Exploring the Future of Tech with Stephen Foskett – Predict 2025

Hey, everyone. Welcome to our Predict 2025 virtual event. If you've watched any of this, any of the sessions so far, you know, we've got an amazing lineup of some very, very smart people who are giving us their best guesses, their best feelings about what are the big stories in 2025, what will the big stories be in areas like DevOps and cyber and Cloud Native and AI and ITSM, um, technology in general, and it, so speaking of smart people, let me introduce you to one of my FU group partners.

Uh, he's also well known as the founder, CEO of Tech Field Day, which is another business unit within futurum, and we work pretty closely together. I've struck up a great relationship with Steven in a relatively short time. I wanna introduce you to Steven Foskett, CEO, founder of Tech Field Day, part of Futurum Group.

Stephen, welcome to Predict 2025. It's great to have you here. Well, it's great to be part of Predict 2025.

I, I hope I don't have egg on my face at the end of the year. Well, if you pay us enough, we don't replay this at the end of the year. If you don't, we do.

And then I hope your predictions were, were good. Um, but seriously, Steven, 2024 was a, in many ways a watershed year, not just in technology, mind you, world event civilization, uh, technology obviously, but things like climate and, and all sustainability. And there've been so many things on our wars piece and so many things on the horizon, but it was certainly quite a year in technology.

And if there was a technology of the year, it would obviously have to be ai. So it's easy to say 2024 was the year of ai, but as we sit here now, you know, on the cusp of 2025 already in the beginning of first weeks of 2025, is AI the 2025 story, and if so, what, what, what aspects of it do you think? Yeah, I actually think that 2025 is gonna be the year of AI and not 2024.

Um, even though AI was very much in the news and in the public consciousness in 2024, from an enterprise IT perspective, I think 2025 is the year that all this stuff gets real. I expect companies to be deploying custom models right and left, and not just chatbots that pop up annoyingly in the corner of the screen when you're trying to use their website, but actually useful AI applications. I'm really excited about seeing what happens with agentic ai.

Um, basically AI agents that talk to each other and have a private, uh, AI to AI conversations on your behalf. And I'm also really excited to see what's going to become of, uh, the transition from focusing on AI as the domain of a few large companies with incredible resources who are developing these foundational models to the, the world of, uh, the Fortune 500, the Fortune 2000, uh, de developing their own fine tuned models, uh, developing their own custom applications built off of AI and broadening beyond the chat and LLM space. Absolutely.

I, I think in many ways we may look back and say 2024 might have been a gen, uh, next, next agent, excuse me, generative AI 2023 was too, for that matter, 2025 is where agentic AI really, you know, rubber meets the road. Um, Steven, you made a good point. Enterprises usually are slow, slow to change budgets, slow to adopt new things.

They may dabble, if you will, but to really jump in with both feet, it, it takes them longer, but, you know, once they jump in, they jump in and it, that, it's like the inertia of moving that big ship. When do you think, I mean, are we, are we looking at the end of 2025 for this, or do you think we'll start seeing things let's say by the spring? I think, I think it's gonna start happening pretty quickly.

Um, I'm seeing some really incredible products, uh, coming to market that are essentially AI platforms for the enterprise. And a lot of the companies that had been previously focused on, for example, process business process automation or on, uh, CRM are building ai, uh, platforms that, you know, if you squint a little bit, you could say this is an agent AI platform. Now, I'm not sure that, uh, term specifically is going to take hold forever, but you know, if you, if you kind of step back and think it, AI agents that are deployed to perform business functions autonomously in the background, uh, those are coming from basically everybody in the space.

I mean, certainly the, the, the biggest one is Salesforce, and they have done incredible work to bring AI to their platform. But essentially every enterprise platform now is building out the, the capability for enterprises to deploy AI that actually does business things. And again, that, that's what I wanna get back to.

We're not just talking about LLMs that are generating text or, you know, apple image playground. We're talking about having a special purpose AI agent that does a thing on your behalf. And one of the ones I think that's gonna come first is normalizing data.

Essentially. I have a strange input of data sets. You know, I'm, I'm a, I'm a lawyer's office and I'm dealing with all this paperwork and forms and stuff, or we're in the medical space and we're dealing with all sorts of doctor notes and reports and so on.

And what we need is we need to normalize all that and structure it and build it a, a data system, a data solution out of that. All of that can make use of ai, uh, models that exist today. And I'm seeing more and more companies that are developing the models that are going to make that happen in the enterprise.

And many of these are basically ready to go and, and, and in, in fact, a lot of them are already getting deployed. So I think that we are gonna start seeing AI agents doing data processing on behalf of companies well, basically now. Excellent.

You know, one of the things that scares me though, Steve, is we hear so much about big tech, big tech, right? Are they a monopoly? And, you know, given the current or the incoming administration and and governments around the world, uh, what kind of appetite is there to keep this curve to keep, keep, you know, a few companies from dominating the, the marketplace?

And, and I think this is true in ai, where you see, you know, the hyperscalers who have put their money where their mouth is, and they're investing billions of dollars in, into, you know, some of the leading AI companies. And is that really, is that raising such a barrier of entry that we're not gonna see sort of a Cambrian explosion, if you will, of AI companies and AI solutions because you're gonna need to be one of the, one of the big boys to play in this game? Well, I can see how it might seem that way, especially with the level of investment that's gone into companies like Open ai, uh, Andro, uh, a lot of these, uh, hyperscalers building their own models.

But I think that it's gonna be very different than that. In fact, I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that ultimately companies like OpenAI and Anthropic are gonna have to pivot their bo their model away from focusing on building ever bigger foundational models and toward building, uh, the capability of fine tuning those models to special applications. We've already seen Meta's investments in Lama, uh, kicking off really a Cambrian explosion of AI capabilities from companies that never would've invested the kind of money needed to train the foundational model.

But the fact that those models are available to them and open to them licensing wise, they're able to use those models to do things that they could not have done. That's gonna happen way beyond meta, way beyond llama. And again, I think that's gonna be a big trend in 2025.

We're gonna be talking about all the incredible models that we can download and use that we don't have to invest in at all. Uh, you know, I use the whisper model from OpenAI every single day on my desktop Mac. And, um, it is just an incredible capability for me to have more incredible is the fact that I paid this $0 to use that.

Essentially, I have a capability that I never would've had. And that's, I think, what we're gonna see across the space. If you look at hugging face, if you look at the open models that people are able to download and put into process and use, it really shows that that core development of foundational models.

I don't wanna ascribe some sort of, um, uh, I don't know, generous generosity to these, uh, to these big companies because clearly they intend to, to, to use their foundational models to somehow corner the market for ai. But at the same time, this whole, um, mindset of openness and open source, open weight, um, the, the, the way that the internet is now, much of this stuff is being given away for free in a way that is causing an explosion of availability, an explosion of interest and explosion of models. And I think that that really is going to lead to AI just infiltrating every portion of modern business in a way that doesn't actually put AI from open AI or philanthropic or Xai or one of these companies in the center of, of, of it.

And in fact, almost sidelines them because all the interesting stuff is happening on hugging space, hugging face, Agreed. And then, you know, the old, you know, the old adage, nothing, nothing is free in life, right? And, and they all come with a cost.

Well, somebody had a, to develop those models. I'm glad they did. Mm-hmm.

Uh, I'm also glad that we don't need to pay billions of dollars back for it. Absolutely. But they will, they'll get their pound of flesh one way or the other, Steven, typical tech industry stuff before we even digest what's on our plate right now, we're already looking at what's next.

Right. And I've heard a lot recently over what they're calling physical ai, right? Jensen Wong was out at CES, uh, last week, and, you know, they, they brought out the robots, the march of the wooden soldiers, the robots came marching out, and some people are calling that now, not robotic ai, but physical AI and that a self-driving cars and vehicles and planes and drones and all of this stuff.

Do you think that's a 2025 story, or we're just out ahead over our skis on that? I think that's more of a 20, 28, 20 30 type story, um, really That far Out. Yeah.

I I think it's gonna take quite a bit of, of development, because essentially, if you think about it this way, what was the, the capability that made LLMs work, essentially, it was that they were able to study the relationship between words to such an extent that maybe there's emergent behavior in terms of, uh, quote, understanding of, of concepts, of written concepts. But if you look at the generative video, uh, that everyone was going nuts about in 2024, that's terrible. Uh, there's no concept of real world physics, et cetera.

It looks beautiful, but the problem is, it, it, it lacks any kind of coherent, um, framework that that matches the real world. What, uh, Nvidia, what what Jensen was talking about on stage at CES, well, it made a lot of sense that we need to build a, a model of the real world. We need to build a digital twin of physics in order to have things like physical concepts, gravity, inertia, uh, permanence of, um, dimensions and, and, and things like that.

All of those things need to be developed in, in a new way so that we can then develop systems that can simulate activities in that real world, and then we can apply them to the real world. That's a lot of work, that's a lot of money, it's a lot of investment. I, um, suspect that Nvidia is signaling that they stand ready to help fund the development of that and help support the development of that through their hardware and software efforts.

But that's something I think that we're gonna see, uh, the next generation of, of AI giants working on, basically building a, uh, a virtual world that is comprehensible to a different kind of AI model, as you said, like a physical AI model, so that they can then, uh, do things, avoid doing things like the, um, the bicycle that morphs from, from front to back to back to front or the, uh, you know, the, the, the people that, um, have grow magical extra arms or something while they're, while they're walking through space, so that AI will kind of quote, know that that's not possible in the physical world. And only then will we be able to take AI and apply it to physical machines in the real world and have it successfully navigate those machines. And if, if this sounds like, uh, bad news for, um, autonomous driving and applications like that, I think it is, I think that it's gonna be a while before we are able to have AI acting in, in real space.

Absolutely. Steven, I want to turn around a little bit here, or not turn around, but pivot a little bit. Um, well, turnaround is sort of pivot, but we could talk about that at another show.

Uh, you know, AI was certainly a bright spot in the tech horizon for 2024, but a lot of our colleagues, people, you and I both know, good people were laid off in 2024. We saw companies being sold for way, way below, you know, market cap, uh, capitalizations of monies they had raised. We, you know, we, we saw consolidation, you know, not, not the general oh, UPIA, you know, kinda liquidity event, but hey, we had to do something.

Um, when we look at the story of 2025, do we, do we get back to a more normal or is this the new normal? Are are happy days here again? What, what's your outlook on the tech industry for 2025?

Steven? I, I think the tech industry has been dramatically disrupted. Um, the pandemic certainly had a huge, um, impact on the tech industry, mainly in terms of the sort of energy and vibrance of conventional, uh, data center IT companies.

Uh, I think a lot of them really found themselves, uh, you know, parked on the side of the road while smaller, more nimble, cloud focused, cloud first companies, remote first companies, uh, leaped ahead of them. At the same time. We, we've talked about how AI has disrupted the, the market.

Every company is turning toward ai. It's, it's really funny for me to talk to companies that I've known for a decade in networking or storage or security and having them say, no, no, no, we're an AI company now we're a hundred percent in on ai. Some of them, um, have, and even, you know, renamed their products or, or completely changed their focus to be absolutely, we're an AI company.

That's it, that's our bet, because that's where the money is. Who can blame them? I do think that, uh, everything has changed and it's not going to get back to normal, especially for those companies that really were asleep at the wheel for the last couple of years.

Um, if, if you were, uh, willing to go out there and invest and try to build a sales and build market, uh, you could absolutely succeed as a conventional enterprise IT company. But some of them absolutely didn't. I think some of them really, they had no product announcements.

They had no, uh, marketing exercises. They had no, uh, public presence in the last couple of years. Uh, those companies I don't think are ever gonna find their footing again, because Amazon and Google and others are just waiting eagerly to eat their lunch.

So we are in a really strange position now where companies have laid off people. In fact, some companies have laid off some very good people, either because the company itself is suffering because it can't seem to find its footing in the market, or because there's been a big acquisition as of course, the case with, uh, VMware by Broadcom, or because they simply got left behind as, uh, all the attention and energy and investment dollars turned to ai. But I think that there's a bright spot, which is, uh, we are still seeing companies that having success, companies selling products into the market, uh, the ones who remained focused, the ones who, who saw a market for their products.

Um, you know, for example, in the edge space, there's a lot of companies that are growing rapidly and, and selling a lot. Um, there's even hardware companies, uh, you know, one of the most exciting companies we saw this year, oxide computer, uh, a big old fashioned hardware company. I love it.

It's so much fun to see it. Why are they successful and others aren't? Well, for, for, for one, they're a startup.

And, uh, a few sales can make a big difference to a startup, but also because they are energetic and they're committed to the market and they see a need and they're trying to build a product that meets that need. You know, the old fashioned stuff that people used to do before they were just chasing, uh, VC dollars. So I think that there is the opportunity for startups, for established companies, even some of the biggest companies to be successful in 2025 and beyond.

But, uh, frankly, if you've been asleep at the wheel for a couple of years, you're not gonna wake up and find a good situation now. So some of the sleeping giants, well, it's gonna be sad to see them go, but I think we're going to. Excellent.

Steven, you mentioned a few times companies that you had seen this past year, and, and for many of them, that means they presented at one of your Tech field day conferences, and you did, I forget how many, it was a couple of dozen tech field day, certainly in in 2024. I'm gonna ask you now a little self-serving, but what do you see specifically for Tech Field Day in 2025? Give us a preview.

Well, we're trying to do some different things with Field Day. First off, uh, we're trying to work with this, uh, tech Strong group. If you've heard of them, uh, you know, they, they vaguely, they, uh, do a great job, essentially, tech Strong is bringing a lot of the things that we've never been able to do with Field Day, uh, in terms of, of, of audience, in terms of demand gen, in terms of connecting the, uh, very, uh, high level, um, uh, or top of the funnel kind of, uh, activities that we do with Field Day, with the rest of the funnel, with the rest of the sales funnel.

And that, frankly, is, is just great for everybody involved because it means that the presentations that are from field that happen at Field Day can then be connected in with, uh, you know, to, to help interested people learn more and connect with these, uh, with these companies. Another thing topically that we're doing is we're, um, looking at new spaces. Uh, you know, it rather than, you know, doing another com, another event focused on storage arrays or network switches or whatever, uh, we are going to be looking at new topic.

So for example, we have a proposal out for another data field day. We have a proposal out for a, uh, CRM Field day. We have a proposal out for other topics that you might not have thought you'd see at, uh, tech Field Day events.

Um, but that's because frankly, there's a lot of really exciting technology. There's a lot of companies we haven't spoken with yet, and we're, um, interested and, and now able, thanks to the help from the future, uh, team to address these spaces. So I'm pretty excited about where we're going in, in 2025.

Uh, we're doing a lot of different things. Uh, I, I love it when I get to go to a Field Day event, even behind the scenes, you know, I'm standing, uh, you know, behind the table instead of sitting at the table, but I'm able to learn something new. Um, I really enjoyed, uh, going to App Dev Field Day and seeing how modern applications are developed.

I really enjoyed going to a mi, a mainframe focused field day event and, and learning how things are doing, uh, you know, in that mainframe world. And, um, I'm really looking forward to being the one to, to stand there and learn about, uh, you know, process automation or CRM or AI or security. So that's really what's driving me in, uh, 2025, uh, with Field Day.

We're also doing a lot more stuff, uh, behind the scenes. So, uh, you know, I'm, I'm gonna be, uh, participating more in, in, in the Textron, um, uh, media activities. Uh, we are participating more in podcasts and so on, essentially to help spread the word about these things that we're learning.

So it's not enough for me to learn it. I wanna be able to help share what I'm learning in real time with the rest of the world. And, uh, Textron gives me that ability.

So it's, uh, it's a really great partnership. And same here. We're, we're excited with that.

So Steven, you know, my, my friend Brad Fel once told me that 99% of what we do in tech is evolutionary, not revolutionary. And even with some of these phal kinda things we're talking about with AI and agentic AI and, and, and physical ai, and, you know, we've spoken on text on gang about quantum coming down the pike and quantum computing and all of this, A lot of it is very evolutionary, right? The, the whole idea of AI taking off seems sort of revolutionary, but when we look over the arc of the next, of the last two, three years going into the next two, three years, we, we see this evolution taking place.

But if I had to ask you, Steven, what's the moonshot? What's a potential moonshot in 2025 from a tech point of view? What, what might be, and ag, and granted, they're long shots, by the very definition, they're moonshots.

But if, if you had a, if you were a betting man, what, what are some that may be worthwhile throwing a couple dollars on? I dunno about, I'm not gonna give you any advice to throw any dollars at anything. Um, okay.

I, I'm famous for making poor decisions there, but, um, I'll say, uh, there are some really cool transformative things happening in this space. Now. We're still waiting for quantum.

Could quantum happen in 2025? The answer is yes, will it? Probably not.

We're waiting for a breakthrough there, and I think that that could be something that could surprise us. Uh, another area that I am pretty excited about is the potential for, um, alternative energy sources. Um, I think that despite what it sounds like from Washington and from, um, Canada and Europe and, and the rest of the world, uh, I think the horse, as I've said many times in Textron group, the horse is out of the barn as, as, as far as solar.

And solar is increasing in, um, value per dollar to such an extent that we could see as soon as the end of 2025, uh, solar being suddenly transformative and, uh, massive investments going into farms and fields of solar to power data centers and things like that. I could also see other alternative energy investment, uh, taking hold. Um, for example, you know, small nuclear reactors, uh, SMR doesn't exist, it's just a concept.

But if some of these things can take hold and they've, uh, attracted the attention of some serious investors and some serious companies, I could see a small modular nuclear reactor being rolled out by the end of the year and having that kick off a, uh, power revolution like we've never seen before. And if we just look at the technology in front of us, um, there's some really neat things and, and neat possibilities that could happen when we combine, um, IOT devices. Uh, when we have, um, low powered chips from arm, uh, maybe risk five, uh, maybe there'll be a breakthrough on a, on a risk five processor, uh, you know, maybe the Raspberry Pie Foundation, um, e even smaller than that.

If we look at, um, microcontrollers and what's happening in the ESP 32 market with, uh, MQTT and things like that, if you don't know what these things are, just Google them. They're very cool. And all of these things could kind of come together to transform everyday life for people.

Um, maybe the matter protocol takes off in, uh, home iot, maybe not, uh, um, maybe, you know, uh, we start seeing, uh, low powered, uh, thread routers in everybody's houses and in every, every appliance, uh, things like that can really be transformative and can kick off new industries as well. So we'll see what happens with all of this. And then one more thing on the energy side.

I am, I'm kicking myself for not mentioning it, battery technology. We are on the cusp of some really big breakthroughs in terms of making, uh, rechargeable battery systems that don't use, um, difficult rare earth that are solid state. Um, there are a lot of patents, there's a lot of companies working on it.

There's a lot of investment happening in that space. And I could absolutely see some time in 2025 having a solid state, um, maybe an iron based battery or a sodium based battery. Absolutely, uh, seizing the, the news at a very low cost, um, very, you know, high safety, uh, low environmental impact, and that would really transform a lot of the stuff that I've talked about and a lot of the stuff that we look at every single day.

So, uh, there's a lot of exciting tech out there. You sound bullish on 2025, Steven. I am, I'm, you know, you, it's easy to, to be disappointed in, uh, in what's going on in the world right now, but there's a lot of cool stuff and there's a lot of people working on neat things and, uh, I'm excited to see where we go this year.

Fantastic. Hey, I want to thank you for coming on here and sharing with our audience here. Predict 2025, your outlook.

You did not disappoint you, you gave, you gave people something to hang their hats on here, and I appreciate it, and I'm personally looking forward to working with you in 2025 and doing some great things. Thank you very much for coming on here. Thank you for watching.

Uh, by the way, if you're interested, you should go check out Tech Field Day. Uh, they, they do do a lot of very cool, uh, events and, uh, if you want to get involved, it's a, you can go on their website and check it out. Um, but for now, that's it.

Steven, thank you for joining us. We've got a full day of Predict 2025 here, including the announcement of the DevOps Dozen award winners. So stay tuned for that.

Or for now, this is Hummel. Enjoy the rest of Predict 2025.