Author: Rena Bhattacharyya

Rena is a Director of Custom Research at Current Analysis, specializing in Delivery Management. She is responsible for ensuring the delivery of actionable recommendations and guidance to clients to assist them in formulating their market development and execution strategies. Her expertise is in telecommunications and IT services, including business networking , communications, data center, security, and business continuity services.

AI Agents Take Center Stage at Salesforce TDX25

by Rena Bhattacharyya, posted in Big Data
R. Bhattacharyya

Summary Bullets:

  • Salesforce’s new AgentExchange is a marketplace for AI agents that are preconfigured to integrate seamlessly.
  • Interoperability among agents and frameworks will be a key concern as organizations look to deploy multiple agents to complete more complex tasks.

Salesforce’s annual developer conference, TDX25, took place in San Francisco during the first week of March. As expected, AI played heavily in all conversations, with AI agents and Salesforce’s Agentforce platform taking a starring role. Similar to its approach with GenAI, Salesforce has been a thought leader when it comes to AI agents. Noteworthy announcements from Salesforce TDX25 included Agentforce 2dx (a suite of AI-powered tools to support building, testing and deploying AI agents), an Agentforce API (enabling customers to embed Agentforce across applications and workflows), partnerships to help scale deployment of AI agents, and customer testimonials and potential use cases.

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Telefonica Tech’s Expanded AI Portfolio Helps Enterprises Deploy GenAI for Virtual Assistants

by Rena Bhattacharyya, posted in Communicate
R. Bhattacharyya

Summary Bullets:

• A key benefit of the Telefónica Tech generative AI (GenAI) platform is that it provides access to and evaluates large language models (LLMs) from multiple sources, including hyperscale cloud providers and open source models.

• Telefónica’s advantage comes from its existing customer relationships and its ability to promote a vendor-agnostic environment.

On January 28, 2025, Telefónica Tech announced its GenAI platform to help enterprise customers create virtual assistants. The platform is designed to be easy to use while at the same time allowing access to multiple LLMs. It provides tools for evaluating models based on cost, performance, and latency. Use cases include virtual assistants for customer services, enhanced data analysis, and improved efficiency in departments such as human resources and finance.

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HCLTech Builds Customer Confidence by Offering Outcomes-based Pricing Models for Generative AI (GenAI)

by Rena Bhattacharyya, posted in Big Data, IT Leader
R. Bhattacharyya

Summary Bullets:

• HCLTech is taking a wise approach to building customer confidence in its GenAI services by offering outcomes-based pricing models.

• Tying compensation to performance, which can include KPIs and ROIs, is a logical next step.

GenAI is considered the most disruptive technology in the market today. Momentum is strong, with the market opportunity expected to grow from $2.8 billion in 2023 to $75.7 billion in 2028, a CAGR of 94%, as projected by GlobalData’s latest forecast. Enterprises across a range of industries are eager to harness the benefits of GenAI in a wide variety of use cases. The technology can be used to support customer service and marketing initiatives, improve operational efficiency, enhance security and fraud prevention measures, modernize applications, and much more.

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Generative AI Watch: Text-based Data is the Next Logical Evolution of Synthetic Data

by Rena Bhattacharyya, posted in Big Data

Summary Bullets:

R. Bhattacharyya

• Synthetic unstructured data, or text, can be used to train and finetune large language models (LLMs) used in customer support applications or chatbot conversations.

• The application of synthetic data, both tabular and unstructured, will continue to grow, driven by a need for additional training data as well as concerns over data privacy.

On October 1, 2024, MOSTLY AI announced that its platform can help enterprises create synthetic text, a timely new capability given the growing interest by enterprises to leverage GenAI to extract insights from unstructured data. Over the past several years, much of the conversation around synthetic data has focused on using GenAI to create synthetic tabular data. Tabular data is structured data that can be neatly organized, for example information that can be arranged in an excel file. The logical next step is to use GenAI to create text-based information that can be used to customize LLMs.

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Generative AI Watch: Telefonica Tech Collaborates with IBM to Help Customers Navigate GenAI

by Rena Bhattacharyya, posted in Big Data, Cloud Enable, Communicate
R. Bhattacharyya

Summary Bullets:

• The complexities of implementing generative AI (GenAI) and integrating it with existing systems present a challenge to enterprises; most organizations report that deployments take much longer than originally anticipated.

• Telefónica Tech is wise to expand its AI offerings for business customers and to offer tools focused on data management and governance.

On June 18, 2024, Telefónica Tech announced it was expanding its partnership with IBM to help businesses in Spain adopt artificial intelligence (AI), including GenAI. The companies will offer Shark.X, a platform designed for data management, analytics, and AI. The platform will incorporate key technologies from IBM, including IBM Cloud Pak for Data and IBM watsonx AI and Data. However, the partnership is not limited to hardware and software: The companies will work together to provide training and educational programs as well as to develop use cases and to help customers implement pilot projects.

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Ericsson Flexes Increasing US Strength with 5G Factory, Federal Contract, and AT&T Win

by Rena Bhattacharyya, posted in Internet of Things
R. Bhattacharyya

Summary Bullets:

• Ericsson is investing to solidify and expand its US presence and ecosystem of partners to gain an edge over competitors based overseas.

• Ericsson’s messaging reflects the evolving domestic political climate and changing global geopolitical environment.

In late May 2024, Ericsson hosted industry analysts to its 5G smart factory in Dallas, Texas (US). The key theme of the event was that Ericsson provides “5G made in the US, for the US.” The Swedish telecom equipment provider reminded attendees that it has been operating in the US for 122 years and that 26% of its sales are from North America. Furthermore, it maintains six R&D facilities, employs 7,600 people, and has invested over $7 billion in acquisitions in the region. In March 2024, the company formed a new division, Ericsson Federal Technologies Group, to help the US federal government deploy 5G solutions. Via its Dallas facility, Ericsson meets the government’s requirements to support open RAN technologies and equipment manufactured in the US.

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Generative AI Watch: Small Language Models’ Growing Role in a Multi-Model World

by Rena Bhattacharyya, posted in Big Data

R. Bhattacharyya

Summary Bullets:

  • As training techniques improve, small language models (SLMs) are becoming more and more accurate, increasing their appeal.
  • The smaller models make sense for simpler tasks; they can work offline and are a good alternative when organizations want to process information close to the source of collection.

The generative AI (GenAI) landscape has been evolving at breakneck speed since OpenAI exploded onto the scene in late 2022.  And despite the numerous new GenAI solutions and product enhancements already brought to market in the last 18 months, momentum around natural language processing (NLP) shows no signs of slowing down. The latest buzz worth paying attention to is around SLMs, which offer capabilities similar to large language models (LLMs) but require far less training data and processing power.  Easier to adopt, less expensive to run, and with a smaller carbon footprint, these models hold the potential to further accelerate the already rapid pace of GenAI adoption.

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Calling All MNCs: The EU AI Act Has Passed – It’s Time to Expand Corporate Ethical AI Strategies

by Rena Bhattacharyya, posted in IT Leader

R. Bhattacharyya

Summary Bullets:
• With the passage of the EU AI Act, staying on top of issues related to AI and ethics is going to become increasingly important to multinational organizations.
• The need for individuals that can help organizations adapt business processes to meet evolving ethical AI requirements will become increasingly urgent.

The EU AI Act is groundbreaking legislation that strives to hold organizations more accountable for their use of artificial intelligence. It categorizes use cases by risk, stipulates greater oversight of riskier AI use cases, bans certain use cases outright, and requires increased transparency over the use the technology, in addition to many other requirements. While these new obligations provide much-needed consumer protections, they create increased complexity for enterprises already struggling to scale their use of AI. To meet the requirements outlined by the EU AI Act, organizations operating in Europe must start devising a strategy to enhance documentation and oversight of AI technology.

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New York Times Lawsuit Against Microsoft and OpenAI Reminds Us of the Need for ‘Responsible AI’

by Rena Bhattacharyya, posted in IT Leader

R. Bhattacharyya

Summary Bullets:

• The New York Times lawsuit regarding copyright infringement highlights the challenges society faces in implementing AI technology in a responsible and ethical manner.

• GlobalData has identified six broad key categories of issues related to responsible AI: explainability; bias; ethics; hallucinations, toxicity and poisoning; data privacy and data leakage; and copyright infringement.

During the week between Christmas and New Year’s, the New York Times sued Microsoft and OpenAI for copyright infringement, making headlines during what is normally a very quiet time of year. The news organization claims that the two tech companies illegally used its content to train ChatGPT and other services they offer to consumers and enterprises. The move represents a change in strategy for the New York Times. Since last April, the newspaper had been negotiating with OpenAI and Microsoft to receive compensation for the use of its work to train large language models (LLMs; the Associated Press has a licensing deal in place), but no agreement has been reached so far. Likely, this latest move by the New York Times will reinvigorate those conversations.

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Generative AI Watch: With Einstein Trust Layer, Salesforce Addresses Biggest Hurdles Holding Back Enterprise Adoption

by Rena Bhattacharyya, posted in IT Leader

R. Bhattacharyya

Summary Bullets:
• Despite the incredible interest in generative AI (GenAI), enterprises worry that large language models (LLMs) will hallucinate, create toxic or biased content, and that their use will cause data leakage, among numerous other concerns.
• At Dreamforce ‘23, Salesforce highlighted the recently released Einstein Trust Layer, a framework that secures corporate data, evaluates content for toxicity, masks sensitive information, and provides an audit trail when using GenAI.

AI took center stage at Salesforce’s Dreamforce ’23 conference. During his keynote, Marc Benioff announced that the world is in an AI revolution, and that AI could change anything and will impact everything. Although Dreamforce was all about GenAI this year, AI isn’t a new focus for Salesforce. The company had already embedded AI capabilities into many of solutions across its portfolio. Furthermore, it acquired natural language processing (NLP) expertise via its acquisition of Narrative Science in 2019. What is new this year, however, is that Salesforce is embedding GenAI capabilities into just about all solutions.

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