grow across the three leading hyperscalers.

That number now stands north of $400 billion. So what you see here effectively is a, a ready made economy for software companies to be able to tap into because they are dollars that have already been committed to spend. And in many cases, if they cannot spend it on their compute needs with the hyperscalers, then they're looking to spend that on their software needs through that same, same vehicle.

And the way to tap into that is through these marketplaces. And I think what you'll see now is the next evolution of that, where when the hyperscalers are going to discuss their commit contracts, they will not only be talking about the, the compute and storage needs that they're providing, but they'll also be talking about the software needs that that customer has to, and saying, why don't you break, bake that into your, uh, commit plans going forward. So I think that will be more tailwind for the cloud marketplaces as well going forward.

And then the final factor has to do with the role of channel partners. And increasingly what you're seeing is that the hyperscaler marketplaces are creating programs and policies and other forms of enablement to allow channel partners to be a part of this overall marketplace engine. Right?

We mentioned earlier that as the overall marketplace fees come down, that leaves more room, again, in the margin stack for the channel partners to, to be involved as well. In fact, you're seeing now north of a third of all marketplace deals involving some kind of channel partner. Some marketplaces leaning much more heavily into that motion than others.

And this also means that the software vendors themselves can include their traditional partners as part of their overall marketplace strategy, so that the partners are not competing with what they wanna do on a marketplace front. So we expect channel partners to play an increasingly important role in marketplaces going forward as well. So again, the three drivers fees coming down, the growth of committed spend and the increasing role of channel partners will all drive cloud marketplaces good going forward.

And so the call to action to the vendors out there, uh, that might be watching this is as you were thinking about your, uh, go to market strategy overall, really consider the, the role and the importance that you place, um, on the hyperscaler marketplaces, as well as the role that you traditional partners will play as part of that marketplace, uh, strategy. Because really they will go hand in hand, um, to be one of the fastest growing route to markets, um, collectively for the software industry overall. Hi everyone.

I'm Mitch Ashley, VP and practice lead for DevOps and application development with the Futurum Group. These are my predictions for 2025. First, 2025 is go time for AI in production.

A lot of AI projects have been stuck in the pilot and prototype phases. Matter of fact, some estimates say that only a third of those have made into production so far. This is the year where AI has to get real and start demonstrating value that impacts how we develop traditional software as well.

We will see vendors introduce capabilities that help us start to blend and coordinate workflows and pipelines across DevOps for both traditional software as well as AI projects, which tend to have some differences in how the workflows are performed. So look for those features maybe later in 2025. Prediction number two, built in AI rather than bolt on AI across the software development lifecycle.

Much of the AI we use, particularly generative AI today, are things that are bolt on. They're chat bots, their natural language interface to it. They may be an IDE plugin that helps us, uh, generate code or get access to a code base.

Increasingly, we'll see more AI that is just a part of the products and the tools and the workflows, the tool chains that we use for creating software rather than an adjunct or separate thing. I think we'll see a lot more productivity as more AI is really integrated into how we work rather than a feature of a product or a separate product. Kubernetes dominance.

That's the next prediction. And we tend to think of Kubernetes as the cloud native, a container orchestration software. Of course, that's what it is.

We use it with microservices, containerized AppSec, all kinds of workloads. But that's the point is that Kubernetes has really expanded its use across virtually any kind of product and service that we may use. We may be provided by a third party, a service in the cloud.

Uh, it could be even on hardware, you know, integrated hardware and software to use for storage solutions or in Ed solutions. Kubernetes truly is Ed everywhere and has become the workload system for any kind of application or service. With that comes though, we need to up our skills in Kubernetes operational capabilities.

It is complex, it's getting simpler. We're offloading more of that to third parties, but we'll also see AI help us here with operationalizing Kubernetes, reducing some of the complexity and improving our overall ability to run it effectively. Well, thank you for joining me for these predictions around DevOps and application development.

I hope you'll check out the full ebook of all the predictions by the Futurum Group analysts. We cover a number of areas, whether it be enterprise applications, ai, of course, infrastructure, security, you name it. com.

Thank you. Hey, everyone. Welcome back here to our Predict 2025 event.

You know, this is, I think, the seventh year that we're doing Predict, and it's always one of the highlights of the year for me because I love to hear smart people talk about what they think is in store for us next year and what we can do around it. Um, I try to be the least smart person on, on the show, and in years past, it's worked for me, and I think this year definitely is gonna work for me. Um, I couldn't think of a better person to kick off Predict 2025 with.

And my next guest, he's my partner, uh, CEO of the Futurum Group. He's on TV a lot, but more than that, he generally is one of those smarter people that I talk about that I, I like to hear what they have to say because that's how I learn and how I kind of internalize and figure things out. So let me introduce you to Daniel Newman.

Daniel is the CEO of Futurum group. And you know what, again, a great way to kick off 2025 Techstrong is part of Futu Group, and we are excited by the possibilities and potential. Hey, Daniel, welcome to Predict 2025.

It's great to have you on here keynoting and kicking things off for us today. Alan, it's great to be here with you. I'm so excited for the start of another year.

A little bit rested, took a little break, but, uh, not too much of one. And, uh, you know, we're straight off another hyper intensive year and couldn't be more excited to have techron in into part of the family in the beginning. And Alan, I mean, look, it's not gonna slow down.

It is not gonna slow down. If anything, it's just gonna keep getting faster. I think that's a great tone for the year, right?

It's not slowing down the beat goes on, was our, our theme here. And it's not slowing down. So Daniel, look, 2024 was a year.

It, it was quite a year, right? We, uh, no matter how you wanna slice and dice it from a world history point of view, from the economy point of view, from a technology point of view, there was just, it was just crazy. I, I think obviously the big story, the, the technology of the year will be Gen AI for 2024.

I don't know if that's true for 2025, but before we, you know, if you don't learn from history, you're doomed to repeat it. Before we jump into 2025, just real quickly, what's your recap for 2024? What's the big takeaways for you?

Yeah, 2024 was a big year of basically taking this technological revolution, this breakthrough, uh, you said generative AI is 24, but generative AI was 22. Generative AI was 23, and generative AI was in many ways, 24. But in 24, I think we started to see some breakthroughs in terms of the usability.

We're starting to see the pressure mount on enterprises to adopt, implement, and show results. We're seeing pressure on the software vendors, security vendors, developers, to start to implement the technology into our workflows to show value. You know, we've seen a multi-year run where it's been a very asymmetric, there's been a few companies that have benefited in a massive way because of generative ai.

We all know in late 22, OpenAI kind of rose into the conscience of the world, um, conscious as well, I guess you could say. In 2023, um, we started to see the semiconductor market really explode because you can't train frontier models and massive large language models without a ton of compute horsepower. And that actually didn't only bring the, you know, the advent of a multi-trillion dollar nvidia, but it really changed the shape of how every chip company and every infrastructure company started thinking about developing products and even building their own semis.

And we'll talk more about that. Um, and then, you know, put all this together, uh, we started to see the kind of flow out where people are like, well, yes, we've seen Nvidia rise to three and a half trillion. We've seen OpenAI raise money at unprecedented, uh, numbers, and who else benefits?

And I spent a ton of my time, Alan, answering that question to the press, to the vendors, um, you know, enterprises, are they adopting it? I remember standing on the rooftop talk, uh, in Davos talking to I-B-M-C-E-O, Arvin Krishna, and, you know, he talked about a $4 trillion economic opportunity. We're seeing numbers now, we're hearing numbers from, uh, firms and the numbers that we're forecasting, it could be 12, 15 or even $20 trillion of economic value that is created.

But this has left us with so many questions, Alan, so many questions. It's questions about, well, if generative AI can do all these tasks that humans do, what does that mean for all of us? Mm-hmm.

Um, answering questions of, are the companies that are considered the, uh, you know, the leaders currently, the incumbents currently in certain markets going to remain the incumbents. We've seen disruption over the last two decades in the internet era, in the mobile era, in the social era, and in the cloud era. What does disruption in the generative AI era look like?

We've seen pressures mounting around the world for regulation policy. How are we setting the tone for who gets access to what data? We know there's been controversial, uh, statements, Alan and, and everyone that have been made about, well, how did OpenAI train these models?

We all remember that interview where Mira Mirati was sitting there in that look that she had knowing or not knowing how to answer that question. And, you know, you step back from OpenAI and you look across the board, who owns the data? What precedent is being set?

What will the legal future look like? And how does this, you know, how does this materialize? And then of course, what we all have come to realize, and this was the 24 inflection, Alan is your personal, private, and enterprise data is actually the real goldmine in opportunity for enter, uh, for generative AI and for the future of ai.

It's not about these large language models that are all using a roughly sane training set. It's about what can you add, what sits in that customer data that you have? What sits in that enterprise data that you've been collecting in your Oracle or SAP or in some other database for multiple decades?

What sits on the devices and inside the business units of intelligent unstructured data sets the thoughts that go around on Zoom meetings and shared in your Slack chats and, uh, content that gets created when smart people to your earlier point, are sitting around the room together and ideating the future of products and services and business. And then how do you take all that, do it safely and compliantly under the right governance and securely while combining it with these language and video and audio models? It's incredible and it's gone so quickly, but I could not be, um, more encouraged that we are gonna continue to make progress, that we'll continue to grow the economy and that the tech industry is right for continued innovation.

What a year, what a time? Uh, 24 is just another great setup year for what I expect to be an exciting 2025. Absolutely.

I couldn't say it better myself. Let me just quickly mention though, as a content publisher, I do worry about all that IP that they've gathered and sucked into their models that we, I paid for here, right? That we've paid for.

You're my partner. We paid for that. They're using it.

We will talk about that off camera. But, um, you know, certainly in some respects, more questions have been created than have been answered around, around all of this. Excitement is 20, 25 a year where we get some answers?

And and where might we get, you know, what might some of those answers be, Daniel? Well, I think as you see technological revolutions moving this quickly, you're never gonna quite get to the point where the questions stop coming, right? We have questions right now about how do we discern good and bad information, right and wrong information.

How do we even, how do we even judge that? Uh, we've seen massive risk, uh, created in a world where algorithms have replaced sort of, you know, open prioritization of information where we really don't even know as people anymore. If the information that's being fed to us is the right information.

We have to deal with everything from, you know, what is the stance and lean that might come from a certain publisher in terms of then understanding how content is then derived. And then you have the aggregators and distributors of content, the social platforms that basically most of us use. I mean, very few of us anymore get a, get a newspaper dropped off in our front door and sit down and read the paper.

And in that case, you have to even look under the cover of each, each publisher, each writer, to understand positioning and how, and so this is kind of a microcosm of the world that we live in, Alan, is that everything right now that we are looking at is being changed in the era of ai. So we like summaries, summaries help us, but deciding which summary is the correct summary, and then using that to point a worldview, that's, that's powerful stuff. And that can shape and that can, you know, that can shape and shift an industry, a business, a political landscape.

It could change a, you know, it could change so many different things at one time. And so, you know, I started to allude to this in the end of my kind of look back and, you know, for those out there that are in the business community that are kind of assessing all of the technology that's at your fingertips and deciding what road to go down, um, I think this'll be the year where we start to see the scale and the availability and democratization of this technology become much more, um, available to businesses of all sizes and shapes, uh, because of these multi-network effects. And so, let me tell you what what I mean by that.

So I kind of started talking about how we saw this explosion of semiconductor valuations and growth. Gotta put the compute in place. So you have the companies like Nvidia building, you, you have cloud providers like Microsoft, Google, and Amazon Oracle investing.

But at that point, that's just basically, if you think about it through the lens of a plant built to make automotive, automotive, uh, automobiles, that's like a plant. They built their plants. Now everybody's gotta say, what kind of car do we wanna build here?

Do we wanna build a truck? Do we wanna build an SUV? Do we want to build a a motorcycle?

Um, are we gonna build shape spaceships? What are we gonna build in this factory? And so this is that next stage.

So we've got this investment in the cloud providers. You've got infrastructure companies like Dell and Lenovo and all these companies and, and, and, and HPE that are building infrastructure, putting 'em in these tier two tier ones. Um, they're standing up, they're building their own silicon.

But then it's how does this get implemented? And so we have actually seen companies like Accenture explode and into this year, they're exploding because basically, most companies, most CEOs like you out there and like me, we're sitting there, we're going, how do we get this stuff done? It's like, it's great that I bought some instances of GPUs, or it's great, but I gotta train.

I gotta implement libraries. I gotta, I gotta develop software. I've got, well, in this year, what's gonna start to change is the software that we all use every day.

If you're using HubSpot for marketing, if you're using Salesforce for CRM, if you're using Oracle or SAP for your ERP, we're gonna see, and we've heard, don't get me wrong, it's not like these companies have done nothing, but we are going to see this next revolution in 2025. We've heard, uh, CEO of Salesforce, mark Benioff talk about agents. We've heard the infrastructure companies talking about agents.

We're gonna start to see this evolution from assistance and AI that's used to sort of make some predictive to more and more intelligent multi-use case agentic AI that es essentially can become tens, hundreds, or thousands of workers that can do task specific things concurrently at the same time. They're gonna get smarter. And these systems, this is gonna be stuff that you will be able to originate from the software that you use every day, whether it's ServiceNow, whether it's Workday, you're gonna be able to originate and you're gonna orchid ate, and you're gonna be able to get these things to do.

You know, I always like to use my example of planning a business trip. Here's a real simple one for everyone out there. You know, historically speaking, if you wanted to plan a business trip, there was 7, 8, 9 different levers.

You're pulling, you're trying to find your flights, you're trying to find availability on your calendar. You're trying to figure out what a hotel you're gonna stay at. You're trying to navigate all the different meetings you want to have while you're there.

Um, and you're, and you're trying to roll all these things together. Well, not right now, you have to kind of do these things asynchronously, but at the same time, trying to coordinate them. And even if you have like an assistant, there's still many, many things all at play.

But imagine an agent that could actually understand your, your, your travel preferences. You can say, Hey, I know Alan, that you like to fly on American Airlines. You like an aisle seat and you always wanna upgrade to premium economy.

So right then and there, you could send the agent out to figure out what travel is available for that period of time. You could have another agent saying, Hey, I know while you're in New York City, you wanna meet with this kind of subset of customers. It knows which customers are based there.

It knows which customers are your biggest and most important. It can actually know which ones you've maybe recently met with. It could see which ones you might need to follow up with, and it could arbitrate, arbitrate between all these different things.

And then basically reach out on a priority basis to customers with a very simple, Hey, I'm gonna be in New York. Here's the right plan days. Start to aggregate smart emails, smart messaging even knows which channel to send that message in.

This customer wants a text, this one likes to want a WhatsApp. This, this is the type of intelligence we can move towards. And then it could say, Hey, based on my meeting schedule, where should I have a hotel?

Where should that hotel be placed? Um, because obviously, you know, I mean, you're a New Yorker, Alan, um, it's very different. Getting from uptown to downtown, downtown, everywhere in between your, your entire week can be better or worse depending on where you planted yourself.

Um, and then what about booking reservations for a meal? You wanna take a customer to dinner, you want to, you know, you, you don't wanna be in New York with no plan. You don't wanna be wandering around and it could figure all this out.

And then what it could do is these things can all work together in a coordinated fashion and come back to you and give you a really, really airtight or close to airtight agenda. Could you do that yourself? Absolutely.

But imagine if you wanted to send 70 emails to get seven meetings set up. I mean, how much time is your team, your assistant, you, depending on your staffing gonna spend and then figure out the flights, figure out the hotel, figuring out the food, figuring out the meeting, by the way, even setting up meeting agendas, pulling all that pre-work. Where's the he health and, and, and success and recent issues with the customer having the dossiers prepared for you?

All this can be done with agentic ai. And this is just one example that's, and That's just planning a business trip, right? Think about what we, You know, what else it could do.

This could be Supply chain planning, this could be HR resource, uh, planning this. And so this is the absolutely, this is this pivotal inflection, Alan, where we're going from a world where everything is done, and even assistants can do one thing at a time, to having the ability to have these really helpful automations, these agents that are working in parallel for you with all this information to make your life better and to enable cus companies to be exponentially more productive. So, Daniel, let me ask you some hard question on this.

Now though, you know, i, i, I don't Like hard questions. Let's go back to easy questions. I, I read an interview about Benioff talking about these, what it call an agent force or whatever they're calling it.

They're gonna hire 2000 salespeople to sell agent force. And the, you know, he's a great salesperson, a great marketer, but the reason he is doing it is he's scared to death. He's scared to death that this will could be the, the, the death nail, if you will, for Salesforce, because a lot of what his present product helps us manage day to day, but doesn't actually do for you, will be done perhaps by these agents.

So anytime you have disruption like this, it's, it's like, Hey, there's a new, there's room for a new growth in the forest, right? We have some new, new trees coming up in 2025. I I think one of the questions we face is, is it the Salesforce, Amazon's the same old, same old, the same old, you know, show guns who control the, the, the territory who will lead on this?

Or do we have room for some new growth? Will there be the, the next Nvidia, the next Salesforce, the next AWS that, or that comes out of this opportunity? Yeah, that's a really thoughtful question, Alan.

It's, it's, you know, the great thing about it is, no matter how I answer it, I'm gonna probably be, That's why I say it was a hard question. But the, the, the fact is, is I think I can give some sort of macro perspectives on the question. I think first and foremost, there are gonna be, you know, part of the rise of new companies has a lot more to do with the regulatory environment, the ability for m and a activity to take place, um, the success and, uh, opportunism of VCs and capital allocators.

And then of course, um, you know, these things all come together to kind of make determinations of how long companies remain independent and run after trying to compete into new markets versus how early they maybe get acquired versus which go IPO. We all know the last several years have been really terrible, IPO environments. So very few companies have gone public.

We also know the last few years have been really tough for m and a. So most larger m and a deals have not really materialized, um, higher, you know, without getting too into the economics, because I know this is a tech event, but like higher interest and, um, higher inflation leads to a, a tougher, um, you know, discounted cash flow model. So private equity companies are a little bit more cautious in what they buy for, and then companies are a little bit more cautious to grow.

But of course, none of these rules apply to the mega cap tech companies. And I, and I say this with no cynicism, I have the utmost respect for Jensen Wong. I know him very well, I know him personally.

Satya, these, these people have done amazing work, built amazing companies that have durability, um, beyond be in their, and, and in many ways, they seem to be beyond reproach. Now, having said that, I mean, there, there is some, some other sides and some things that I, I, let me just first say, as a techno optimist, um, Alan, I'm super hopeful to see more breakthrough companies that disrupt le legacy industries, um, and disrupt current innovators. Uh, I'm, I'm concerned about how realistic that is.

If I'm being, uh, Frank, I'm very close to these companies. I'm very close to this technology. Um, first of all, the balance sheets of these companies is larger than many global economies.

So they have the money to basically identify any sort of threat to their longevity and, and, and can acquire. Um, they're very creative companies. Over the last year, one of the trends of 24 was creative deal making that allowed companies to effectively, uh, acquire businesses that probably never would've been acquired via regulatory, but because, um, of creative mechanisms, they were able to to, to do deals to get IP control.

We've all seen and heard some of what Satya Nadela from Microsoft has, has said about the relationship with OpenAI. And we then saw one of the most significant rounds of capital in history raised at a valuation of over $160 billion for a company that's losing $5 billion a year. So this is indicative to me of how important the, in that the technology is, but it's also indicative of how, uh, exuberant in some ways the market is.

And of course, just like Bitcoin or any other sort of, um, highly speculative asset class, um, things are worth what someone's willing to pay. And when the most, uh, valuable capital allocators in the world say it's worth 160 billion, they all put their money in, then chances are it's probably gonna be end up being worth a lot more. So what does that leave?

Well, I mean, you've seen some really exciting companies like Palantir come in and break through, um, winning and changing potentially the entire shape of government contracts for, for technology. That's something that I think we all need. We know that that system is, is at, at at best, um, you know, flawed and at worst completely broken in terms of how government contracts are issued.

Will this fix it? I mean, that's TBD or is it just an will just become a new, um, sort of racket in how that stuff gets done? Um, you know, I do believe I will make a prognostication that I do believe that, um, companies like Meta and NVIDIA will enter the hyperscale cloud business.

I think that that will make the big seven. I mean, we already know X AI is, we won't call it, it's not Tesla, but X AI is a startup that has the backing of a Mag seven and, and Elon Musk. But they will also enter be, because I think the next era we went from 2021 was a CPU era where in the GPU and accelerated computing era.

And now you have companies like Meta, um, that have built mega data centers for their own utilization that could easily be, and they built llama, they built open source models. You think about all the compute, all the platform and code that they built for Llama, why would they not enable businesses? It's been a, an issue where a company like Meta's never been able to fully break through.

And then of course, you look at a company like Nvidia and their biggest partners are all set to become their biggest competitors. That's just the track that it's on. And so if you're Nvidia, you're saying, well, we've already built a cloud with a fully, uh, integrated enterprise solution in nim.

Um, and not to get too technical, but they have a fully integrated library frameworks compute, uh, container system that you can basically run all this AI on. If the data centers, um, and the big hyperscale cloud providers decide that they're going to maybe lead more with their own compute, um, of course Nvidia would be in the right to, uh, more meaningfully move to a situation in which their cloud could be consumed by customers. And of course, with their balance sheet, they could do anything they want.

So, you know, roughly anything they want. So I'll leave you with this thought on that question 'cause it's a great one, Alan. Is, I, it's very difficult if you're a small technology company to break through and compete at the, at the very, very top levels.

I expect more m and a, I expect more investment consolidation in certain industries, but I do expect these MEG seven companies, and I do expect, especially in an era where I, I believe there will be less regulation and there will be more, um, exuberance that these companies will have the chance to get bigger and stronger over the next four years. And it is tied to the current political climate. Um, having said that, this is where I always say, uh, competition and, uh, antitrust are conflicted because antitrust should be about enabling competition, which right now it's very hard to pair that behavior with the desire to limit or to reduce consumer harm, because consumers like their Apple experience.

They like the integration of Google, they like meta applications that work con you know, consistently with each other. They like ad platforms that are, uh, very data-driven, that are connected all the way from interaction with the content to the purchase cycle. So you have this kind of conflicting, it's not the mabell any days anymore, Alan.

No, it's not, you know, one company. So harm and competition are not gonna be spur. So another thing I guess I'll predict, we need some real reform in antitrust to enable competition without squashing the experiences that we have all become so fond of.

There's also strategic, I mean, speaking as a US citizen here, right? The strategic consequences of if these are world beater companies, you don't want to squash that with, with regulation or antitrust type of activity. And we, and we, you know, we saw some noise of that.

Daniel, we, we have maybe five, seven minutes left. I want to turn, I want to turn to something else though. You know, as great as 2024 was, and as exciting and exuberant is the word you used exuberance as it was for our friends in the tech industry.

And you and I, we have a lot of friends in the tech industry. It was a year of unprecedented pain in terms of layoffs and job cuts. And you know what?

I, I still know plenty of people who've been out of work now for months. Good, talented people. Um, now whether you believe the Department of Labor, uh, stats about what our true unemployment is, I saw an interesting article, I dunno if it was in the journal or the times that it, it's kind of misleading because we saw a lot of people hopping around jobs in 2024 to keep up with inflation, actually, right?

They, they couldn't make a go out of it at their old job, so they went to a new job. And that counted as, you know, moving towards it. But for our tech workers out there, it's been a tough 2024 for the most part, for many of them anyway.

What do you think? 2025. You're an optimist, so I'm hoping it's gonna be optimistic, but give, give my, give my folks some something of a life raft here to jump on.

Daniel, what do you think? There's a couple of things that I, I'll say about what to look for ahead. I, I, I will actually agree with you about 24.

There's been a lot of layoffs in tech and the quiet conversations, the stuff that I always say the quiet part said out loud is that a lot of tech companies are implementing this technology and they're finding efficiencies. You know, you have the extremes. You have the Elon Musk in hock tans that can cut 50 or 75% of a workforce and get EBITDA growth, profit growth, growth, growth, growth mm-hmm.

Profit growth. Um, and then you have other companies that have been a little bit more quiet about it, you know, where you've seen, I saw a report just this week. Companies like Google and Microsoft, big successful companies that have met numbers, expanded earnings, they're darlings of Wall Street, and yet their employment numbers are somewhere around the same level as 2019.

To me, this is kind of, it's a, it's a testament to how well some of the technology works. It's indicative of the fact that companies can be, uh, over overweight on, on, on employees and not implementing and utilizing them well enough. It's also a signal to me of something that, um, I think we all should be paying attention to.

And that's, you know, the continued growth and upskill that we all have in our careers. I think, you know, whether it's been remote work, it's been easy to become a little complacent. Um, you know, the rapid and tectonic shifts that are going on in, in technology itself is, are you staying up to date?

Are you keeping yourself valuable to the, to the organization? And of course, um, you know, I also think that the, you know, evolution of our roles is gonna change. And, and I think I've always said that like, people that are really comfortable with change are gonna always do fine.

And this is probably, you know, some people out there, especially people out there that maybe don't feel great about change. You're probably gonna look at me and start throwing tomatoes at the screen, and that's okay. But what I've found in, in, in my career is that there are, there's kind of be kind of, it's like a, it's like a playwright.

There's gonna be multiple acts in your life and in your career and in a business. Um, Alan, before we came together, you've had many acts, we've talked about them. I've had different acts in my career, and the business changes.

And, you know, as a, as a, you know, the future and group as a company that's successfully doubled in size every year since its inception, um, no two years have looked the same. Priorities have changed. And by the way, your ability to sort of look at maybe something you're doing in saying this is the past, and being able to say, now this is the future.

That, that desire to hold on too long, whether you're an entrepreneur, whether you're an executive at a tech company, whether you're a practitioner inside of a tech company out there, that desire to hold on too long puts you at risk. Will generative AI eliminate every programmer? No.

But will it eliminate some? Absolutely. Will AI change the role of a CISO or a security leader?

Absolutely. Uh, we should get to the point where, uh, you know, everyday threats that used to be harder to detect and earlier, you should be able to get ahead of it. It'll also make the nation states, uh, budget, budget supported bad actors.

It'll make them better too. So the pressure will be on you if you are leading a company, is it your job to figure out how to implement AI and put it to work for the benefit of the company? Absolutely.

Now, again, if we can gain $20 trillion of economic growth because of this technological evolution that's going on, then there will be new roles. You know, I wrote a book called, um, uh, human Machine. I forgot my own book title.

You know, one of the things that we looked at was, you know, if you remember back in the day, you know, by the way, this is, it'll make you laugh, laugh. But, you know, we use the term gaslighting a lot. And you know, it actually kind of the term goes back to the day that people used to ha their job used to be to go up and down the streets, light lamps, lights mm-hmm.

At night. And they were told, you know, uh, basically the idea that electricity would eliminate all the jobs in the future. Now, again, have, we had not seen the economy grow by thousands and thousands of times since that point.

But whether it's been the assembly line, whether it's been the advent of the internet, we've heard at every revolution there's this fear that it's gonna eliminate every job. And then there's been a boom. Now, having said that, is AI different?

Absolutely. But does that mean everyone's job goes away? Absolutely not.

Does it mean you need to be dynamic? It needs to be constantly thinking about your skillset and changing. Does it need, you need to be consistently learning.

And, and, you know, I'll, I'll say this, and you know, I've been accused of being slightly paranoid at times, but that old phrase about people that are, uh, successful in, in business and, and in life, that only the paranoid survive. I think being a little paranoid right now is okay. And I think if you're a little concerned about your job and its longevity, you should be thinking about where do you add skills?

If you're concerned about how your company stays competitive, you should be looking at new technologies. And how does it change the game? This is all here for you.

I mean, the thing is, is it's, it is pretty democratized. It's super available, whether it's touching, you know, and, and, and using LLMs, a lot of them are free, whether it's using tools. I mean, heck, you can go to a MOOC and, you know, mooc, I know people don't use that word, but you can take any class that m mi teaches online, MIT teaches online for free.

The desire to continuously learn and be part of this shift will put you in a great position. But don't get me wrong, um, it is a time of massive change. Those that embrace it, I think will do really, really well.

And I wish all of you great success in 2025. Daniel, thank you. I got one more question for you, and we'll wrap it, I promise you.

One more. Okay. Okay.

A little self-serving. I, I have invested interest now too. What's your prediction for Futur Group in 2025?

So, my, my plan, my genuine belief is that in an era where there is exponential information available at our fingertips, who says it will become equally, if not more important than what is said. So now, in an era where we can put a prompt into A GPT and it can create a, an article, we wanna know who writes it, why it's valid, all that is formulated. So we have put a lot of muscle into making sure that we can quantify our, our, our, our foresight that we can provide great inputs to the IT and technology vendors that we support.

And then of course, that we can create content that really helps synthesize a lot of info. So you heard my last, uh, you know, ramble about what to look ahead to. You know, people need to know, can we trust the information that's put in front of us in this era?

I believe that Futurum can become one of the perennial, one of the most valuable sources of meaningful information about the tech industry and what the future looks like for tech. And that we will have the analysts, we will have the distribution, we will have the technology and tools to, to cross the chasm, Alan, from the empirical, the data that sets the markets, the testing and the performance. We do all this to the most ephemeral, which is which podcast you listen to, which platform you read it on, and how you make sure that you out there stay ahead of the curve and connected to the innovation that's taking place right before our eyes.

I love it. Hey, man, Daniel, thank you so much. I appreciate it.

I hope everyone out here appreciates it. Here's to a great 2025, check it out. The futurum Group Techstrong, it's all part of one family.

And thank you for joining us here. We've got a tremendous, uh, schedule of sessions here at Predict 2025. So if you like Daniel and and his session here, stay tuned.

We've got more smart people coming your way, but we're out. Hi everyone. In honor of President's Day, let's go Imperial in terms of our it, that's where we're headed here on Text Drug Act.

Hi everyone. Happy Tuesday. We hope you enjoyed your President's Day.

You, I'd like to do a survey. How many of you out there took off for President's Day? Raise your heads.

We do my Romper room thing. Oh, yeah, I see Tom and Dick and Harry. Okay.

I, you know, it is a federal holiday. I think if there's any federal employees left, they probably took off, but I don't know how many are left. And that's what we're gonna talk about on this fine Tuesday.

Let me tell you who we're talking about it with. We've got a nice gang assembled, first of all from Hudson, Ohio, where he's officially, uh, in cons before he heads out to this week's Tech Field Day, which I believe is a cloud tech field day. It's the CEO founder of Tech Field, day of Futuring and Company Steven FoST.

Good morning, Steven. How are you? Hey, I'm pretty good.

Um, you know, president's Day, I had to come up, uh, I was trying to tell my team like, uh, you know, what's your favorite president? Um, you know, how about Jimmy Carter didn't have a great presidency, but he seems like a decent guy. Um, but of course, if you, if you broaden the scope, um, how about Bertrand Russell?

He was the president of Pugwash, uh, an all around great guy. Okay, so presidents don't have to be US Presidents, Presidents of anything. Yeah.

Yeah. That's like people who, who, you know, maintain or look at eliminating government waste don't have to be appointed or, or approved or anything either. Well, Nobody just let that guy fire everyone.

Well, he is. All right. Moving on from Steven.

We'll go right over. I see we're starting early. We're moving over to Harrison, New York, where we have our chief content officer in residence, Mike Vizard.

Good morning, Mike. I hope you enjoyed President's Day. I enjoyed President's Day and the Valentine's Day before that.

So it was kind of a lovely set of bookends in some ways. Yeah, It was so, hit us With a good president. Come on.

A good president. Well, of course there's always George Washington who started this whole thing, but behind that, um, I kind of miss Abraham Lincoln not having his own day. You know, that you mentioned when I was younger, we had Washington's birthday.

Lincoln's birthday, and then they just combined it in the President's Day. Well, This is offic, it was, it's officially Washington Dash Lincoln Day in Ohio, if that makes you feel Better. Is it?

Well, I, yeah, that does make me feel better, actually, Steven. Good. I'm glad they did that.

Let me introduce, though, well, she's not the president. Well, she is the president of Echo site, echo Tech Insights, but she's also our analyst for all things sustainable and green. Bonnie Schneider.

Hi, Bonnie. Welcome. Thanks, Alan.

Great to be Here. Great to have you here. Big day for you today.

We'll be getting to it a little later. Um, so gentlemen, lady, it is the day after President's Day, and, you know, Washington warned us about this stuff, speaking of Washington, and, uh, I've been talking and writing about it now for a couple weeks. You know, I'm, no one raises their hand and says, I'm for fraud, or I'm for waste, or I'm for paying more money that doesn't get used well and winds up in people's pockets illegally or, or immorally.

But there's a right way and a wrong way. And so, Mike, let me kick it over to you. Have we reached an age of an imperialism in government?

It, ITI Think we're gonna have to sort this all out with some sort of Supreme Court re ruling, and the sooner the better. But a lot of folks are walking around to your point, and they're saying, what's the big deal? I mean, it's, the Department of Government efficiency has been unleashed on these agencies with the approval of the heads of those agencies to go look for this waste.

So on a certain level, they're saying that it's all above board, it's just being super aggressive, and the average person is standing there going, well, yeah, most of what we think is spent by the government is wasted anyway. So why not apply analytics and all this stuff to come to some better outcome? And, uh, maybe the only way to do it is, you know, with a blunt instrument.

So that's one thought process. The other thought process is, of course, you know, this is executive overreach and things that have been approved by Congress to be spent are not being spent. So, Alan, which side of this equation are we up?

I stand on the right side, the correct side equation. The correct side. Yeah.

Not right or left, you know. Um, so Mike, I agree. No one raises their hand and says, I'm all for fraud.

I'm all for waste. I'm all for spending more money. Of course not.

But a nation of laws that does not follow their laws is a nation that will not stand. I think Lincoln said something like that, Right? It's a house divided, house divided, right?

A nation of laws. We are a nation of laws. Now, the right side, i I do mean left versus right.

Rejoiced over the last couple years as the Supreme Court on more than one occasion has said, these federal agencies cannot overstep their charter given to them by Congressional acts. Right? We've seen it on several different agencies.

Well, I'm telling you that the flip side of that is correct as well. These agencies cannot overstep their charter as given to them by acts of Congress. So when an act of Congress establishes an agency with a specific purpose and budget and, and charter, it is, the executive branch is, does not have the ability to go against or overrule that act of the legislature.

Now, you wanna say, well, the heads of these agencies gave them permission. The heads of these agencies are no more than the leftovers of the Saturday Night Massacre that's gone on here. The same way we dropped the, they had to go through seven, a Assistant Attorney generals to drop the charges against the mayor of New York, because the first seven said, we don't nce that kind of unlawfulness, and that kind of, that's fraud, which more than anything else.

So eventually they find someone to sit in these agencies who's a loyal collaborator, who say, go ahead and do it. That doesn't undo the will of the legislature or Congress absent an act of Congress. That's number one.

Number two, though, you know, I had a good discussion with my friend Tony Bradley about this, and there's an excellent article that I think every single person watching this needs to read by two people that I know pretty well in the security space, and that I respect an awful lot. Bruce Schneider, who, if you're in security, needs no introduction. Bruce has been, you know, probably one of the foremost, uh, personalities, thought leaders in security for as long as I'm in security, 25 plus years or more.

And another really smart guy, Dave Heimer. Heimer Davey is, was one of the original security bloggers network members in 2005, has been with us. I think it was Security Penguin is his blog, but he, he does a lot more than that now.

But Avi and, and Bruce wrote a really great article. It's in here on government over, excuse me, me, um, it, it's, it's in here on declaring Do unconstitutional. And I will put the, well, the URLs in there, read it.

They lay it out. What we're doing here for the sake of reducing fraud and waste is giving a back door to our, I don't wanna call 'em enemies, but our adversaries, China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, by putting classified information on machines and systems that have not been certified, that have been hacked already. And, and graffiti put on them that are Swiss cheese.

And, but it's okay. I, I've had conversations with fairly smart people who say, well, you know what? In, in the name of progress, we gotta do that again.

Not in a nation of laws. We have laws about this. People have gone to jail for releasing classified information like this.

This is being done without an act of congress, without due process, without hearings, without following our rules. I'm all for reducing waste. You wanna go do a fact finding thing, not to mention that you invited Mr.

Fox into the hen house. You invited a man who has 400 million plus dollars, whereas a government contracts annually, and you are asking him to police government contracts. Do we, you know what, when I took political science, I had a really great teacher who taught us modern political theory, including communism.

He was a former socialist in the thirties. He was blacklisted, didn't work for a long time, became a college professor, and then he became a violent anti-communist. 'cause he said, you know, know what the problem is with communism.

It, it only works if you have a society of atheistic saints. Are we to believe that Elon Musk is an atheistic saint? That he's doing this out of the kindness of his heart, A man who owned who, who is in bed with the Chinese Communist Party because he needs them for his Tesla business.

You know, there, there used to be rules about conflicts of interest. There are rules, there are laws about conflicts of interest. Just because someone has a lot of money, doesn't mean they don't follow the rules.

That's what this country's based on. But yet we're saying it's okay 'cause it's Elon and, and what, what, what could he possibly do wrong guys? Have we have, we, have we all gotten stupid?

We we have forgotten about the absolute power Maximum corrupts Absolutely. Let's let this, this, I mean, if this stands, I'm telling you, it, it bodes very ill for a nation founded upon the rule of law. Yeah, absolutely.

And, and remember too that, you know, I mean, the United States has spent, uh, centuries lecturing every other country in the world about how to build a nation and how to be a nation of laws and how to have a proper democracy, a proper functioning democracy. Um, you know, the, the stuff that's going on with Elon Musk and the Doge is just unconscionable because, you know, allegedly, we are a nation bound by the Constitution. Allegedly, we are strict construction.

I mean, remember, remember when people were all talking about, you know, people, Republicans we're all talking about how, uh, you know, we're, we're getting beyond the, uh, the, the, the Constitution, and we have to return to the strict, you know, what it says in the Constitution. And, you know, all these Supreme Court justices as well, um, have said that they are strict constitutionalists. But where's that, where that, where's that now?

Um, you know, is it, doesn't the Constitution enumerate which powers are belonging to which, uh, branches of government? Doesn't the Constitution talk about the, uh, powers of the, uh, executive branch? And, and I'm sure that they have, uh, people are willing to twist themselves into a pretzel, uh, deciding that somehow this is constitutional, but it's clearly not.

It's also, uh, asinine, uh, to have someone go in. Um, I heard one of the things at the education department. They, uh, canceled a grant, um, that was central, a central data collection system, if we can get back to it here for a moment.

They canceled a grant that was, uh, central to handling, um, data collection on the demographics of American school, uh, children, because that was, uh, fundamental to the mission of the education department and all other aspects of government, because, you know, you have to know who these kids are if you're supposed to be supporting them in any way. Um, the reason they canceled it was because the title of the grant was Common Core of Data And Common Core is a popular, I mean, you, you've heard, you know, that there's all this DEI, anti DEI stuff. Well, common Core is a, is a popular, um, phrase for a certain type of teaching that is, uh, frowned upon on the right.

Um, the fact that they named this grant, common Core of Data made it canceled. And it's like, that is just, you didn't even know what it was. And, and it's true of most of these, uh, grants from the national, from the education department that have been, uh, canceled last week.

A lot of the people who've lost their jobs, um, you know, it, it's, it's basically a global search and replace. I can just see somebody sitting there. I don't wanna give 'em any credit, but I can see there with vi, you know, search for this, uh, search for that.

And, um, and then, uh, D-D-D-D-D, we don't need any of that stuff, you know, it's just, it's just ludicrous. Um, When do you ever declare fraud and everything else before the investigation is done? And Steven, I think they got rid of that list.

So, because we're afraid we might track what kids have vaccines, I don't think that's what was included in that particular one that I, well, I just wanna throw back. I got out there. Um, I gotcha.

You know, the other thing that's bothering me here is I don't wanna be all, both sides. It's true that there's waste and there's fraud in the government. And it's true that that should be rooted out.

But it should be rooted out competently. You know, it should be rooted out by somebody who goes in and looks at things and considers what it is and considers whether it's waste or fraud. I'm sorry.

SLS should have been shut down a decade ago in favor of SpaceX and Blue Origin. I, you know, you can say what you want about Elon, Elon Musk, but SpaceX freaking works and SLS is just a giant cash cow. That being said, having Elon Musk be the one to cancel SpaceX that Stinks.

S-L-S-S-L-S-S Ls. But Yeah. Space launch system.

Right, right. Our big stupid rocket. I Mean, it, it's just inherently a conflict of interest.

Yeah. Yeah. So, Alan, in effect though, constitutionally, I mean, if the president is now exercising what amounts to a pocket veto by not spending money in effect, we have turned the executive branch into some sort of equivalent of a king.

Well, it's an imperial presidency. That's, and, and that's, let's face it, that's what, that's what our current president thinks. And, and, and you know, he's also appointed three of the eight Supreme Court justices and two of the others are slightly to the right of, of Hitler.

So you've got a majority of the Supreme Court that is far, far right or beholden to this man, and they're our last best hope Obi one. Right? If things don't work the next, the next thing is the rebellion.

Well, the, the funny thing is, the prosecutors who quit in New York, were all clerks for most of the hard right justices. So go figure. Well, you hope that you, you gotta hope that the decency and the law abiding nature of our judiciary from an impartiality, you know, there's outliers like that crazy woman down in Florida who we appointed that somehow every case got assigned to her.

I don't know how that happened, but for the most part, our judiciary, our US attorneys are, I think, law abiding decent people, right? Before nominating people for the judiciary became a political sport. Over the last eight or 10 years, we had, we had, you know, to get, to become a federal judge, generally I'd have an a BA American Bar Association recommendation.

You had to have some experience. You, they, there's good people on the bench, Let's call it competence. That's a good word, that we seem to have forgotten competence.

Um, I just wanted to add something. Go ahead. You know, it's as something as Steven said, but they're looking through, you know, the waste or whatever.

They're, they're looking, they're using an algorithm to detect certain words and what Steven was pointing out, something with education could be triggered by the word common core. What, what I'm hearing from my colleagues in weather and climate is a concern for the word climate Yes. As a trigger word.

And then losing funding for that. And I just got an email, I haven't looked at it, but my dad sent it this morning that Bloomberg, um, as Michael Bloomberg was gonna step in and fund a lot of the climate projects that, um, that, that, that are, are probably gonna be canceled. So, um, that is a big concern.

Number one, with just the funding already that's been designated for climate. And number two, as a meteorologist, another huge concern within the community that I'm in is the data, uh, for know whether data has always been free to use, and it's something that private weather leverages as well. And public weather, if that becomes completely privatized, that's gonna be a real problem, I think.

So we'll see what happens. But I just wanted to give you that perspective also. Absolutely.

I mean, I mean, quite frankly, if they're eliminating everything, 'cause climate change doesn't really exist and we nothing monolith fossil fuels. What does that do for Tesla? Mm-hmm.

Well, gee, uh, it didn't quite get 400, uh, million dollars worth of Tesla vehicles get sold to the State Department, though it almost did. Um, it, it, though, it should be pointed out that that program was, uh, came up up in the Biden administration. Um, but still, uh, that was another news story from last week.

Um, but talk about self-dealing. Um, you know, I mean, ultimately, you know, I, I'm reminded of the Onion article, uh, the Facetious article supposedly written by Jimmy Carter. It was not saying, you know, they made me sell my effing peanut farm.

Um, I'm, I'm thinking of that, you know, I mean mm-hmm. It's like, you know, he had to sell his effing peanut farm. And, um, and yet this, Because I, I think, and this is the biggest thing, I, I've had this conversation with numerous people on social media.

They're willing to overlook obvious craziness like this for the sake of, we won an election and we could do whatever we want. And that, that's a problem. And I wanna, And I wanna leave you with one more thing.

I think the reason that Elon is doing all this, I don't think he's political at all. I think the reason he is doing all this is so that he can get to Mars. He will cozy up to the Chinese Communist Party.

He will, he will support, uh, right wing, uh, nationalists in Europe. He'll, you know, fund Trump's rise to presidency because he knows that that is the only way that he gets to Mars. And he, that's all he cares about.

I think he cares about making more money. Nope. He wants to get to Mars.

That's my thought. Okay. I would just say, I would just say to all our IT friends out there who might be anywhere near this, be careful.

There will be lawsuits. You will be called to testify and you will have to explain what you did and didn't do. So think twice.

Mm-hmm. Agreed. All right.

Let's take a break before they come and censor us. Thank God we don't rely on any federal, uh, on any federal subsidies or anything, but we're gonna come back and let's talk about something Easy Tech Field Day was live, it's Cisco Live last week in over in Europe. They're still a Europe, isn't there?

Yes. Yes. All right.

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Welcome back to Textron Gang. Uh, so we were, uh, in Amsterdam for Cisco Live last week. And, um, I brought a few tidbits to share with the Techron community from that show.

Now, I wasn't there, but Tom Hollingsworth, who runs our networking mobility security events, was with a great group of tech Field day delegates along with some of our staff. We did a live stream, a bunch of presentations on a channel you might watch called Techstrong tv. We also are uploading those to YouTube if you're interested.

com. But, you know, here's sort of the, the takeaway, the TLDR of, of Cisco Live. Now, as you can imagine, it's 2025.

So Cisco spent a lot of time talking about ai. In fact, uh, according to the folks that have talked to the insiders and management at Cisco, all the way up to the top, Cisco is all in with ai. Now, you could probably substitute almost any enterprise tech company and say exactly the same thing, but what is Cisco actually doing?

Well, as you can imagine, they're a server vendor. Uh, or did you forget that? Yes, Cisco's UCS is one of the leading and, and probably the, the most, uh, advanced, uh, integrated blade type system out there.

The UCS is actually, uh, adding more capabilities for GPUs. You can now have, uh, up to eight Nvidia H 100 GPUs on those, um, UCS, uh, SE servers according to, uh, Tom's, uh, reporting. Um, and they're really trying to go after the market for not just AI training, of course, but, uh, the, the emerging market for, uh, inferencing AppSec, uh, basically using AI to do productive stuff.

One of the more interesting aspects to me, um, was that Cisco announced something called AI Defense a few weeks back, which is essentially a, um, a system, let's call it an agent that looks for AI applications running in your environment and allowing you to, uh, uh, you an IT manager to control some of that. It also, uh, helps service providers and others to try to figure out, uh, how AI is being used. This is an interesting angle for Cisco and one that I think is pretty smart.

Now, Cisco also did some really cool stuff with, uh, DPU and a new, uh, their own homegrown silicon. But let's, let's put a pin in that for a second because I wanna hear what, uh, the other folks here have to say about Cisco's place in the AI centric data center. Uh, what do y'all think?

I think this is a battle for the control plane that's coming around and, um, you know, Cisco and HP and Dell like to talk about the data center and on-premises if, uh, AWS and Google and Microsoft have no ambitions in that space, when in reality they seriously do. And then the question's gonna come down to, do I go with a control plane that enables me to manage a unified cloud from Microsoft AWS Google, or do I go with something from Cisco HPE or Dell and I manage that hybrid cloud infrastructure that way? Um, and the, you know, honestly, the cloud guys have a lot more experience with that kind of control plan than the hps and Dells and Ciscos do.

So, um, the question is, does the customer view those people as the center of their IT universe or now just kind of hanging around the edge of some other IT universe managed by somebody else? That's, to me where the battle's gonna be. To me, Cisco has always been a company that sells picks and shovels to gold miners, right?

They, they sell the hardware that made these data centers run. And even early on in the cloud, you know, the, the, not the server per se, but the connectivity hardware and security hardware or Cisco, they've lost a lot of that business, right? Um, but the hardware business or the, the hardware networking infrastructure business is not what it was.

Yeah, there's a lot going on with servers and how many Nvidia can you stuff into a rack and, and all of these things. But the traditional Cisco business is not enough for Cisco anymore. And so the question they face is, do they wanna just continue selling picks and shovels, though there may be different picks and shovels.

Maybe they're more servers, they're more, you know, not just the traditional networking gear or do they enviously eye what Google and, and AWS and these others have, which is the service layers on top of that hardware. So it's not enough just to do the hardware, right? We're gonna layer on services there with, and, and they've, look, they've tried this with WebEx and, and their security and Splunk now, right?

They, Cisco's remade itself or trying in the process of remaking itself to be more than just that pick and shovel seller. So we could talk about their latest, greatest hardware, but to me, the real action at Cisco is what are they doing service-wise on top of the hardware? And that will determine whether they go the way of Intel or Microsoft.

Well, it's interesting that, um, you mentioned that because the other half of what was announced, the nerdy half is really hardware. And, um, let's, let's dive into that for a second. So Cisco is actually ripping a page out of Apple's playbook here.

Uh, they've introduced their own, uh, Silicon One is, uh, what they're calling it their own, uh, switching platform. And this effectively is, uh, uh, um, you know, uh, uh, just like, uh, apple was able to push Intel out of the max. This is a way to push, uh, Broadcom and cloud scale and companies like that out of the Cisco switches.

Those were a pretty big cost line item for Cisco, I'm sure. Also, um, you know, it's a kind of a generic platform. You know, if you, if you're using an enterprise switch, asic, it's uh, pretty much, uh, you know, Broadcom's been good at differentiating them, but ultimately, um, Broadcom is happy to sell them to your competitors as well.

So Cisco has done some pretty cool stuff on the switching side here. The new, uh, nexus 9,300 line, uh, includes their, uh, their new switch, uh, asic, which again, like Apple incorporates things that the generic hardware wasn't incorporating. In this case, it's dpu.

Now, we've talked in the past, I'm sure, on, uh, Textron Gang, certainly on, uh, tech Field day events and so on about dpu. Um, you remember, um, the Pando group, which was, uh, made up of the, that group of, uh, Cisco execs called MPLS that typically develops things and then Cisco buys them back and all that. Well, when it came to Pendo, it's interesting, A MD was the one that bought it instead of Cisco.

And so a MD has basically these client offload card, you know, networking cards with offload engines, credibly powerful. And we've seen a lot of use cases for those things to, uh, you know, in the AI space, but also in conventional networking. And, um, as you mentioned in the security space in, um, you know, new networking technologies.

Well, Cisco is now integrating that same type of technology into the Switch ASIC for themselves. And so basically you've got a DPU on both sides, which accelerates everything. Again, very Apple-like to do this, but also it enables Cisco to be a little bit more of a master of their own destiny when it comes to where they're going with their, uh, Cisco, with their, with their underlying hardware.

Now, there still needs to be a bit of a rationalization here because, you know, now Cisco has multiple different, uh, fabrics, multiple different operating systems. You know, the Nexus portfolio now supports N-X-O-S-A-C-I and Sonic, uh, which is a, a, a new up and coming, uh, platform for networking. So it, it's really gonna be interesting to see, uh, how Cisco rationalizes those things.

I expect there will be more announcements at Cisco live us, which we'll also be covering. But, um, overall, uh, you know, again, I feel like what we're seeing here as a company, again, like Apple, that's trying to focus on user experience, trying to focus on the, on the value or the, the, the high margin part of the market, trying to make sure that those customers are the happiest customers, bring more to services, more to software and control the platform all the way down to the chips, which is something you don't see as much of in the enterprise tech space as you do in the consumer tech space. What do you guys think of this?

I think that it'll take Broadcom in short order to kind of converge DPU into their own networking processors. And well, They certainly have that capability, don't they? And they, and then they will turn around and commoditize the pricing to the point where it's very difficult, as we've seen in the historically, right?

Cisco's done a good job for creating their own networking chips for a long time, but the map, you know, from a manufacturing point of view seems to be against them. And the speed at which the other guys can copy that is getting faster and faster. So I'm kind of not seeing the cycle of how they're gonna like, get enough scale on their processors and that architecture to kind of make it worth competing head to head against a Broadcom and wherever else decides to at that.

And remember, the cloud guys are also all making their own networking chips now. And so there a lot of that business that Cisco might have had over the years. There's just a lot more options.

And the cloud guys are right there with DPU as well. I think you should point that out, that, you know, a lot of them are really making hay with this same technology. So in a way, Cisco is almost following them.

Cisco will not achieve its corporate goals On hardware. They, they have got to put a bigger bet on services and software. That's the bottom line here.

The hardware business, if it was a commodity before, it's even more of a commodity now, because you, you no longer have certain, I don't wanna use the monopoly word, but powerhouses that you did before, there were the, the barriers to entry to, to burning your own silicon, designing your own silicon, fabbing your own silicon, or, or, you know, subbing out the fabrication piece of it are much, much lower than they ever were. So if you are going to stake your claim on purely, uh, custom silicon without corresponding software, you know, what makes the Apple chips great, is because they're optimized for something called the Mac Os and iOS right There. Yep.

Right? Without Mac, OS or iOS, who the hell needs a, an M four? Mm-hmm.

Exactly. And, and well, that's obvious everybody who bought an M four iPad, um, it, it, it's, it's also exactly what I'm seeing too, Alan, that, that the goal of this platform is to enable Cisco's software and services. And if they can do that, then they have a sustainable differentiation in the networking market.

I mean, they're still the 800 pound gorilla. They still sell more than anybody else in pretty much every, uh, market they play in. And, um, and they can maybe use that to, you know, claw back market share and, and, and, and so on.

But if, if they can't, if this is just a way to extract a little bit more margin from those switches, it, it ain't gonna work. It needs to be a truly integrated product or platform all Apple. And we're gonna be keeping a close eye on that, so, right.

Don't forget that there's this little Chinese outfit called Yahweh that's trying to close off half the market for No, Yahweh. Yahweh, it's wwe. Yahweh's a different guy.

Ywe people pray to. All righty on that. No, let's take a break here.

Mike's mixing metaphors with Gods and, and, uh, service providers. We need a break. We're gonna be back.

Get some big news for Bonnie, from Bonnie coming at you. You are watching Textron gag. Hi everyone, welcome back to the Techron Gang.

Well, this week I have an exciting announcement that's coming my report. I've been working on this for quite a while now, and it's called Executive Strategies that, uh, I'm sorry, I'm already getting my report's name wrong. Decisions that define Executive Strategies and Innovations driving Corporate Sustainability.

And this report came after two years of interviews, over 100 executives at the cutting edge of sustainability and technology. And, um, you know, it was fascinating to go through all of their insights and put together and synthesize down this report, which would takes a look at ai. It takes a look at the circular economy and strategies in leadership, how to have that sustainability message go beyond the silo of one department.

So it's, I'm very excited. com on Wednesday, February 19th. I've been, uh, showing some previews of it on LinkedIn starting on Monday.

And one of them is this preview video I'd like to share with everyone right now. Sustainability is now a business priority, Bonnie Schneider latest report decisions that define Executive Strategies and Innovations Driving corporate sustainability based on exclusive interviews with 100 industry leaders reveals how companies use technology to cut emissions and improve efficiency. Leaders in data and AI, including Perforce, Delphix, Dynatrace, vulture, and Platform sh are optimizing infrastructure for lower energy use.

HuggingFace, new Relic and Buzz Solutions are advancing AI to drive sustainability and climate resilience across supply chains. Palo Alto Networks, pure Storage, Dell Technologies, HP Renew Solutions and Human IT are reducing waste, lowering emissions, and providing disregarded devices to those in need. org, mia, AI and climate people integrating sustainability into operations training and hiring.

2025 marks a turning point with the eus corporate sustainability reporting Directive. Now, in effect, businesses face strict new requirements, greater transparency demands and critical deadlines for compliance, powered by Ecotech Insights and the tech strong group decisions that define executive strategies and innovations. Driving corporate sustainability demonstrates that sustainability is no longer optional, but a catalyst for resilience and growth.

com to read the executive summary. The full report releases on Wednesday, February 19th. You can also go to Ecotech Insights on the blog.

I have a brand new blog up there now, which also talks about some of the findings in the report decisions that define, I'm very excited to share this with everyone, and like I said, I've been working on it for months and it's, it's kind of long, it's 31 pages, but has less pictures. So it's, uh, it's easy to digest and a lot of companies that are in it, you've heard of, maybe some of you haven't, that that was the exciting part, to talk a little bit about some of the more cutting edge AI startups that are looking to do climate mitigation, climate risk mitigation. And one of the companies featured, actually two focused on wildfire mitigation.

And I wrote this before the wildfires in California, so it's very timely indeeds, and I'm looking forward to everyone's, uh, you know, feedback on it. And, and I also wanna thank everybody on Textron Gang because our conversations also were always in my head when I was putting it together. Thank you, Bonnie.

Well, you know, it's interesting, right? This is what makes the world go round. The government could try to take out anything with the word climate in it or sustainability or any of these things, but yet we're at a point in the, in the world right now where this is staring us in the face and, and the time for us to do something meaningful that will mitigate this somehow, or I don't even know if we, I mean, we can't solve it.

I don't know how much of an effect mitigation we can have, but the time for us to do something is now. And what what's nice about this is you do, you have over a hundred interviews, over a hundred executives you've spoken to, and they, they run the gamut right around sustainability, you know, very heavily weighted in the IT and technology space. But it, at least it's clear at that level that sustainability, you know, mitigation of, of, of, uh, global climate change and so forth, and trying to be more renewable.

And all of this is important. And we, you know, all kidding aside, we, we argue when we yell about what's going on in our federal government right now, sustainability is important. The work you're doing is important.

And it's not just important for me or Mike or Steven. It's important for our children and their children and for this world, because doing the same old, same old is not gonna end well, and it's gonna end quick if we don't jump ahead of this. So I would highly recommend not just leaders out there, but tomorrow's leaders and wanna be leaders.

Go take a look at the report, see what leaders are saying, see what, you know, the actual facts on the ground are. You know, an interesting thing that goes on in our society today, and I think it's one of the reasons we're in the mess with red, is everyone says, well, I wanna listen to all sides and then I'm gonna form my opinion. And that's my opinion.

You know, opinions are like buts, my grandmother used to use a different word than buts, right? But opinions are like that. We all have one, but truth is eternal.

There's true and there's false. Everyone could have an opinion, but what's true is true. I don't really care what your opinion is.

Well, my opinion, it's, it's truth. And when we're talking about stuff like this, I, I think that's the key to what Bonnie is. There's this truth here, and we need to do something about it.

So, great work. Thanks. I'm really excited to see how it comes out and, you know, people's reactions.

I am coming to an, arguably an opinion, but, um, have we reached a point where the mitigation side of this thing is just, we're not gonna get there. So we need to focus more of our energy on things that take carbon out of the atmosphere and kind of the more the effort has to be on the fixing. I think it's a combination of both, because on medication for the impacts of more extreme weather events, um, when we're talking about wildfires, dry conditions and things like that, definitely add more fuel to it.

But the, the mitigation in the technology of detection, early detection with drones, and, um, detecting any spark that's on infrastructure to prevent power outages, that's all I think very valuable. And then on the climate tech side, there are incredible innovations happening to remove carbon, to capture, um, solar energy and, and, and things like that, that are, that are all happening at the same time. That's why this sport, it's funny, when I was writing it, it turned out to be much longer than I expected because there were so many different sides to this story.

So Mike, I, I think you make a good point that there's, there's that, that side of it and, and then the others. Well, yep. Wait, wait, wait.

Let's ask Steven Windmill FoST what he thinks. Is that my little name mail? I thought it Thought, so I threw Steven Solar.

Yeah, Now I, I, um, I was just gonna jump in on that too. I, I, I, I have to say that, um, you know, one of the things that is evident in this report is that it's not all driven by, uh, I mean, and you guys can throw stuff at me. It's not all driven by feel good, liberal hippie dippy do better for the children kind.

This is also driven by solid business reasons. Sure. You know, you look at some of these things, you know, I wanna call out one of the companies that, uh, that Bonnie focuses on the report, and that's pure storage with their Evergreen architecture.

I, I know those guys, they're not bad people. Um, but I guarantee that they didn't come up with Evergreen for hippie dippy feel good reasons. They came up with Evergreen because it was a solid differentiator.

Um, and their customers love it. And I've been to the Pure Conference, I have talked to their customers. They absolutely do love it.

Mm-hmm. The idea that your storage array can be migrated forward to such an extent that you can have the, literally the latest and greatest product from Pure and parts of it, components of it are still the original product they came out with over a decade ago is powerful. And, you know, I think that that's a, a, a business reason.

Mm-hmm. To look at the circular economy, it's a great economy. It's the same with HPE, which is another company you focus on in here.

Mm-hmm. HPE is a huge corporation. They're not driven by doism, they're driven by business reasons, and they are doing a lot in the circular economy and sustainability.

And like I've said many times, you can call me windmill FoST or solar panel foskett if you want, um, those technologies, you cannot stuff them back down because they make good business sense. They're not just good for the environment, they're good for, they're good for business, they produce power cheaper. They, you know, and it's the same with a lot of these other things.

You know, you look at, um, in many ways, I think that we can look at problems and find ways that are ecologically sound right. And we will find that they're also good business and no new, uh, political administration, no smears and, and, and assaults on that is gonna change that. And I am optimistic that ultimately, you know, the cat's outta the bag on some of these eco-friendly technologies, you can't stuff 'em back down.

That's a great point. I I, I definitely am glad you said that because that, that's one of the thesises of what I put together, that it's, um, not just about, um, you know, the do-gooder mentality that there, there are solid ROI that I stated, I have, you know, data to back it up. And, um, I think that's gonna be something that's more looked at.

We always talk about on the show that, you know, it depends in the end is it cost effective? People don't wanna spend the money. And what I found was there were multiple examples just in the report, and there's more that, that weren't, didn't even make it in there, that they were getting that return on investment.

Um, another one is delphix with their virtualization, um, and, and, and storage and how that is much more efficient and it's been successful. And Perforce, um, acquired Delphix, uh, for, for that technology. That was one of the reasons they acquired them.

So, um, as you, as you look through the examples, um, there are many. So I think that is changing, Right? But you ruin The view from the golf course out onto the ocean.

I mean, what are we gonna do about that? And won't somebody think of the imaginary whales that are killed by imaginary wind turbine? Well, no.

That I thought they just cause cancer. That was my opinion. Anyway, what's the website?

com. Go check it out. Until then, this is your hippie dippy weather, dude saying stay away from the brown acid.

You've got my reference. Yeah. We'll, uh, we'll, we'll talk to you all tomorrow.

Enjoy the rest of tech drunk tv. We, Steven, you are a tech field day cloud, tech field day Wednesday. Yes, we're Be live, Live streaming cloud Field Day on Tech Trunk TV and LinkedIn Wednesday and Thursday this week.

Uh, we've got a great group of people, um, really looking forward to it. Tune in. Fantastic.

Mike, I'll see you in New York this week, right? Absolutely. Looking forward to it.

Until then, everyone enjoy the rest of the day. This is Alan Shimel for Textron Gang. We're out.

I am Tiffani Bova, chief of strategy and research at the Futurum Group with 2025 upon us, I'm reminded of one fundamental truth. Disruption waits for no one organization and leaders who can anticipate, adapt, and act quickly will thrive. At the Futurum Group, we are focused on helping you decode the complexity of today's digital first world, so you can stay ahead of the curve.

This year's predictions dive deep into the trends, reshaping industries from AI's, pervasive influence across enterprise applications to seismic shifts in hardware, cloud, and customer experience. Our team of analysts, some of the brightest minds in research and strategy, have dissected the forces driving change, and outlined actionable insights for what's next. Whether it's the rise of ag, agentic, AI disrupting software consumption, cloud marketplaces revolutionizing go-to-market strategies, or the accelerating impact of a IPCs on productivity, the message is clear.

We are entering a new era where business agility, intelligence, and innovation are the ultimate differentiators. The insights shared in our prediction series are not just about spotting trends, but about preparing for transformation As customer expectations soar and the competition intensifies. Companies that embrace change as an opportunity rather than a challenge, will set the pace for the next decade.

I invite you to explore our predictions, listen to our analysts, share their insights, and download the report so you can reflect on how your organization can harness these shifts to drive growth, improve outcomes, and elevate experiences for customers and employees alike. Don't forget to download our Futurum 2025 prediction ebook, and we look forward to meeting the future head on together. Hi, I'm Keith Kirkpatrick, research director, enterprise applications for the Future boom group.

Today I'd like to talk to you about the market and offer a bold prediction that I have for 2025. Now, there's a lot going on in the enterprise application market. Generative AI is predicted to deliver exponential productivity, efficiency, and accuracy.

And in large measure has dominated nearly every buying conversation. Now, gene AI technology is being delivered either as an add-on feature at an additional cost, or as a fully integrated or embedded capability directly into business applications such as C-R-M-E-R, PCDB, and countless other line of business applications, though without a discreet additional charge on top of the base license. Now how generative AI is actually being delivered to customers, it's largely dependent upon the individual vendors technology stack and footprint.

Some vendors such as Oracle or Zoho, well they own the entire technology stack, including the data centers and compute that will power AI model training, tuning, and inference test, all the way to the end user facing applications. Now, other vendors, they only own the application itself may have to procure or cobble together compute resources, AI model, training and development, and other ancillary services to actually deliver real value to organizations. This latter group, there are significant concerns around balancing these costing heard for delivering AI, while actually ensuring that they can deliver new innovations on a continuous basis, not just on a quarterly cadence, but on a continual basis to satisfy their customer's thirst for quickly utilizing new innovations.

My prediction for 2025, it's that we're gonna witness the introduction and growing usage of new packaging and pricing models in terms of how software is actually delivered to the market. This will largely be based around the growing utilization of generative ai, copilots, or assistance AI agents and embedded AI technology. Now, if you'd like to learn more, please be sure to download our ebook future and research 2025 key issues and predictions.

Thanks and we'll see you throughout the year. Hello, I'm Krista Case Research director on the team here at the Futurum Group, and I'm here today to walk you through three of the key trends that we're going to be watching in the cybersecurity space. The first topic is the fact that AI is accelerating the race between attackers and defenders.

The second topic is the fact that attack surfaces are sprawling, and this is really creating the perfect storm. Number three is the fact that data protection is evolving into cyber resiliency. So let's look at the first topic.

AI is accelerating this race between attackers and defenders. The meteoric rise of deep seek so far this year in 2025 has really shown a limelight on the fact that attackers are not only using AI to kind of up their game, create more innovative and more efficient, you know, attack techniques, but at the same time, they're also targeting large language models and things of that nature to be able to do things like capture user, um, personal identifiable information and other things. The other flip side of this coin is how we're seeing enterprises use AI from a defensive perspective to try to, as much as they can, keep a step ahead of how attackers are evolving their techniques.

I think a lot with practitioners and they're really looking to their vendors to be able to make capabilities like detection of anomalous activity and to be able to identify, you know, potential breaches sooner, and also to be able to respond to them more quickly. So again, it's certainly something that just as attackers are not sleeping on, the opportunity for AI defenders certainly are not as well. The second topic, sprawling attack surfaces an explosion in the number of SaaS applications in use by the given enterprise.

For example, we have the rise of remote work and the myriad of devices that enterprises are accessing corporate data from. We have a growing number of iot devices and growing OT environments, for example, we also have supply chains that have become more sprawling than ever before. So as attackers have become more innovative in their approaches, the potential attack surface is also much more difficult for security practitioners to be able to get visibility into an established control.

Over our third topic, data protection evolving into cyber resiliency. This topic is very closely interweaved with our first two topics because it is naturally the data at the end of the day that attackers are targeting as it becomes more difficult for enterprises to stay ahead of attackers and prevent them from getting in. The precedence is placed on recovering data as quickly as possible and getting these critical business services back up and running.

So for data protection companies, what this means is it means baking in capabilities like that anomalous detection that we talked about of potentially nefarious activity, and then to be able to potentially take action like creating a snapshot as soon as that activity is detected and automatically uncovering the best recovery point. There's also a growing correlation between data protection vendors and incident response that we've seen both through partnerships and acquisition activity. So the takeaway from these three key trends is really that there's new technology requirements that really have been emerging over the last 18 to 24 months.

Buyers are evaluating all of the vendors that they're working with across the cybersecurity space, and they're really looking for ways to address these new threats, shore up their security posture and any potential goals and to be able to mitigate any business impact if they are breached. So with that, I wanna thank you for joining me. Please make sure to also check out the video from Fernando Montenegro, our VP in this space.

He's gonna be covering some other trends, um, that we're gonna be watching in cybersecurity this year. And make sure to check out our ebook, um, for a discussion of all of the trends and topics across, um, the technology space that we're watching. Thank you so much again, and I look forward to seeing you in the next video.

Hello and welcome to the digital CXO podcast. I'm Amanda Razani, and with me today is Mario Pania. He is the CEO of Anello photo tonics.

How are you? Hi, nice to meet you, Amanda. Good to see you again.

Happy new year to see you. Yes, happy new Year. So we have been on the show before.

Can you share a little bit with our audience though, about anello and what y'all are providing and working on maybe a little bit about what we talked about last time and then we can move on? Sure. So here at Anello what we've done is we've created, there's two types of gyros.

There's a MEMS based gyral that's in your phone and your watch, your EarPods that measures gyros measure position and rotation. Uh, um, and so these are billions, you know, billions of units a year. They're not very expensive, but they're not very accurate.

And then on the high end, there's these fiber gyros, right? This is a 3D print of a fiber optic gyro. It's about 30, $40,000, but it's used for the high end fighter jets, submarines, ICBMs.

And what we do is the world is moving autonomous. We want more and more precision, but you can't afford the big, bulky, expensive thing. So what we've done is we've created the world's smallest fiber optic gyro on a chip, as we call sfo silicon photonics, optical gyro.

3 volts, but it has the same precision of the fiber gyro, but it's based on integrated silicon photonics. This is the same silicon that's used for integrated circuits. So we fabricate these devices in the same factories and fab fabrication facilities as integrated circuits.

We put this with some electronics around there, and then we have a little laser in there that shoots light into this chip. And now we can very accurately measure position a rotation. We then put that in the systems.

And if I put three of those into a cube, you can sort see here three, you now have a three Actis. This is for things that fly drones. And just to compare, this is, uh, a 3D print of an LN 200.

This is our X three. You can see here, size, weight, area, power, right? It's a third, a fourth to size, fifth to weight, fifth to power, same performance.

Um, and this allows you now to bring that what was previously high performance capability into smaller things and bigger markets, right? Higher volume. So obviously drones, this is a use case here.

We have land vehicles. This is a, a, a unit we call genus inas as GPS chips. It's a sealed unit, salt spray.

We're shipping this into construction for land vehicles. The heading matters. So while you're moving around on the ground, you're still constrained your wheels unless you have a flying car.

We're not there yet. Um, and so it's the heading is the key. So this has one optical gyro technology in the, in the drive axis.

So here we're doing and shipping to construction, farming, agriculture, and then we have another product, um, that we use for, uh, robots that is similar, but if you're already indoors, there's no GPS. And this is a unit that we're shipping into, uh, construction robots and harden things. Um, and so this is now about being able to navigate with GPS or more importantly, when you lose G-P-S-G-P-S constrained GPS denied or GPS spoofed environments.

And what we have, because you have this high precision gyro, you combine that into a box with CPUs and algorithms, and we have algorithms that say, Hey, we're driving, for example, and I'm starting to lose GPS, whether it's a canyon, urban canyon, downtown barns, orchards for agriculture, mines for, uh, for construction. As you start to lose GPS, well, algorithm says, Hey, we're losing GPS weigh the algorithm more and more on the anello technology, and now we can navigate for extended periods of time without GPS, I can imagine this being used for, um, mapping underground unexplored tunnels and caves or, uh, finding people that are trapped in, you know, tunnels and caves with putting this into little drones. Yes.

And so what we're doing is we started off as an industrial, uh, application construction farming. Uh, then there's a bunch of interest that's happening with the DOD. So if you're in conflict areas in Afghan, uh, you know, Ukraine or Israel today, all the GPS is jammed or spoofed.

If you take your phone in in Israel today, it sends you to Beirut, right? It's all being jammed and spoofed. And then there's all these other use cases that your indoor buildings, right?

We're talking about, uh, uh, uh, a handheld unit for, for soldiers or emergency, uh, people that go into buildings that you can't find. You gave a perfect use case is that whether it's underground or underwater, six feet underwater, there's no GPS, you can start going into tunnels, um, whether it's search and rescue or other things you wanna navigate. So we brought this capability now that we can navigate extended periods of time, like we're talking 30, 60 minutes of navigation at a price points that you previously couldn't think of and, and form factors.

So there's a perfect example. And what really excites me when I do these interviews or when we talk to customers, is as we in and announce these in, uh, advances, and I'll talk about a new product we just announced, people and customers come to us and say, Hey, we have this use case, right? An example, we have robots that we put into tunnels and we wanna know where in certain places in the tunnel.

And if you have a tunnel that's dark, that looks the same, cameras don't help, LIDAR doesn't help, right? Because the image is the same, there's no features. So how do we know where we're going in terms of position?

How do you know where you start? And so these are use cases, um, that we're finding all enabled by this, you know, wonderful thing which we call sfo, which was this breakthrough that we developed that, uh, this, you know, team here, uh, has developed over the last couple of years. Fantastic.

So now tell me a little bit about the new product. Okay, so I said what we have before we have stuff for land, right? This is our vehicles.

We're shipping robots, which are, these are also somewhat land, these are robots on the ground air, which we launched last year. This is the X three product, which predominantly for drones and things that fly. And now we just launched a product at cs, which we call our maritime product.

So this is now for things that are above water. Think about this. You're bouncing around and there's this new activity of, of USBs unmanned surface vessels.

That seems to be a very high interest. Now that's the same thing. If you're in a, you're, you're an unmanned vessel and on the ocean, cameras don't help you, right?

All looks the same. You can go 360 degrees, you can use lidar, maybe you can use the stars. What we've done here is we've taken our sfog, but three of these in here.

So it's the same concept as the cube, but in addition, we've created a navigation system. So this has two GPS chips where we actually have GPS, it's a sealed unit. We have a, a navigation system and, and, and software in here.

And this now it's also watertight and sealed. So now we can actually navigate on the water. We have algorithms that take into account currents and drifts, but also allows, the reason the three axis is depending on the speed of the boat that you're using, you know, there's some of the smaller boats that go two to four knots.

There's the bigger boats that go, 15 to 20 knots, you're bouncing around. But now we can operate and navigate, um, on the water or underwater with an Los Scilog technology and operating in GPS denied or contested or spoofed environments. Fantastic.

So can you give an, uh, any examples of, uh, real world use cases this is already being used in? Yeah, so we're just launched the product. We're we'll have samples.

There's quite a bit of interest. We're launching engineering. We have test boxes that we've shipped, uh, that customers have been testing with.

And then we, we launching this product ramping up in Q2 with early engineering samples. And in full production in the fall, uh, the interest level's quite high, but we've taken our technology, for example, just recently at, uh, for West 25, which is an event, uh, was put on in San Diego, I think January 27th, January 28th. Um, this was in conjunction with a partnership with Saab, SAAB.

If your readers go and look up, uh, on our LinkedIn posts at Anella photonics, or if you look at our website or if you go to a Saab, uh, this was in partnership with scpa, which is their, uh, innovation group. We put our technology on their boat. This was then sent out on, you know, people were watching real time.

We sent a boat out, you know, many, many miles out on the ocean from San Diego, turned off to GPS, and then we navigated back in based solely on Anello. And we were talking, I think 30 or so miles of navigation, or kilometers I think I should say, with less than 1% error. Um, when we came back into the dock, you know, we sort of measured how far we were off with the turning on off GPS.

Now in San Diego, the testing was done by just disconnecting the antennas, right? We're not in a, a contestant environment. The same technology in partnership with Naval X and Task Force 59, uh, this is a, a navy a task force 59 is the innovation unit of the Navy that's out in Bahrain, out in the Middle East.

Our technology was flown out there was then flown to Jordan, and then we had a partnership with Seasat s where they have a UUV unmanned surface vessel, USV, sorry. And it was just driven up to the tip of Israel and the Navy that was falling behind it. People's phones were, we could tell when they were being spoofed, we detected the spoofing.

So spoofing is when you can still get, there's two things. Jamming is when you lose satellite signal and you can sort of tell that, you can tell by number of signals. The number of satellites.

The weakness spoofing is you get GPS signal, but you don't know if it's real or not good or not. And so what we can do here, because we have real time information, we compare every 10 milliseconds. What is the position that an L says and what is the position that GPS has?

And for example, in this case here, we were navigating and we were getting close to Israel and the, the spoofing detected that all of a sudden GPS says, you're in Kobad Jordan airport, or, uh, I, I think Kobad is a base. You were at the Ahad airport, which was 300 kilometers away. We immediately detected it.

We said, Hey, we're being spoofed, poured over to Anello. And then we navigated. There was just some testing that was done by taskforce 59.

And there's an example in a real environment that our technology technology has been tested and we navigate solely based on Anello. So it's quite exciting. And there's a few more customers that are doing testing that are not public.

Um, but you know, we now have, you know, land which we've been, you know, there is a product. We shipped it a year and a half ago. We introduced the three axis product specifically for drones.

And we have lots of customers testing, unfortunately customers are in public. Um, and then we just launched a maritime product that is a combination of testing we've done with customers, both in field trials with Naval X, with other customers out in San Diego on the east coast in Rhode Island. And then some of this is actually being shipped over the next quarter.

We about six or seven pretty big customers testing this in field trials. And then looking at, uh, ramping that into production, uh, in the summer and then ramping through the fall. So quite exciting again.

Yes, all based on this little thing called sip fog, silicon photonics, optical gyro. Absolutely. It sounds like your technology is making a large impact around the world.

Yes. And you know, I think, uh, as you said earlier, what's really exciting is if you think about it, we thought about maritime a year ago. There was a bunch of interest over the summer.

Uh, people came to us and we said, Hey, we can build something. We build a test box first. That took, you know, a combination of the X three A, a discrete board for GPSA discrete board for our navigation software.

And then as that evolved where there was interest, we ended up building a real product. And this is, you know, like I said earlier, the real excitement of working with customers, putting it our technology onto real use cases, and then together with the customer, building a product that's optimized for the use case. And I think from the schedule I just showed you also gives you a sense of how fast, uh, and nimble we are, how we're really customer focused.

And you know, I urge any of your customers that are listening, if you have new use cases or new applications, you know, I think between these three products or derivatives, we can find how we can quickly app adapt our technology. Maybe it's tweaking the algorithms or maybe, you know, obviously every boat is different. Every USB is different, every land vehicle, but you know, 90% of it is the same.

And then we can work with the customer to tweak the, the algorithms. And also these are, these are designed to be very easy to install, 15, 20 minutes, put it in their standard interfaces. There's no proprietary, uh, interfaces.

So we, we try to make this as, as easy to use, easy to install, and, and then take it out to the, to the, the mass market So you can custom build for a client, You know, if there's a business case that that's makes sense. Absolutely. Right.

And, um, we have, uh, one or two projects that are slightly taking our existing product and then we, we do some custom stuff for customers. Yes. So what's next?

Do you have anything in the works for the future? Is there any reason you would try to get even smaller for any reason? Yeah, I mean, it's sort of the first thing is just, you know, we're ramping up, we just raised a funding round, um, and we're ramping up our existing product portfolio and bringing this new customer on the new product line and then ramping that into production.

So there's a lot of stuff happening here, but if you wanna look forward, you know, we, we are here in Silicon Valley, it's not, uh, uh, the Wizard of Oz in Kansas or something, but you know, this is, you know, this is unfortunately the, the beat we live on, this is the state of the art today. This is a 3D print of an L 200. This is Anello X three, which we just launched, and I think you set me up, but this is our next generation, right?

Oh wow. Yes. We're talking about shrinking the X three to even the smaller.

So this is something that's in our roadmap. It's not something we're focused on today, but this is something that we've had from customers of how do we scale it? And this is something probably in the next three plus years, you know, we have a roadmap that we continue, as you said, we're gonna continue to reduce power, we're gonna continue to reduce size, and as you shrink those, you end up with something.

And by the way, we don't trade off on performance. So this is talking about something one inch square from a two by two, you know, eight times smaller, uh, fifth, maybe half a third, the power, same performance. So what this does is opens up new applications, right?

Things you want the same precision, but maybe you want on consumer drones, or maybe you want it on, you know, handheld and personal people that can carry it or other things. And so as you go smaller, you keep the same performance, but it opens up volume markets. And this eventually we'll keep integrating and integrating.

Eventually we're gonna make it small enough that we'll put it on every phone, on every watch, and then you can track everybody anytime, any place. Not track, but you can use it to navigate with everything you do with the same precision, whether you're in contested GPS denied or not environments. Alright, great.

So if someone wanted to reach out to you, uh, where would they go? Can you give the, the web address? com.

There's a, a, a link there for info. Uh, you can download the spec sheets, get on our mailing list. There's a also pull down for mailing list.

And then if you have any questions or applications, we look at that every day on the info page. And then we usually send it off to our applications engineer, depending on the topic, and someone will get back to you and, um, look forward to hearing from you, and more importantly, look forward to seeing how ALO can solve your navigation solutions. All right, great.

Well, thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing all about these products. Well first of all, thank you, Amanda, for, for having us back on and look forward to, to hearing more from you and in the future we'll keep you updated when new stuff comes out, but I look forward to talking to your viewers and your customers and our future customers. How's that?

And thanks to our audience. Stay tuned. There's more.

Hi, I am Nick, patience, vice president and AI practice Lead at rum. And these are some of my predictions for AI. In 2025, agen AI will take center stage.

This is the evolution of the, the generative AI revolution that started in late 2022. And now we're getting to the stage where AI enabled agents are gonna be able to take decisions, they're gonna be able to interact with other agents, they're gonna be interact with other kinds of software applications and interact with humans. And this is the, the, the, the evolution of this.

So we actually get to the stage where AI can execute business processes, and that opens up all sorts of new opportunities. This year we're gonna see, uh, a successful IPO of one of the AI focused companies. The IPO market has been, um, fairly fallow in the last, um, few years.

There's been a lot of venture capital invested, obviously, and that also need, needs to go somewhere. And we we're expecting the IPO market to open up a little bit in 2025. We're also expecting one of the smaller large language model companies to get acquired.

OpenAI has obviously stormed ahead here and, and is the dominant player. Um, but there's quite a few others that are fairly small in comparison to OpenAI, but might make attractive acquisition targets probably for application software vendors, but maybe also for infrastructure, uh, vendors as well. Agents and reasoning models, these reasoning models where they kind of act sort of like a human with chain of thought reasoning and show they're working and show how they're actually coming to a decision.

We think both those kind of trends, A, they're related, and B, they're gonna drive an increase in need for inference infrastructure. So you have more power at the inference stage because of this, this chain of thought, uh, process going on. This is not as just a simple putting in a a simple question into a an LLM in text and getting the answer back or, or anything like that.

This is gonna require more investment, we think. So those are some of my predictions for 2025. Thanks for taking the time to listen, and if you wanna know more about these predictions and all of our predictions, you can check out the FUTURUM research ebook, which is available now.

Hi, I am Olivier Blanchard. I am the research director and practice lead for AI devices automotive and AI device semiconductors at the Futureum Research Group. And so what we're thinking here in our holistic practice, looking at all of our dif different technology categories is that AI devices is actually taking off this year.

Uh, and it's, it's probably going to be one of the bigger trends in, uh, in the overall tech sector. Up until now, we've had AI living in the cloud, in, in terms of training inferencing services. Most of it has been handled in the cloud through data centers and cloud services.

But what we're doing this year, or what we're seeing this year rather, is a, a migration, not away from the cloud, but into devices towards the edge. So essentially it's an expansion of, uh, of the AI ecosystem from the cloud outward to the edge to devices, and these devices are IPCs. That's obviously one of the big, uh, developments for this year.

I'll come back to it in a second. Another one is, uh, AI enabled mogul devices, which actually isn't new, but we're going to start seeing a lot more on device Ag agentic AI entering the market this year, and also all of the other devices that are sort of peripherals to, uh, PCs and mobile. So that's the wearables like your watches and xr.

So smart glasses. It's also drones. It's also smart cameras, smart smart speakers.

All of the, the, the little ecosystem of, of intelligent devices that you can interface with, either by voice or, or other types of, uh, uh, of interfaces. And we're also seeing an expansion of that into the automotive space where cars aren't just about self-driving and a DAS, they're also about ag agentic experiences inside the vehicle for the drivers and passengers. So all of these things together are essentially driven by advancements in two areas.

One is, uh, semiconductors. So the small semiconductors, the semiconductors that go into your devices, your PCs, your mobile phones, your watches, your smart glasses, your speakers, your, all of your wearables. And the vehicles are getting much better.

Uh, a lot of them are equipped with, uh, something called an NPU, which is a neural processing engine or unit that allows AI workloads to happen on device. And increasingly what we're seeing is not just inference, which is sort of the AI interacting with you on devices, it's also the training itself. And, and we're, we're now able with IPC's mobile devices and, and, and vehicles to train AI directly on the device without necessarily needing a, um, a cloud connection or connection to the cloud or, or to a data center.

So that's, that's a huge thing because it allows training of AI to be remain local, to be secure and to be a little bit more immediate. And that's also with the inferencing, which is kind of the interactions that we have with ai. AI models are becoming a lot more efficient to trade.

And so what used to have to be trained in the cloud a year ago that required, you know, 70 a hundred billion parameters can now is, is much smaller now and can run directly on devices or can be trained directly on the device. So we're gonna see an expansion of training AI models from the cloud into smaller solutions like small servers, more local, and also some of that training being, uh, being moved to AI devices. All of that and more, uh, can be found in our ebook about our predictions for 2025.

Uh, we're talking about not just AI devices, but a lot of other technology categories as well that all play into this big AI revolution that we have. Also, I recommend that you follow us on the socials. So we're on LinkedIn, obviously, uh, we're on X anywhere.

You can find us, uh, anywhere You can find me where I talk about AI devices, and also follow us on our websites where you'll find a lot of other resources. com. Thanks a lot.

Happy reading, and I hope to see you at. Hello, I'm Fernando Montenegro and I recently joined futur Research as vice president and practice lead for cybersecurity research. You may have seen the video from my colleague Krista case, so this is a bit of a compliment to that.

I also encourage you to check out our ebook. We want to highlight several crucial areas for the security landscape in 2025. First up is the discussion around security platforms.

We emphasize the, the very nuanced discussion to be had about what is actually a platform and how do you consume one. We typically think of a conversation as a dichotomy between platform versus best of breed, but we think that have actually evolved into a much more complex decision matrix besides choosing on functionality, pricing, et cetera. We argue that there are now at least three dimensions that people should consider.

The first one is, do we buy it as a platform or as a point product? Do you consume it and, uh, as a product and then you have to integrate it yourself? Or is it integrated into a platform?

Which one evolves quickly? Which one, how gives you more, uh, faster time to value? The second conversation is, are you buying something that is best of breed versus quote unquote good enough?

Of course, we all want best of breed, but that comes at a cost. So how can organizations choose with where they want to pay for a premium versus where good enough is? Well, good enough.

Lastly, you have the, the, the topic of how do you consume it, how you do, how do you deliver it? Is it something that you are choosing to buy from a vendor directly or is it something that you are working with a service provider or a channel partner on? Each of these dimensions have pros and cons, and you have to evaluate based on specific organ organizational requirements.

We argue that a cybersecurity becomes much more strategic. These types of decisions become much more tied to an economic angle to them, and we have to frankly just navigate what the economic trade-offs are between these choices. Another key area for us for 2025 is the evolution in the convergence of application security with cloud security.

Now, cloud security best practice in general is encouraging us to use more automation and infrastructure as code as principles, and that by itself fits really well with how application security already works. Also, the developers that are typically outputting, uh, front end code H-T-M-L-C-F-S fs, JavaScript or backend code go Python, no, what have you, they are also very comfortable creating con Kubernetes configurations in e ml or helm charts or cloud formation templates with cloud formation or Terraform, et cetera. So it's not that big of a jump to include those configurations into the software supply, uh, pipeline.

This alignment is really interesting because it creates this proximity between consuming application security and cloud security functionality. That being said, this convergence is also interesting because we have to rethink how teams are structured, how responsibilities flow from one to another. So that's another area that we're looking at.

Third area I want to highlight is this evolution of third party risk management. We think that modern third party risk management is much more about addressing both the business level risks as well as the technical risks across your value chain. So this includes evaluating, for example, security libraries or cloud posture or SaaS components that you're using as well as vendor reliability, financial viability, et cetera.

The challenge of here is how do you as an organization maintain this complex, uh, information set on first party, second party, third party, first party relationships? So it's really interesting. One more point I want to mention before you wrap up, and that is that there are quite a few security areas that actually are very good at spanning multiple domains, if you will.

We all talk about AI security, for example, as one of these, but that said, we think there are other areas. Ransomware response and, and uh, and protection, for example, is one of those. It's not just an endpoint security issue, just like it's not a only a data security issue, it actually flows into a bigger conversation around risk management and cyber resiliency.

Also, secure access service edge implementations, SE right? They themselves are interesting because they stand from network security to cloud security, data security and so on. All of these are really interesting areas that require us to look at them with different perspectives and, uh, from different lenses.

As we look into these in 2025, we here at, uh, at TU are paying very close attention to the needs of all the stakeholders in this, in this area. As I get to wrap up, I want to thank you very much for your attention and I want to encourage you to do three things. First of all, if you can please review Krista Case video for some other cyber predictions, please review our ebook for a complete set of predictions from cybersecurity and other areas.

com. I often like to say, I mean, there is never a adult day in the fiber security industry, so thank you very much for your time and I wish you all a great day. Hi, my name is Richard Gordon.

I'm vice president and practice lead for semiconductors here at RUM Group. Today I'd like to talk a little bit about what's going on in the semiconductor industry, and we'll maybe have two or three predictions as well. So first of all, let's start with the state of the industry right now at the end of 2024, and as we entered 2025 last year, the industry grew at around about 20% and that growth was driven by a boom in data center semiconductors, particularly AI chips, and, uh, also from a boom in, in memory from the likes of Samsung, Eski, Hynek, and Micron.

The industry growth rate's gonna slow down a little bit and we'll probably see growth of around 10% this year. Overall, that's gonna be driven, um, I think by a pause in investment in the data center space and also a a, a recovery in the rest of the market as supplied and demand comes more into balance. So the industry going from strong growth last year to slightly more moderate growth in 2025.

As we head towards 2030, I think we'll see another upcycle in the industry pushing the market towards a trillion dollars or so in the early 2030 timeframe. Second prediction I'm gonna talk a little bit about is to do with the technology roadmap over the, the, the past few decades in the industry, technology has been driven by Moore's law. Investment in semiconductor scaling is what drove chip performance and cost reduction.

However, it's increasingly challenging for companies to invest and keeping to the Moore's law curve. Really only the leading foundries and leading memory players can afford to do that these days. So we're gonna see increasing investment in advanced packaging to drive the technology roadmap.

In fact, one of the equipment manufacturers reckons that by 2030, around a quarter of foundry revenue will come from the triplet space. Benefit of triplets is that semiconductor devices can be partitioned up into functional blocks and then recombined in advanced packaging so that there's different types of semiconductors with different properties available in a single package. The last thing I wanna talk a little bit about is geopolitics.

Of course the industry has is very much a globalized industry and has a globalized supply chain, but increasingly we're seeing semiconductors seen as a driver of economic growth and also very important from a national security perspective. So what we're going to see going forward is more Onshoring of semiconductor design and manufacturing. We're gonna see increased technology transfer restrictions around the world and also increased tariffs and trade as well.

Uh, uh, that will not apply just the semiconductors, of course it'll buy to, to business more generally, but it will affect, affect the semi space. So that's a little bit of a a look into what's going on in the industry right now. If you want to find out more, you can download, uh, our ebook, um, where we have some more detail on these predictions.

That's RUM 2025 key Issues and predictions. This is Textron tv. Hey guys, thanks for the throwaway here with Eran Yahav, who's CTO for tab nine.

And we're trying to sort out what is the future of application developers in the age of AI because, well, there's a lot of talk about how much is gonna be automated and just what is the job function gonna be around. Welcome to the show. Thank you for having me, Mike.

I think everybody has the same basic conversation when it comes to ai. They all have some understanding that their quote unquote cheese is about to be moved, but they don't know to what extent and are they gonna be completely obsoleted or is the role gonna change? And you have a lot of hands-on experience with ai.

So what are you seeing and what should we expect? Yeah, the role is definitely gonna change, but uh, AI is not here to replace you. AI is here to amplify you.

And in fact, the role has been changing for years, right? And maybe before we discuss, um, about know how the role changes, we can start with the basics of what is the definition of the role anyway? What is the job of a software engineer, right?

Always say that it changes. Let's agree on what is it that is being changed. And, uh, the definition on the job description has always been solving business problems using software.

And that job description is not going to change. We are still going to be solving business problems using software. We're just gonna do less of the boring stuff, less of writing the code itself, dealing with the syntax problems, dealing with program that does not compile because you forgot the semicolon, right?

All this stuff is going away maybe, uh, for many domains. And we're just gonna focus on the higher level planning, on the higher level, what needs to be done, and maybe less in the nitty gritty details. So that's a high level answer and we can dig deeper.

Definitely In effect, am I gonna become more of a supervisor of the development of a piece of software rather than spending all my time trying to figure out how to write a specific line of code better or testing this, that and the other, or creating the tests, and there's gonna be this kinda series of AI agents that will take care of a lot of these functions. How will that kind work out in your head? Yeah, in my head, I think it's, it's gonna be basically the shift from an individual developer.

Every developer should think of himself or herself as, um, engineering manager or as a team lead. And they're going to be a team lead of a team of AI agents, basically, that are going to be delegated certain tasks and hopefully the AI agents can complete these tasks with, uh, high reliability, producing high quality code. But this is definitely not always going to be the case, right?

And just like any team lead, you will have to make sure that the problems are well-defined when they're delegated, and you'll have to make sure that what you're getting back is actually satisfying the requirements, right? And as any team lead, you'll have to say, Hey, you know what, Mr. Ai engineer, you kind of missed on this part here and that should be improved and have another iteration with the delegated tasks, right?

So it's really more a managerial responsibility, architectural thinking, understanding your requirements, the constraints, the trade-offs. These are still going to be very much at, at this point, uh, human tasks, right? And then we're gonna basically have the AI agents deal with the low level details of the implementation coming back to us with something that hopefully works.

There's a little bit of cynicism in the air when it comes to ai. Folks are basically saying that instead of going to some website and hunting around looking for, uh, code that I'm basically just gonna copy and paste, I'm now using an AI agent to do that. But the problem is, um, the AI agent doesn't have any context for the production environment.

So when I go to debug the thing, um, I don't know how it was written and I'm more or less confused by all the code written by the machine. So I kind of throw up my hands and say, well, maybe I was just better off doing this myself. So I know we're on the journey here, but what, what are the practical use cases for AI these days?

I think we're already seeing AI pop across the entire SDLC. So we have AI generate code, generate tests, generate documentation, review the code, uh, solve review comments, all those things are done by ai. I think, um, the CI cynicism is understandable and expected, um, given that we are far from perfect on all of these tasks, right?

So part of the human skill in the coming years is to know where to apply AI and where to actually dig in and do the stuff yourself, right? Because the AI is either gonna give you a partial result or something that you'll have to debug very carefully anyway, right? So I would not use it for my super-duper one-off sophisticated algorithm that requires a lot of, uh, contextual understanding of my company, et cetera.

That's maybe not the best use case right now. It'll be, things will mature. Uh, but we're already seeing, again, increasing autonomy across tasks across the entire SDLC.

Things are improving all the time. Uh, I think things that were science fiction just a couple of years ago, like having ai writing entire applications from scratch are pretty common placed now, as soon as, as long as the specification is clear enough and the environment in which this is happening is isolated enough. So there's still a way to go in terms of ai, understanding the context of the organization, right?

Understanding what code already exists, what libraries should be reused, um, how to not generate things, uh, if you can use an existing microservice out there in the organization, et cetera. And these are part of the things that top nine is focusing on making top nine, making the AI more contextual to your organization, having the AI engineer in a sense onboarded to your specific org. So it really does work that could be maintained, uh, downstream, right?

Something that is really matching the best practices of the organization writing code that is not foreign. To your point, it's very easy to generate code that may be functionally correct, but is completely foreign to the organization, right? Something that doesn't use the right library is something that doesn't call the right microservices.

So it may work, but whoever needs to maintain it downstream is gonna have a hard time At the other end of that spectrum. I can't help but wonder how quickly are we gonna move to a scenario where people may be skeptical at the moment, but I could see a world where I may not wanna be an application developer without using these types of tools because there's a lot of toil involved. And being a developer that's not a lot of fun.

I think like previous tools in previous, you know, revolutions, let's call it, uh, I, I think the main thing we're gonna find out is that we can accomplish much more and it opens the kind of the way to new ways of doing things. Like, let me give an example. Today when I have to develop an application, I maybe have some wire frames.

Somebody gives me like the basic flows of the app, et cetera, and I develop it and I get one application because the cost of the development is so high that I basically get one bite at the apple, right? It's kind of, this is the application, but imagine that the co co cost of generation is like low, is like maybe a push button. I can generate a hundred different variations of this application with different ui, with slightly different behaviors, with slightly different logic maybe.

And now the new developer, the, the Empower developer by AI can basically spend time choosing the right application out of the 100 variations, refining it, maybe iterating on it some more, so you can produce maybe 10 x or a hundred x more options than what you used to be able to do without ai. I think this is really the way in which it's gonna change. And maybe you can even have multiple versions of the same app that are personalized for different personas, right?

This is the kind of empowerment that you're getting from AI that you can basically get stay in the spec level, kind of define what is it that you want, and maybe get the rest done by the AI agents. We all talk about, well, isn't it gonna be awesome that AI can generate code? But you know, I feel like that's just going back to the old, you know, let's measure people on how many lines of code that they're actually creating.

And I kind of think, I thought at least, and we kind of prove that that was pointless. There is this goal that says we're gonna build more applications per developer, but each application is a problem that needs to be solved. And what is the cognitive load that a developer can really carry simultaneously?

How many problems can I solve regardless of how much AI I have? How much can I carry that, um, thought in my head at the same time? Can I really work on instead of three things, 20 things at the same time?

Or is that just not how it's gonna play out? Yeah. So again, I was not implying that you'll have to like, you know, really fully develop a hundred AppSec and deal with all the details, but really, but, but there are many variations that are relatively small as a consumer of the app, right?

As a user, but may make a huge difference in like how you code the app, right? That was what I was referring to. It, it is, maybe it is the same calculator app or it is the same Tetris game, but maybe the it's 3D instead of 2D.

Maybe, you know, the buttons looks slightly different. Maybe the the keyboard or the mouse controls are different. These are, it's the same app, but kind of you get a lot of variation, a lot of strength or power uplift by the AI to try these different things without having to rewrite the whole thing yourself manually.

So again, cognitive load is definitely a thing, though. I don't want to dismiss that, right? Like imagine, uh, I'm now Iran and I'm using ai.

I give it some tasks and it comes back with 1 million lines of code that it wrote for me, right? Um, now what, right? Uh, if there's a bug there, who's gonna maintain it?

Who's gonna understand it, right? To your earlier point. And so I think one of the challenges that we're facing as we're moving into this more independent or autonomous agents is how can we trust the results that we're getting back from ai?

How can we guarantee that the code that is being generated is actually an asset and not technical debt, right? That's a central question. And that I get asked by engineering managers as well, right?

I have top nine, it generated whatever, 15,000 lines of code for me. Like how can I guarantee that this is something that we can maintain, uh, down the road? And this is why we put a lot of emphasis on what we call top nine coaching, which is a way to define rules and best practices that are enforced by the AI as code is being generated and also actually for human written code, right?

So you want to be able to define kind of like what are the rules for acceptable code in the organization? And these rules are org specific, right? They're not the kind of rules that say, you know, your function has five nested if conditions.

So it's a, so it's a bad function. This is not the kind of code review comments that you would like to get from Tom. It's more like, Hey, you know what Mike looks like you are sending customer data without encryption.

This doesn't look like good practice in organization, right? Or looks like you're accessing accessing the database without authentication or without logging. This is again, not good practice.

So you want all of that level of control, um, and oversight to be built into the AI product such that the human engineer can have more control on what's going on and not just watch the AI generate arbitrary code. Uh, that may or may not be maintainable downstream. To your point, it seems also that people are struggling a little bit with the LLMs are probabilistic, and so they're scratching their heads going, well, how come it doesn't gimme the exact same code?

Every time I send a prompt, I get a different answer to every use case. And, and they're kind of like looking at it going, a lot of what we do is deterministic and I kind of need the same exact piece of code the same way every time. So how do I kinda marry these things together?

Yeah. First of all, again, think about it as delegation, right? And so if I as an engineering manager delegate the tasks to five different developers, they may give me five different pieces of code that again, functionally may be equivalent or nearly equivalent for the requirements that they've been given, but they are gonna be different.

And so having different results is not necessarily, well, not inherently, uh, a bug or, or bad thing as long as it's, uh, it's gets the job done. Uh, but being contextualized on the organization, getting like the right code for my setting or a right code for the, for my setting, it may not be, again, like a single unique solution may be multiple solutions, but something that matches my specific org requirement. I think this is something important, uh, to, to get from the ai.

Yeah. So if, if you go, again, if you go to say charge GBT and ask it to write a piece of code to accomplish a task, it does that completely in a way that is completely disconnected from the context in which you are operating, right? So let's say you ask it to write a sorting function, so it will generate a new sorting function, maybe quick sort me sort whatever it is that is the favorite algorithm that you get from Chad G pt.

But maybe you already have mic sort somewhere in your code base that is your specific sorting algorithm with all the edge cases and and whatnot for your organization doing it. And yeah, maybe sorting is too generic of an example, right? But you, you get the idea like something that could be specific to your org creating employee or something like that, rather than the generic one that you'll get of a developer that has not been onboarded to the organization.

So AI, just like any other engineer, has to be onboarded into the organization in order to give you the consistent, relevant results that, that you'd like to see from an employee. So in that example, might it not be a better way to say, okay, well maybe I will ask four or five different AI models to create something for me and then I'll compare the output and I just need a platform that lets me kind of navigate those things to determine which of those outputs actually fits better in my use case. 'cause it seems to me each of these LLMs is slightly different and maybe better at a given task at any given moment.

Yeah, and I think it's not as much a question of the model, because the models, of course, they have their nuances and difference in, in behavior. Uh, but it's more a question of the context that is given to, to the model, right? Uh, you can run the model with very different context and get dramatically different results.

Uh, example is, again, what code base already exists and can you contextualize on the organizational code base for getting new code to be generated and maybe, you know, in one code base, the result is calling an existing microservice in other code base, the result is generating a new microservice, right? Depending on in what context exactly we're operating. So to me at least, it's more about the context than it is about the specific LM and LMS are, you know, rapidly changing, improving all the time.

And it's, uh, it's more the question of what you feed them when you're looking to accomplish a task. We of course, have been talking about shifting as many things left as we can possibly do, and developers of course don't always appreciate that 'cause they're like, I am trying to write code and I have a few thousand things I'm trying to do here, and you're adding one more. But where is the right place to like add things like testing and observability.

Now in the age of ai, can I just drop that into the IDE so it sits alongside in real time as I'm developing and it's just something that's sits over my shoulder and I don't need to do those things later in the cycle? Or am I trying to just do those things everywhere across the entire cycle? Yeah.

So actually, you know, you can shift further left from the ID to the, the requirement stage, right? And we can maybe, uh, just write the requirements in a detailed enough way so you don't have to write the code. And the AI will write code that already has observability built into it, already has some, uh, security, uh, hardening built into it, et cetera, et cetera.

So a lot of the, let's call it non-functional properties that they'd expect from the code being generated could in fact be handled by I and expect observability to be one of the first ones that, that gets integrated automatically because that is first annoying to the human developer and second, easy enough to, to get pretty decent results with automation. So we started this conversation talking a little bit about what an application developer does, but in the age of ai, well, won't everybody more or less become a software developer? I mean, what is the, the scope of that role could expand considerably?

'cause all I need to know is how something works then maybe, you know, mere mortals like me or application developers. Yeah, I think the, the, the realm of like system thinking, large scale software design, architecting the system, all those components are very much still, uh, human endeavor, uh, understanding, you know, also existing code bases and how to interoperate with that is a combination of what the AI understands together with some, uh, human guidance, um, there's still gonna be a bunch of like understanding and improving and integrating the AI generated code, right? We're still not in, in a place where, you know, we push a button and get really an entire enterprise scale system generated by the ai.

So there's still gonna be a lot of putting together the components, whether they're human created or AI generated. So I think we're just moving one level up in terms of engineering, just like we don't have to worry for the most part about memory management anymore. And we don't have to worry about many of the low level details that I had to worry about when I started, uh, programming.

Uh, I think it is the same way we just moved up. One level, don't have to worry about syntax. Maybe programming languages become less foreign because, you know, maybe you don't really care if it's Python syntax or c plus plus syntax.

It's roughly, uh, equivalent to the ai, right? You write one level higher, not necessarily completely natural language, but something that is between natural language and problem languages at this point, some mixture. Mm-hmm.

So there's still a lot of work for the human to guide the ai, understands their, understand the result, uh, refine them, integrate them, et cetera. When I talk to a lot of folks, they're a little intimidated by a lot of this, and they don't know where to get started. So what, I mean, what's your best advice other than the fact that I'm gonna go tell a bunch of developers to start experimenting with things?

Is there kind of a, a method to the madness as it were that, you know, you're seeing people put together that has a better outcome? Yeah, I think that the first step is to start using something, get something in your id, uh, get familiar with the capabilities in, in a very real sense here, resistance is futile, right? Like AI is here, AI for software engineering is here to stay.

Um, the, the main thing in getting experience with the tools is to understand where they do not work right now, right? Like everything else, the hype is over the top. Uh, the skepticism is under the floor and the the truth is somewhere in the middle, right?

And so kind of finding for your world, whatever your job is, what AI can do for you today right now, and kind of starting to refine your intuition on, oh, oh, here is a place that I should actually use ai, and no, this is not a good place to use it. I think that's the, the most important thing that people should do right now, really start collaborating with AI and understanding where delegation to AI makes sense and where it does not make sense, right? So that's, that's really the first step.

And the earlier you take it, uh, the earlier you get on the train that is, has definitely left the station, right? This train is just accelerating and you need to be on it. All right, folks, you heard it here.

The only wrong answer when it comes to AI is doing nothing. Hey, rah, thanks for being on the show. Thank you for having me.

All right, and back to you guys in the studio. Hello, this is Diane Hitch. com.

And here are my analyst predictions for 2025. I've got three of them. We're now moving into a new domain called agent-based ai, and this is the next big wave in generative ai.

And instead of generating content for you, this AI that takes direct action on your behalf, so actually getting work done and, uh, using a browser or using applications and actually accomplishing tasks autonomously across multiple applications. And it can be multi-step tasks and it can be for a long period of time. And so this has implications for the digital labor market very significantly.

A, a large, uh, percentage, and by our estimates, about 4 trillion globally, and labor can be automated in this fashion. So a a lot of rote tasks that before might have had AI advising you or, or telling you how to best complete that task using content. Now the AI can just go actually do it for you.

That has major significance in terms of how CIOs are gonna automate in the future. We've been following all the latest Agentic AI product announcements from the top enterprise vendors. Uh, we have a report coming out in a few weeks that we'll cover them, but, uh, what organizations have to be doing is getting experience now and making, uh, agentic AI perform and do it safely with guardrails.

My next prediction is also about ai, something called super intelligence. Then the next step beyond that, uh, we may reach, which is artificial general intelligence. And this is a conversation I I don't see enough people focusing on because it has major strategic impact to our organizations.

And this is the top vendors that OpenAI or philanthropic who are, have the stated goal of eventually getting to the most advanced, uh, type of ai that's the A GII just mentioned. But on the way, and we're seeing signs that we're actually starting to reach it is this concept of super intelligence, which is AI that is smarter than our best PhDs, uh, smarter than our best geniuses who can do things that can solve problems that humans cannot have not been able to solve so far. And this is, we're seeing as the, the AI models climb the IQ benchmarks, you know, run every day on all the new models that are being released, uh, new versions of models that are being released all the time.

We're seeing that, uh, they're closing in on that super intelligence and should be in the lab by the end of the year. And that's something organizations have to be contending with, uh, preparing for because, uh, these super intelligence can allow your organization to do things your competitors can't. It's very significant.

Uh, and this, this, um, milestone will be reached here shortly. Um, and it'll be in production and available to, to all enterprises sometime next year. So definitely have to prepare for that.

And my last prediction has to do with the cloud modernizing existing workloads and moving new workloads out to the public cloud. And that now is because of the cost of, of these new types of workloads, AI workloads are always on. Uh, we also have a lot more, uh, compliance and regulatory issues, data residency we have to deal with.

And so private cloud is returned to the conversation using the same technologies, but running inside co-location or inside a enterprise data center to really manage costs or optimize performance or do deliver on constraints like data residency, um, that can't be delivered easily any other way. And so private cloud is not not gonna be the next new destination. Public cloud is still the primary destination, but we see private cloud emerging as a major are alternative for certain types of workloads.

Those always on those highly perform at those, uh, things like AI training, it have to be run for months, uh, often makes sense just to, to, to cut out the middleman and, and, and there's, there's significant cost savings in, in that regard. And so we see private cloud is really being added to the mix, to the whole spectrum of the cloud computing conversation. Uh, it's part of a continuum, uh, where before we only saw public cloud, so that's a, it is a major shift.

71% of CIOs say they're reconsidering where we're gonna run their workloads this year. So that shows you how, how big a trend. Uh, so I predict our organizations will be adding a lot more to the mix going forward.

And so those are my, my analyst predictions really focused on the CIO for 2025. com. Hello everyone.

Alex Smith here with the Futurum Group, and today we're gonna be sharing with you some of our predictions going into 2025. And I'm specifically gonna be talking about cloud marketplaces and the role that we expect them to have in the technology industry. In fact, we think cloud marketplaces will become as important as a route to market for the software industry as traditional distribution has been for the hardware industry.

And there's really three main reasons why that's the case. The first has to do with marketplace fees, which have been coming down over the past decade. You go back a number of years when marketplaces first came on the scene and fees were around 20% north of 20%.

5%, uh, depending on marketplace, depending on scenario. And in this price point, they're operating in a similar margin stack to what, uh, traditional distributors would offer for their customers. So overall, it is becoming a more cost effective route to market.

And vendors can bake this fee into their pricing. They can offer their Salesforce comp neutrality, many do, and that, again, makes it overall a more cost effective, uh, route to market, uh, compared to what it was in the past. So that's driving some momentum.

The second factor has to do with cloud commits. And by this we mean, uh, long-term commitments that customers make to spend in the hyperscaler environments. And increasingly, this part of this c commit can be used on third party software products that exist in the cloud marketplace.

So that is an additional way for customers to burn down these long-term commits. And this commit amount continues to grow across the three leading hyperscalers. That number now stands north of $400 billion.

So what you see here effectively is a, a ready made economy for software companies to be able to tap into because they are dollars that have already been committed to spend, and in many cases, if they cannot spend it on their compute needs with the hyperscalers, then they're looking to spend that on their software needs through that same, same vehicle. And the way to tap into that is through these marketplaces. And I think what you'll see now is the next evolution of that, where when the hyperscalers are going to discuss their commit contracts, they will not only be talking about the, the compute and storage needs that they're providing, but they'll also be talking about the software needs that that customer has too, and saying, why don't you break, bake that into your, uh, commit plans going forward.

So I think that will be more tailwind for the cloud marketplaces as well going forward. And then the final factor has to do with the role of channel partners. And increasingly what you're seeing is that the hyperscaler marketplaces are creating programs and policies and other forms of enablement to allow channel partners to be a part of this overall marketplace engine, right?

We mentioned earlier that as the overall marketplace fees come down, that leaves more room again in the margin stack for the channel partners to, to be involved as well. In fact, you're seeing now north of a third of all marketplace deals involving some kind of channel partner, some marketplaces leaning much more heavily into that motion than others. And this also means that the software vendors themselves can include their traditional partners as part of their overall marketplace strategy so that the partners are not competing with what they wanna do on the marketplace front.

So we expect channel partners to play an increasingly important role in marketplaces going forward as well. So again, the three drivers fees coming down, the growth of committed spend and the increasing role of channel partners will all drive cloud marketplaces go going forward. And so a call to action to the vendors out there, uh, that might be watching this is as you were thinking about your, uh, go-to-market strategy overall, really consider the, the role and the importance that you place, um, on the hyperscaler marketplaces, as well as the role that your traditional partners will play as part of that marketplace, uh, strategy.

Because really they will go hand in hand, um, to be one of the fastest growing route to markets, um, collectively for the software industry overall. Hi everyone. I'm Mitch Ashley, VP and practice lead for DevOps and application development with the Futur and Group.

These are my predictions for 2025. First, 2025 is go time for AI in production. A lot of AI projects have been stuck in the pilot and prototype phases.

Matter of fact, some estimates say that only a third of those have made into production so far. This is the year where AI has to get real and start demonstrating value that impacts how we develop traditional software as well. We will see vendors introduce capabilities that help us start to blend and coordinate workflows and pipelines across DevOps for both traditional software as well as AI projects, which tend to have some differences in how the workflows are performed.

So look for those features maybe later in 2025. Prediction number two, built in AI rather than bolt on AI across the software development lifecycle. Much of the AI we use, particularly generative AI today, are things that are bolt on.

They're chat bots, their natural language interface too. They may be an IDE plugin that helps us, uh, generate code or get access to a code base. Increasingly we'll see more AI that is just a part of the products and the tools and the workflows, the tool chains that we use for creating software rather than an adjunct or separate thing.

I think we'll see a lot more productivity as more AI is really integrated into how we work rather than a feature of a product or a separate product. Kubernetes dominance. That's the next prediction.

You know, we tend to think of Kubernetes as the cloud native, a container orchestration software. Of course, that's what it is. We use it with microservices, containerized AppSec, all kinds of workloads.

But that's the point is that Kubernetes has really expanded its use across virtually any kind of product and service that we may use. We may be provided by a third party a service in the cloud. Uh, it could be even on hardware, you know, integrated hardware and software to use for storage solutions or an edge solutions.

Kubernetes truly is ED everywhere and has become the workload system for any kind of application or service. With that comes though, we need to up our skills in Kubernetes operational capabilities. It is complex, it's getting simpler.

We're offloading more of that to third parties, but we'll also see AI help us here with operationalizing Kubernetes, reducing some of the complexity in proving our overall ability to run it effectively. Well, thank you for joining me for these predictions around DevOps and application development. I hope you'll check out the full ebook of all the predictions by the FU and group analysts.

We cover a number of areas, whether it be enterprise applications, ai, of course, infrastructure, security, you name it. com. Thank you.

Hey everyone, welcome back here to our Predict 2025 event. You know, this is, I think the seventh year that we're doing Predict, and it's always one of the highlights of the year for me because I love to hear smart people talk about what they think is in store for us next year and what we can do around it. Um, I try to be the least smart person on, on the show, and in years past, it's worked for me, and I think this year definitely is gonna work for me.

Um, I couldn't think of a better person to kick off Predict 2025 with than my next guest. He's my partner, uh, CEO of the Futurum Group. He's on TV a lot, but more than that, he generally is one of those smarter people that I talk about that I, I like to hear what they have to say because that's how I learn and how I kind of internalize and figure things out.

So let me introduce you to Daniel Newman. Daniel is the CEO of FU group. And you know what, again, great way to kick off 2025 Techstrong is part of Futurum Group, and we are excited by the possibilities and potential.

Hey Daniel, welcome to Predict 2025. It's great to have you on here keynoting and kicking things off for us today. Alan, it's great to be here with you.

I'm so excited for the start of another year. A little bit rested, took a little break, but, uh, not too much of one. And, uh, you know, we're straight off another hyper intensive year and couldn't be more excited to have techron in into part of the family in the beginning.

And Alan, I mean, look, it's not gonna slow down. It is not gonna slow down. If anything, it's just gonna keep getting faster.

I think that's a great tone for the year, right? It's not slowing down the beat goes on, was our, our theme here, and it's not slowing down. So Daniel, look, 2024 was a year.

It, it was quite a year, right? We, uh, no matter how you wanna slice and dice it from a world history point of view, from the economy point of view, from a technology point of view, there was just, it was just crazy. I, I think obviously the big story, the, the technology of the year will be Gen AI for 2024.

I don't know if that's true for 2025, but before we, you know, if you don't learn from history, you're doomed to repeat it. Before we jump into 2025, just real quickly, what's your recap for 2024? What's the big takeaways for you?

Yeah, 2024 was a big year of basically taking this technological revolution, this breakthrough, uh, you said generative AI is 24, but generative AI was 22, generative AI was 23, and generative AI was in many ways, 24. But in 24, I think we started to see some breakthroughs in terms of the usability. We're starting to see the pressure mount on enterprises to adopt, implement, and show results.

We're seeing pressure on the software vendors, security vendors, developers to start to implement the technology into our workflows to show value. You know, we've seen a multi-year run where it's been a very asymmetric, there's been a few companies that have benefited in a massive way because of generative ai. We all know in late 22, OpenAI kind of rose into the conscience of the world, um, conscious as well, I guess you could say.

In 2023, um, we started to see the semiconductor market really explode because you can't train frontier models and massive large language models without a ton of compute horsepower. And that actually didn't only bring the, you know, the advent of a multi-trillion dollar Nvidia, but it really changed the shape of how every chip company and every infrastructure company started thinking about developing products and even building their own semis. And we'll talk more about that.

Um, and then, you know, put all this together, uh, we started to see the kind of flow out where people are like, well, yes, we've seen Nvidia rise to three and a half trillion. We've seen OpenAI raise money at unprecedented, uh, numbers, and who else benefits? And I spent a ton of my time, Alan, answering that question to the press, to the vendors, um, you know, enterprises, are they adopting it?

I remember standing on the rooftop talk, uh, in Davos talking to I-B-M-C-E-O, Arvin Krishna, and you know, he talked about a $4 trillion economic opportunity. We're seeing numbers now, we're hearing numbers from, uh, firms and the numbers that we're forecasting, it could be 12, 15 or even $20 trillion of economic value that is created. But this has left us with so many questions, Alan, so many questions.

It's questions about, well, if generative AI can do all these tasks that humans do, what does that mean for all of us? Mm-hmm. Answering questions of are the companies that are considered the, uh, you know, the leaders currently, the incumbents currently in certain markets going to remain the incumbents.

We've seen disruption over the last two decades in the internet era, in the mobile era, in the social era, and in the cloud era. What does disruption in the generative AI era look like? We've seen pressures mounting around the world for regulation policy.

How are we setting the tone for who gets access to what data? We know there's been controversial, uh, statements, Alan and, and everyone that have been made about, well, how did OpenAI train these models? We all remember that interview where Mira Mirati was sitting there and that look that she had knowing or not knowing how to answer that question.

And, you know, you step back from OpenAI and you look across the board, who owns the data? What precedent is being set? What will the legal future look like?

And how does this, you know, how does this materialize? And then of course, what we all have come to realize, and this was the 24 inflection, Alan is your personal, private, and enterprise data is actually the real goldmine in opportunity for enter, uh, for generative AI and for the future of ai. It's not about these large language models that are all using a roughly sane training set.

It's about what can you add, what sits in that customer data that you have? What sits in that enterprise data that you've been collecting in your Oracle or SAP or in some other database for multiple decades? What sits on the devices and inside the business units of intelligent unstructured data sets the thoughts that go around on Zoom meetings and share it in your Slack chats and, uh, content that gets created when smart people to your earlier point, are sitting around the room together and ideating the future of products and services and business.

And then how do you take all that, do it safely and compliantly under the right governance and securely while combining it with these language and video and audio models? It's incredible and it's gone so quickly, but I could not be, um, more encouraged that we are gonna continue to make progress that will continue to grow the economy and that the tech industry is right for continued innovation. What a year, what a time?

Uh, 24 is just another great setup year for what I expect to be an exciting 2025. Absolutely. I couldn't say it better myself.

Let me just quickly mention though, as a content publisher, I do worry about all that IP that they've gathered and sucked into their models that we, I paid for here, right? That we've paid for. You're my partner.

We paid for that. They're using it. We will talk about that off camera.

But, um, you know, certainly in some respects, more questions have been created than have been answered around, around all of this. Excitement is 20, 25 a year where we get some answers? And and where might we get, you know, what might some of those answers be, Daniel?

Well, I think as you see technological revolutions moving this quickly, you're never gonna quite get to the point where the questions stop coming, right? We have questions right now about how do we discern good and bad information, right and wrong information. How do we even, how do we even judge that?

Uh, we've seen massive risk, uh, created in a world where algorithms have replaced sort of, you know, open prioritization of information where we really don't even know as people anymore. If the information that's being fed to us is the right information. We have to deal with everything from, you know, what is the stance and lean that might come from a certain publisher in terms of then understanding how content is then derived.

And then you have the aggregators and distributors of content, the social platforms that basically most of us use. I mean, very few of us anymore get a, get a newspaper dropped off in our front door and sit down and read the paper. And in that case, you have to even look under the cover of each, each publisher, each writer to understand positioning and how, and so this is kind of a microcosm of the world that we live in, Alan, is that everything right now that we are looking at is being changed in the era of ai.

So we like summaries, summaries help us, but deciding which summary is the correct summary, and then using that to point a worldview, that's, that's powerful stuff. And that can shape and that can, you know, that can shape and shift an industry, a business, a political landscape. It could change a, you know, it could change so many different things at one time.

And so, you know, I started to allude to this in the end of my kind of look back and, you know, for those out there that are in the business community that are kind of assessing all of the technology that's at your fingertips and deciding what road to go down, um, I think this'll be the year where we start to see the scale and the availability and democratization of this technology become much more, um, available to businesses of all sizes and shapes, uh, because of these multi-network effects. And so, let me tell you what what I mean by that. So I kind of started talking about how we saw this explosion of semiconductor valuations and growth.

Gotta put the compute in place. So you have the companies like Nvidia building, you, you have cloud providers like Microsoft, Google and Amazon, Oracle investing. But at that point, that's just basically, if you think about it through the lens of a plant built to make automotive, automotive, uh, automobiles, that's like a plant.

They built their plants. Now everybody's gotta say, what kind of car do we wanna build here? Do we wanna build a truck?

Do we wanna build an SUV? Do we want to build a a motorcycle? Um, are we gonna build shape spaceships?

What are we gonna build in this factory? And so this is that next stage. So we've got this investment in the cloud providers.

You've got infrastructure companies like Dell and Lenovo and all these companies and and, and, and HPE that are building infrastructure, putting 'em in these tier two tier ones, um, they're standing up, they're building their own silicon. But then it's, how does this get implemented? And so we have actually seen companies like Accenture explode and into this year, they're exploding because basically, most companies, most CEOs like you out there and like me, we're sitting there, we're going, how do we get this stuff done?

It's like, it's great that I bought some instances of GPUs, or it's great, but I gotta train. I gotta implement libraries. I gotta, I gotta develop software.

I've got, well, in this year, what's gonna start to change is the software that we all use every day. If you're using HubSpot for marketing, if you're using Salesforce for CRM, if you're using Oracle or SAP for your ERP, we're gonna see, and we've heard, don't get me wrong, it's not like these companies have done nothing, but we are going to see this next revolution in 2025. We've heard, uh, CEO of Salesforce, mark Benioff talk about agents.

We've heard the infrastructure companies talking about agents. We're gonna start to see this evolution from assistance and AI that's used to sort of make some predictive to more and more intelligent multi-use case agentic AI that es essentially can become tens, hundreds, or thousands of workers that can do task specific things concurrently. At the same time, they're gonna get smarter.

And these systems, this is gonna be stuff that you will be able to originate from the software that you use every day, whether it's ServiceNow, whether it's Workday, you're gonna be able to originate and you're gonna orate and you're gonna be able to get these things to do. You know, I always like to use my example of planning a business trip. Here's a real simple one for everyone out there.

You know, historically speaking, if you wanted to plan a business trip, there was 7, 8, 9 different levers. You're pulling, you're trying to find your flights, you're trying to find availability on your calendar. You're trying to figure out what a hotel you're gonna stay at.

You're trying to navigate all the different meetings you want to have while you're there. Um, and you're, and you're trying to pull all these things together. Well, not right now, you have to kind of do these things asynchronously, but at the same time, trying to coordinate them.

And even if you have like an assistant, there's still many, many things all at play. But imagine an agent that could actually understand your, your, your travel preferences. They could say, Hey, I know Alan, that you like to fly on American Airlines.

You like an aisle seat and you always wanna upgrade to premium economy. So right then and there, you could send the agent out to figure out what travel is available for that period of time. You could have another agent saying, Hey, I know while you're in New York City, you wanna meet with this kind of subset of customers.

It knows which customers are based there. It knows which customers are your biggest and most important. It can actually know which ones you've maybe recently met with.

It could see which ones you might need to follow up with, and it could arbitrate, arbitrate between all these different things. And then basically reach out on a priority basis to customers with a very simple, Hey, I'm gonna be in New York. Here's what I planned days.

Start to aggregate smart emails, smart messaging even knows which channel to send that message in. This customer wants a text. This one likes to, wants a WhatsApp.

This, this is the type of intelligence we can move towards. And then it could say, Hey, based on my meeting schedule, where should I have a hotel? Where should that hotel be placed?

Um, because obviously, you know, I mean, you're a New Yorker, a um, it's very different. Getting from uptown to downtown, downtown, everywhere in between your, your entire week can be better or worse depending on where you planted yourself. Um, and then what about booking reservations for a meal?

You wanna take a customer to dinner, you want to, you know, you, you don't wanna be in New York with no plan. You don't wanna be wandering around and it could figure all this out. And then what it could do is these things can all work together in a coordinated fashion and come back to you and give you a really, really airtight or close to airtight agenda.

Could you do that yourself? Absolutely. But imagine if you wanted to send 70 emails to get seven meetings set up.

I mean, how much time is your team, your assistant, you, depending on your staffing gonna spend and then figure out the flights, figure out the hotel, figuring out the food, figuring out the meeting. By the way, even setting up meeting agendas, pulling all that pre-work. Where's the he health and, and, and success and recent issues with the customer having the dossiers prepared for you?

All this can be done with ag agentic ai. And this is just one example that's, And that's just planning a business trip, right? Think about what we, you what else it could do.

This Could be supply chain planning, this could be HR resource, uh, planning this. And so this is the absolutely, this is this pivotal inflection, Alan, where we're going from a world where everything is done and even assistants can do one thing at a time, to having the ability to have these really helpful automations, these agents that are working in parallel for you with all this information to make your life better and to enable cus companies to be exponentially more productive. So Daniel, let me ask you some hard question on this now though, you know, I, I read, I don't Like hard questions.

Let's go back to easy questions. I, I read an interview about Benioff talking about these, what is it? Call an agent force or whatever they're calling, and they're gonna hire 2000 salespeople to sell agent force.

And the, you know, he's a great salesperson, a great marketer, but the reason he is doing it is he's scared to death. He's scared to death that this will could be the, the, the death nail, if you will, for Salesforce, because a lot of what his present product helps us manage day to day, but doesn't actually do for you will be done perhaps by these agents. So anytime you have disruption like this, it's, it's like, Hey, there's a new, there's room for a new growth in the forest, right?

We have some new, new trees coming up in 2025. I I think one of the questions we face is, is it the Salesforce, Amazons the same old, same olds, the same old, you know, show guns who control the, the, the territory who will lead on this? Or do we have room for some new growth?

Will there be the, the next Nvidia, the next Salesforce, the next AWS that that comes out of this opportunity? Yeah, that's a really thoughtful question, Alan. It's, it's, you know, the great thing about it is, no matter how I answer it, I'm gonna probably be, that's why I say it was a hard question.

But the, the, the fact is, is I think I can give some sort of macro perspectives on the question. I think first and foremost, there are gonna be, you know, part of the rise of new companies has a lot more to do with the regulatory environment, the ability for m and a activity to take place, um, the success and, uh, opportunism of VCs and capital allocators. And then of course, um, you know, these things all come together to kind of make determinations of how long companies remain independent and run after trying to compete into new markets versus how early they maybe get acquired versus which go IPO.

We all know the last several years have been really terrible, IPO environments. So very few companies have gone public. We also know the last few years have been really tough for m and a.

So most larger m and a deals had not really materialized, um, higher, you know, without getting too into the e economics, because I know this is a tech event, but like higher interest and, um, higher inflation leads to a, a tougher, um, you know, discounted cash flow model. So private equity companies are a little bit more cautious in what they buy for, and then companies are a little bit more cautious to grow. But of course, none of these rules apply to the mega cap tech companies.

And I, and I say this with no cynicism, I have the utmost respect for Jensen Wong. I know 'em very well. I know 'em personally.

Satya, these, these people have done amazing work, built amazing companies that have durability, um, um, beyond be in their, and, and in many ways they seem to be beyond reproach now. Ha, having said that, I mean, there, there is some, some other sides and some things that I, i, let me just first say, as a techno optimist, um, Alan, I'm super hopeful to see more breakthrough companies that disrupt le legacy industries, um, and disrupt current innovators. Uh, I'm, I'm concerned about how realistic that is.

If I'm being, uh, Frank, I'm very close to these companies. I'm very close to this technology. Um, first of all, the balance sheets of these companies is larger than many global economies.

So they have the money to basically identify any sort of threat to their longevity and, and, and can acquire. Um, they're very creative companies. Over the last year, one of the trends of 24 was creative deal making that allowed companies to effectively, uh, acquire businesses that probably never would've been acquired via regulatory, but because, um, uh, creative mechanisms, they were able to to, to do deals to get IP control.

We've all seen and heard some of what Satya Nadela from Microsoft has, has said about the relationship with OpenAI. And we then saw one of the most significant rounds of capital in history raised at a valuation of over $160 billion for a company that's losing $5 billion a year. So this is indicative to me of how important the end that the technology is, but it's also indicative of how, uh, exuberant in some ways the market is.

And of course, just like Bitcoin or any other sort of, um, highly speculative asset class, um, things are worth what someone's willing to pay. And when the most, uh, valuable capital allocators in the world say it's worth 160 billion, they all put their money in, then chances are it's probably gonna be end up being worth a lot more. So what does that leave?

Well, I mean, you've seen some really exciting companies like Palantir come in and break through, um, winning and changing potentially the entire shape of government contracts for, for technology. That's something that I think we all need. We know that that system is, is at, at at best, um, you know, flawed and at worst completely broken in terms of how government contracts are issued.

Will this fix it? I mean, that's TBD or is it just an will just become a new, um, sort of racket in how that stuff gets done? Um, you know, I do believe I will make a prognostication that I do believe that, um, companies like Meta and Nvidia will enter the hyperscale cloud business.

I think that that will make the big seven. I mean, we already know XI is, we won't call it, it's not Tesla, but XI is a startup that has the backing of a Mag seven and, and Elon Musk. But they will also enter be, because I think the next era we've went from 2021 was a CPU era where in the GPU and accelerated computing era.

And now you have companies like Meta, um, that have built mega data centers for their own utilization that could easily be, and they built lama, they built open source models. You think about all the compute, all the platform and code that they built for lama, why would they not enable businesses? It's been a, an issue where a company like Meta's never been able to fully break through.

And then of course, you look at a company like Nvidia and their biggest partners are all set to become their biggest competitors. That's just the track that it's on. And so if you're Nvidia, you're saying, well, we've already built a cloud with a fully, uh, integrated enterprise solution in nim.

Um, and not to get too technical, but they have a fully integrated library frameworks compute, uh, container system that you can basically run all this AI on. If the data centers, um, and the big hyperscale cloud providers decide that they're going to maybe lead more with their own compute, um, of course Nvidia would be in the right to, uh, more meaningfully move to a situation in which their cloud could be consumed by customers. And of course, with their balance sheet, they could do anything they want.

So, you know, roughly anything they want. So I'll leave you with this thought on that question 'cause it's a great one, Alan. Is, I, it's very difficult if you're a small technology company to break through and compete at the, at the very, very top levels.

I expect more m and a, I expect more investment consolidation in certain industries, but I do expect these MEG seven companies, and I do expect, especially in an era where I, I believe there will be less regulation and there will be more, um, exuberance that these companies will have the chance to get bigger and stronger over the next four years. And it is tied to the current political climate. Um, having said that, this is where I always say, uh, competition and, uh, antitrust are conflicted because antitrust should be about enabling competition, which right now it's very hard to pair that behavior with the desire to limit or to reduce consumer harm because consumers like their Apple experience.

They like the integration of Google, they like meta applications that work con you know, consistently with each other. They like ad platforms that are, uh, very data driven, that are connected all the way from interaction with the content to the purchase cycle. So you have this kind of conflicting, it's not the mabell any days anymore, Alan.

It's not, you know, one company. So harm and competition are not gonna be spurned. So another thing I guess I'll predict, we need some real reform in antitrust to enable competition without squashing the experiences that we have all become so fond of.

There's also strategic, I mean, speaking as a US citizen here, right? The strategic consequences of if these are world beater companies, you don't want to squash that with, with regulation or antitrust type of activity. And we're, and we, you know, we source some noise of that.

Daniel, we, we have maybe five, seven minutes left. I want to turn, I want to turn to something else though. You know, as great as 2024 was, and as exciting and exuberant is the word you used exuberance as it was for our friends in the tech industry.

And you and I, we have a lot of friends in the tech industry. It was a year of unprecedented pain in terms of layoffs and job cuts. And you know what, I, I still know plenty of people who've been out of work now for months.

Good talented people. Um, now whether you believe the Department of Labor, uh, stats about what our true unemployment is, I saw an interesting article, I dunno if it was in the journal or the times that it, it's kind of misleading because we saw a lot of people hopping around jobs in 2024 to keep up with inflation, actually, right? They, they couldn't make a go out of it at their old jobs, so they went to a new job and that counted as, you know, moving towards it.

But for our tech workers out there, it's been a tough 2024 for the most part, for many of them anyway. What do you think? 2025.

You're an optimist, so I'm hoping it's gonna be optimistic, but give, give my, give my folks some something to a life raft here to jump on. Daniel, what do you think? There's A couple of things that I, I'll say about what to look for ahead.

I, I, I will actually agree with you about 24. There's been a lot of layoffs in tech and the quiet conversations, the stuff that I always say the quiet part said out loud is that a lot of tech companies are implementing this technology and they're finding efficiencies. You know, you have the extremes.

You have the Elon Musks and Haans that can cut 50 or 75% of a workforce and get EBITDA growth, profit growth, growth, growth, growth mm-hmm. Profit growth. Um, and then you have other companies that have been a little bit more quiet about it, you know, where you've seen, I saw a report just this week.

Companies like Google and Microsoft, big successful companies that have met numbers, expanded earnings, they're darlings of Wall Street, and yet their employment numbers are somewhere around the same level as 2019. To me, this is kind of, it's a, it's a testament to how well some of the technology works. It's indicative of the fact that companies can be, uh, over overweight on, on, on employees and not implementing and utilizing them well enough.

It's also a signal to me of something that, um, I think we all should be paying attention to. And that's, you know, the continued growth and upskill that we all have in our careers. I think, you know, whether it's been remote work, it's been easy to become a little complacent.

Um, you know, the rapid and tectonic shifts that are going on in, in technology itself is, are you staying up to date? Are you keeping yourself valuable to the, to the organization? And of course, um, you know, I also think that the, you know, evolution of our roles is gonna change.

And, and I think I've always said that like, people that are really comfortable with change are gonna always do fine. And, and this is probably, you know, some people out there, especially people out there that maybe don't feel great about change are probably gonna look at me and start throwing tomatoes at the screen, and that's okay. But what I've found in, in, in my career is that there are, there's kind of be kind of, it's like a, it's like a playwright.

There's gonna be multiple acts in your life and in your career and in a business. Um, Alan, before we came together, you've had many acts, we've talked about them. I've had different acts in my career, and the business changes.

And you know, as a, as a, you know, the future and group as a company that's successfully doubled in size every year since its inception, um, no two years have looked the same. Priorities have changed. And by the way, your ability to sort of look at maybe something you're doing and saying this is the past, and being able to say, now this is the future.

That, that desire to hold on too long, whether you're an entrepreneur, whether you're an executive at a tech company, whether you're a practitioner inside of a tech company out there, that desire to hold on too long puts you at risk. Will generative AI eliminate every programmer? No.

But will it eliminate some? Absolutely. Will AI change the role of a CISO or a security leader?

Absolutely. Uh, we should get to the point where, uh, you know, everyday threats that used to be harder to detect and earlier, you should be able to get ahead of it. It'll also make the nation states, uh, budget, budget supported bad actors.

It'll make them better too. So the pressure will be on you if you are leading a company, is it your job to figure out how to implement AI and put it to work for the benefit of the company? Absolutely.

Now, again, if we can gain $20 trillion of economic growth because of this technological evolution that's going on, then there will be new roles. You know, I wrote a book called, um, uh, human Machine. I forgot my own book title.

You know, one of the things that we looked at was, you know, if you remember back in the day, you know, by the way, this is, it'll make you laugh, laugh. But, you know, we use the term gaslighting a lot. And you know, it actually kind of the term goes back to the day that people used to ha their job used to be to go up and down the streets and lights, lamps, lights.

Mm-hmm. At night. And they were told, you know, uh, basically the idea that electricity would eliminate all the jobs in the future.

Now again, have, we had not seen the economy grow by thousands and thousands of times since that point. But whether it's been the assembly line, whether it's been the advent of the internet, we've heard it every revolution, there's this fear that it's gonna eliminate every job, and then there's been a boom. Now, having said that, is AI different?

Absolutely. But does that mean everyone's job goes away? Absolutely not.

Does it mean you need to be dynamic? It needs to be constantly thinking about your skillset and changing. Does it need, you need to be consistently learning and, and, you know, I'll, I'll say this, and you know, I've been accused of being slightly paranoid at times, but that old phrase about people that are, uh, successful in, in business and, and in life, that only the paranoid survive.

I think being a little paranoid right now is okay. And I think if you're a little concerned about your job and its longevity, you should be thinking about where do you add skills? If you're concerned about how your company stays competitive, you should be looking at new technologies.

And how does it change the game? This is all here for you. I mean, the thing is, is it's, it is pretty democratized.

It's super available, whether it's touching, you know, and, and, and using LLMs, a lot of them are free, whether it's using tools. I mean, heck, you can go to a MOOC and you know, mooc, I know people don't use that word, but you can take any class that MI teaches online, MIT teaches online for free. The desire to continuously learn and be part of this shift will put you in a great position.

But don't get me wrong, um, it is a time of massive change. Those that embrace it, I think will do really, really well. And I wish all of you great success in 2025.

Daniel, thank you. I got one more question for you and we'll wrap it, I promise you. One more.

Okay. Okay. A little self-serving.

I, I have invested interest now too. What's your prediction for Futur Group in 2025? So, my, my plan, my genuine belief is that in an era where there is exponential information available at our fingertips, who says it will become equally, if not more important than what is said.

So now in an era where we can put a prompt into A GPT and it can create a, an article, we wanna know who writes it, why it's valid, all that is formulated. So we have put a lot of muscle into making sure that we can quantify our, our, our, our foresight that we can provide great inputs to the IT and technology vendors that we support. And then of course, that we can create content that really helps synthesize a lot of info.

So you heard my last, uh, you know, ramble about what to look ahead to. You know, people need to know, can we trust the information that's put in front of us in this era? I believe that Futurum can become one of the perennial, one of the most valuable sources of meaningful information about the tech industry and what the future looks like for tech.

And that we will have the analysts, we will have the distribution, we will have the technology and tools to, to cross the chasm, Alan, from the empirical, the data that sets the markets, the testing and the performance. We do all this to the most ephemeral, which is which podcast you listen to, which platform you read it on, and how you make sure that you out there stay ahead of the curve and connected to the innovation that's taking place right before our eyes. I love it.

Hey man, Daniel, thank you so much. I appreciate it. I hope everyone out here appreciates it.

Here's to a great 2025, check it out. The Futurum Group Techstrong, it's all part of one family. And thank you for joining us here.

We've got a tremendous, uh, schedule of sessions here at Predict 2025. So if you like Daniel and and his session here, stay tuned. We've got more smart people coming your way, but we're out.