The Week of Agentic AI Conferences, When Does It Get Real? – Shimmy Says EP 14

Hey everyone, it's Alan Shimmel and welcome to another Shimmy says, you know, I think when we look back, this will be the week of Agen AI conferences. We had so many people both here on our Techstrong team, as well as on the Greater Futurum team, really spread out all over the place, whether it was Dell Tech World or Red Hat Open Summit, or the Microsoft Build Conference, SAP Sapphire and more, you know, listening in reporting from getting briefed at speaking at all of these conferences and all these conferences. You, I felt like I was watching the Kentucky Derby and we had 12 horses coming around that final bend, because they all very much, at some level look the same.

All of these companies were talking about their agentic AI plans and how their agents are gonna make our life better, you know? And quite frankly, it's not just from this week, it was the same story last week and the week before, and the week before that. It just seems the race is on to get agents out there doing your work or doing tasks for you, and, and then there's a race within a race, which is to be the orchestrator of those agents, right?

We've seen that from ServiceNow and, and Salesforce and, and, uh, automation Anywhere and IBM, right? Everybody wants to be the manager of all these agents that all these companies are talking about, and it raises some really big issues. I realize.

I work in the tech industry and we live in a bit of a bubble, and we're always, you know, we, we pride ourselves in being in the 15% of early adopters looking for that next new thing. And by all, you know, stretches of the imagination, agentic AI is that next new thing, but is it really, are we, are we putting too many eggs in our basket? Are we, are we overhyping here with making it impossible for, for this to, to do everything we think it's gonna be?

You know, when you look at adoption curves of, of things over the years in technology, it's very hard to put your finger on the point and say, this is when it became real. This is when things really started working. And very rarely is that point at the point we are now, right?

Because the point we are right now really screams to me of, of just hype, right? And no one wants to be left out of this, right? A company like SAP, they're a great company, they're an ERP company.

People don't look to SAP to be cutting edge. People don't look to SAP to pioneer the newest thing. SAP adopts things when their customers are ready to use them.

Same thing with Dell. Dell doesn't pioneer new markets. Dell doesn't get into a market until it's big enough to be something that'll move the needle.

And until they think that they could command enough of a market share In that nascent market to really move the needle at Dell, which is measured in the tens and hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars at this point. So, when I see companies like Dell and SAP talking about their agentic, AI and, uh, ambitions and product launches, to me this is, this is, we've moved beyond the cutting edge stuff that I expect from the hyperscalers, that I expect from Google and Meta and, you know, companies like that, Adobe, or even Microsoft. When Dell and SAP are doing it, it, it's starting to feel like it's real.

But yet as I sit here, is it really real? Where do these AI agents really work? And I'll be honest with you, I'm a bit of a loss.

Where do they really work? First of all, I still have questions. What's the difference in some cases between an AI agent and an API call is an API called a form of an AI agent?

Not really, but you know, I'm, I'm gonna put it out there to you, Shimmy's asking you what AI agents are you using now that work? If you can let me know, I'd love, I'll talk about it at our next shimmy says, but I think that's something we need to discuss. That's it for today.

This is Shimmy. I'm out. Have a great holiday weekend for those of us in the us.

Bye-bye. Says.