Cloud Wars Live with Bob Evans

Bob Evans

Cloud Wars analyzes the major cloud vendors from the perspective of business customers. In Cloud Wars Live, Bob Evans talks with both sides about these profoundly transformative technologies, and with monthly All-Star guests from across the business community about the trends impacting how the world lives, works, plays, and dreams. Visit https://cloudwars.com for more.

  1. 22h ago

    Workday Goes All-in on Agentic AI -- and Anthropic

    In today's Cloud Wars Minute, I examine how CEO Aneel Bhusri is accelerating Workday's AI ambitions and positioning the company to compete with larger enterprise technology rivals. Highlights 00:09 — Workday introduced some very interesting new agentic solutions and innovations this week at Workday Rising, and I wanted to touch on those. And also mention, I think, a very key partnership that Workday has strengthened with Anthropic. It's really going to be part of what I'm calling its all-in commitment to agentic AI. 00:35 — More recently, three big things have really paved the way for Workday's emergence into the AI field in a big time. One was about a year and a half ago, the hiring of Gerrit Kazmeier from Google Cloud. He's now Workday's president of products and technology. He's been a huge proponent for the AI boost. 00:54 — The second thing was about a year ago, the acquisition of Sana for $1.1 billion, and third was early this year, Aneel Bhusri's move from executive chairman back into the CEO role to really push this forward. So a lot of what they announced at Rising this week were the fruits of those developments. 01:18 — First, Sana is now the Workday home. It's a single, sort of wide-open AI experience that's going to run all of Workday's applications, but it also orchestrates the agentic work that's being done, not just agents that ask questions and offer suggestions, but get the work done. 01:39 — Second thing is four new, what Workday calls autopilot agents. You know, playing on the notion copilots help, autopilots actually do the work. So these autopilot agents are in accounting, payroll, talent acquisition, and deployment, where they can help you figure out the right way to handle all these things. 02:16 — Their decision intelligence is a new set of agents working across HR and finance that help model out the best scenarios, all with the grounded, governed data that Workday has. Work Intelligence helps customers figure out the right place to deploy agentic solutions, how to work those, how to get the best ROI from them. 03:12 — Now Workday, being smaller than most of the big ones like Oracle and SAP and Salesforce and Microsoft, has had to use advanced technology and being out on the front edge of these things to remain fully competitive, and to give customers the trust that Workday is going to continue to push them into some of these new advanced areas. Visit Cloud Wars for more.

  2. 1d ago

    Why ServiceNow Flow Could Change Enterprise IT Service Management

    In today's Cloud Wars Minute, I examine ServiceNow's launch of Flow and why its rapid deployment and one-click automation capabilities could change employee service management. Highlights 00:03 — ServiceNow has launched Flow. It's a standalone, conversational AI-native service desk designed to handle employee requests through Slack, Microsoft Teams, and email. This means users can bypass those traditional portals and ticketing systems altogether. So, what's Flow? Well, essentially, it's a startup-like offering within ServiceNow, and its big selling point is speed and simplicity. 00:48— ServiceNow says Flow can be deployed in under a day with no infrastructure or implementation project required. Now, importantly, because Flow is a standalone product, customers that don't already subscribe to ServiceNow can still purchase it. ServiceNow says the new service will still deliver, and I quote, "the same reliable results expected from ServiceNow's comprehensive service management portfolio." 00:56 — I think one of the most interesting things about Flow, beyond its speed and remarkably light onboarding requirements, is the way that it works from an agentic AI perspective. It doesn't just answer questions. Once a request has been resolved, users can actually automate the workflow with just a single click. So, if the same issue arises again, Flow can deal with it automatically. 01:26 — It hasn't just built another AI chatbot. Instead, it's turning the service desk itself into an agentic operation. But there's another interesting point here. As Amit Zavery, President, CEO, and Chief Product Officer at ServiceNow, has said, the company is investing where it sees AI-native market opportunities and isn't necessarily trying to replace or detract from its existing business. 01:58 — ServiceNow is offering Flow at no additional procurement costs to its existing customers, positioning it as an alternative or an addition for specific departments, for remote teams, or newly acquired business units that need rapid deployment or prefer a different operating model. Visit Cloud Wars for more.

  3. 2d ago

    Google Cloud Gemini Enterprise: 12 Eye-Popping Outcomes

    In today's Cloud Wars Minute, I explore how Google Cloud's Gemini Enterprise is delivering remarkable customer outcomes and transforming AI investments into measurable business value. Highlights 00:02 — I wanted to fill in some pretty interesting details about customer outcomes with AI projects from Google Cloud, ones that are using Gemini Enterprise. Got some pretty eye-popping examples of that. These were released last week at the launch of the Gemini agent event, and CEO Thomas Kurian laid out a dozen of these very, very interesting, detailed customer outcome stories. 01:00 — There's the Department of Defense, with three million users now using Gemini Enterprise, and those three million altogether have built 100,000 agents with them. Interesting to see that this is in a highly regulated, highly secure environment, and it's been rolled out and adopted and deployed at that scale, with 100,000 agents being built by those people in the DoD. 01:25 — Commerzbank, document processing costs cut by 30 million dollars with the help of Gemini Enterprise. NTT cut 300,000 hours from document access and retrieval. It said it went from two weeks in most cases to now happening instantly. Grupo Marista insurance firm cut the time for processing hospital claims from 72 hours to four hours. 01:53 — Liverpool, one of Mexico's largest retailers, built a discovery agent, and they built that and deployed it in one week, and they have said now that it is expected to have a 10x ROI on the money that it costs to run that trial. 03:25 — Businesses are using AI here to either accelerate the pace of their operations, to make their people more productive, to cut down on a lot of busy work, get people doing more valuable high-level work, and in many cases, generating new revenue streams, boosting the customer experience that's happening here. 04:00 — If you measure your own company's aspirations and achievements to date with AI against these, are you going to feel happy about that? Are you going to feel kind of like, you know, you're falling behind the times here? I think these are great ideas or great projects here that are going to stimulate a lot of ideas for how others can do things to advantage. Visit Cloud Wars for more.

  4. 3d ago

    Google Cloud's New Gemini Agent Rocks Agentic AI Category

    In today's Cloud Wars Minute, I break down how Gemini agent combines Google Cloud's AI stack, cross-cloud capabilities, and governance to address pressing enterprise challenges. Highlights 00:03 — I think late last week, Google Cloud rocked the whole agentic AI category here with a very interesting development of what it's calling Gemini agent. It spans both the personal AI that we've heard a lot about lately from OpenAI and Grok and Meta, but also, I think much more importantly, the big focus on it is for enterprise AI. 01:39 — This is heavily an enterprise AI product, although it can do those other things. The key is that it sits across Google Cloud's world-class AI stack. That gives it, then, more capability, more flexibility, and better economics for enterprise customers. And in his keynote address, Kurian focused on the affordability that comes now with Gemini agent, the simplicity engineered into it. 02:24 — He said, "The prompt window is the new user interface." Kurian also focused, I think rightly so, on how Gemini Agent, with some of the lakehouse capabilities within Google Cloud, can now work across and tap into data from all the different major clouds, different data stores, applications, tools, and other solutions. 03:00 — A big part of its promise is the ability to work end-to-end across the entire enterprise. They've got to be able to go in and work across different vendors, different applications, and so forth like that. Part of this, then, you can say goodbye to egress fees, which have been a pain in the neck. 04:22 — Customers are saying, "Hey, I'm being pushed inside my organization to do a number of things faster and differently than I've ever done them before, and I need to have tech partners, tech vendors who speak to me in my language about my priorities, my outcomes, and the things that I need to achieve right away." 04:40 —So I think this was just a great launch here by Google Cloud, not only for what the product is able to do, but how that aligns with what customer priorities are. Visit Cloud Wars for more.

  5. 6d ago

    Google, AI Slop, and the Future of Bug Bounty Security Programs

    In today's Cloud Wars AI Minute, I examine why Google reportedly shut down its open-source bug bounty program and what the growing problem of AI slop means for enterprise security. Highlights 00:12 — Today, the subject is AI slop and how it's actually just started to shut down security programs. On October 1, we had Google go out and shut down its open-source bug bounty program. For those that don't know, that's basically Google saying, "Hey, submit bugs to us, and if you find really good bugs, then what we'll do is we'll research those, and we'll actually pay you for finding these bugs." 00:54 — What's really interesting about this specific thing is why did they shut it down? Well, it's actually because they have so much slop being produced from AI, where basically a bunch of different vendors or different people are using AI to submit a whole bunch of fake bugs that they're having to triage, and they don't know what to do about it. 01:40 — And so I think this is going to become interesting as the world starts to look at how you start to build these programs and how you open up and identify when you are being served AI slop or fake bounties or fake security audits and assessments versus real ones. 02:09 — So as we continue to move forward, I do expect that we will start to see more and more companies having to figure out how to be able to deal with this particular problem. We might even see new industries pop up that are going to be able to deal with this. 02:49 — We'll keep an eye on it here at Cloud Wars, and we'll keep you up to speed on what's going on. But it's a great thing to be looking at and researching yourself, and identifying where you might even be exposed to AI slop. Visit Cloud Wars for more.

  6. 6d ago

    Workday Expands Agentic AI in HR With New Total Benefits Experience

    In today's Cloud Wars Minute, I look at how Workday is leveraging AI agents to empower employees, streamline benefits operations, and reshape traditional HR processes. Highlights 00:03 — Workday has launched Workday Total Benefits. It's an AI-powered benefits experience that Workday describes as a single, connected experience for employees, HR teams, benefits administrators, and benefits providers. From an agentic AI standpoint, agents can help employees compare benefit plans, understand policies, and make the most of their benefits year-round. 00:34 — And these agents can also take on administrative work that's traditionally made benefits programs costly and significantly complex to run. Workday Total Benefits includes Workday Wellness, which, I'll quote Workday on this, "connects benefit providers directly to Workday, streamlining benefits implementations and automating administration across systems." 01:14 —Looking ahead to 2027, Workday plans to introduce more capabilities, including a Benefits Guidance for Self-Service agent, which will provide employees with what Workday describes as proactive, personalized recaps of the benefits they've used and other ways to optimize them. 01:32 — I think this is a really good example of what Workday is actually doing here, positioning benefits as more than an annual administrative process. It's about continuous AI-driven benefits guidance and automation, and I think it's a really good example of how agentic AI can enable industries to rethink the very basis of how work that may have traditionally followed a very rigid path gets done in the future. Visit Cloud Wars for more.

  7. Oct 8

    AI Governance at a Crossroads: Regulation, Innovation, and the Race for AI Leadership

    In today's Cloud Wars AI Minute, I look at the tension between AI regulation, industry self-governance, and America’s determination to remain competitive in the global AI race. Highlights 00:18 — Some regulatory things happening as the government in the U.S. started to take a look at AI in general. We had six of the CEOs of the major AI providers in the world really, went over to Washington and started talking about how they were going to do self-regulation. Now, the issue with this is going to be that that agreement has actually no penalties associated with it. 00:50 — So, if someone actually breaks the rules, doesn't mean that there's actually any penalties that are going along with this particular situation. And now, the other interesting part is that two of the six are now actually under FTC investigation over consumer risk, and so we have to really ask ourselves: Do we really believe that they're going to properly self-regulate? 01:54 — Now, the other thing is that there is a report that needs to be due to the Trump administration in 120 days. So, what I would tell you is, over the next 120 days, I would fully expect that we're going to get a lot of movement in this space on what are we going to do specifically around AI, which is now also being kind of formed on superintelligence. 02:18 — Now, I believe what they're trying to do here is say that AI governing maybe is not as necessary as superintelligence governing, and they're really kind of trying to draw a line in the sand on the difference between artificial intelligence and superintelligence. And so, I really think this is going to be interesting to see over the next few months what's going to happen in this space. Visit Cloud Wars for more.

  8. Oct 8

    Google Cloud Gives Business Focus to Modernization

    In today's Cloud Wars Minute, I examine how Google Cloud is using AI and unified solutions to radically accelerate enterprise modernization. Highlights 00:03 — We know that on the road to AI transformation, tech modernization is a key element. Unfortunately, for a lot of organizations, the traditional approach to this has been very tactical, very point-solution-oriented, and talking about technologies, kind of disconnected from business cases, from ROI, from business outcomes. 00:27 — And that's left a lot of business leaders with that glazed look, where they're just dying to get out of the room and get out of that discussion. Google Cloud's made a fairly simple but highly effective step, I think, in fixing that. It's consolidated a lot of its products together — its migration and modernization products — into a simple solution. 01:00 — The significance of this is there's still some very deep, heavy-duty technology in there, but it's been packaged in a way that lets business leaders understand the significance. And it's also not just the packaging of it, but there's some new AI-driven technologies here that allow some of these complex processes, these complex steps that have to be taken for modernization, to be greatly collapsed in time. 02:02 — Over the past couple of years, it's taken multiple products that it has in a certain area, put them together in a single, unified, end-to-end solution so that customers have an easier time to consume those, to get value out of them, to drive toward the appropriate business outcomes, rather than having to evaluate every single point solution. 02:54 — And I think this is something its's going to see a lot of other providers move into: to try to have these comprehensive solutions for customers, get away from having customers be the general contractors pulling together lots of very detailed technical point solutions, and instead put together a suite that is a full portfolio that is oriented toward the business outcomes that the businesses have to have. Visit Cloud Wars for more.

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Cloud Wars analyzes the major cloud vendors from the perspective of business customers. In Cloud Wars Live, Bob Evans talks with both sides about these profoundly transformative technologies, and with monthly All-Star guests from across the business community about the trends impacting how the world lives, works, plays, and dreams. Visit https://cloudwars.com for more.

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