Summary Bullets:

• GenAI providers leverage strengths across the cloud stack to differentiate

• Progress in AI agents’ efforts are made via acquisitions, partnerships, and innovations

Technology providers across the GenAI ecosystem continue to build out AI agent and AI assistant strategies and portfolios to help demonstrate the power of GenAI technology through practical use cases, which highlight vendors’ unique technologies. In the year ahead, vendors will lean heavily on their strengths across the cloud stack in order to differentiate from rivals and appeal to customers.

The industry’s latest wave of announcements highlighted an interesting array of various approaches in leveraging AI agents stemming from a growing ecosystem of AI providers and partnerships.

Cisco and LLM partner Mistral for example embarked on co-creating their first AI agent, an AI renewals agent aimed at streamlining and improving upon traditional customer renewals. Interestingly, Cisco is using the real-time analysis agent for its own internal use, downplaying any plans for presenting the tool to its broader customer base. Cisco comes at the GenAI space not from a traditional platforms role as most rivals in this space, but from an infrastructure modernization approach. The company is leading with its strengths to take on prominent rivals further up the cloud stack by demonstrating its unique ability to address pain-points among operations experts. These include configuration, orchestration, and deployment of modern apps in GenAI technologies, ensuring adequate security as well as monitoring (observability) and automation.

Workflow automation giant ServiceNow accelerated its presence in the GenAI space through the acquisition of Moveworks for just under $3 billion. The move will enhance its efforts in agentic AI and automation solutions via a newly acquired front-end AI assistant which improves the employee user experience. Like other ITSM and automation leaders, ServiceNow stepped into the market segment in 2023 with GenAI initiatives, often involving proprietary LLMs. The acquisition will build on the company’s Now Assist offering, which is integrated with Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365.

Alibaba’s latest AI assistant app Quark, powered by its Qwen-based advanced reasoning model, integrates deep thinking/research and task execution to enhance its UI. The app is focused on supporting academic research, medical diagnostics and other problem-solving applications. Helping shore up its GenAI efforts, the company has partnered with Manus AI, a GenAI agent that is focused squarely on competing with OpenAI’s AI agent, DeepResearch. Alibaba is also feeling the pressure from Chinese start-up DeepSeek’s high-profile R1 model released earlier this year, as Alibaba strives to establish a leadership position not only in China but globally. The company claims that its AI reasoning model, QwQ-32B, is on par with rival models (e.g., DeepSeek).

Those participating in this highly competitive new AI space will continue to acquire, partner, and innovate to establish a foothold in the fast-growing market segment. For more details and in-depth insights on these events please see GlobalData’s latest GenAI Quarterly report: Generative AI Quarterly Q1 2025: Agentic AI Becomes a Cornerstone of Vendor Strategies.