IT Connection

Generative AI Watch: New Zoom AI Companion Capabilities Keep Zoom in the Race

February 6, 2024February 6, 2024 by Gregg Willsky, posted in Cloud Enable, Communicate

G. Willsky

Summary Bullets:

• With these latest announcements, Zoom continues the rapid build out of its GenAI portfolio.

• The advent of GenAI has leveled the playing field between Zoom and rivals such as Microsoft, Cisco, and Google.

Zoom continues to aggressively expand its portfolio of AI capabilities with a new round of features targeted at admins, contact center agents, and meeting participants. The features are part of ‘Zoom AI Companion,’ a generative AI (GenAI) assistant launched in September 2023. Zoom AI Companion is available at no additional cost for customers with paid services assigned to their Zoom user accounts.

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Google Cloud and Hugging Face Enable GenAI Developers

February 2, 2024August 29, 2024 by Beatriz Valle, posted in Big Data, Cloud Enable, IT Leader

Summary Bullets:

• Google Cloud and open-source startup Hugging Face signed a deal to share hardware, cloud infrastructure, open data, and open-source models and libraries.

• The partnership meets growing enterprise demand for generative AI (GenAI) software that is optimized for specific tasks and reflects the increasing popularity of open-source applications.

Google Cloud and Hugging Face announced an agreement that will enable developers to access the Google Cloud infrastructure to fine-tune and operate Hugging Face’s open-source models without the need for a Google Cloud subscription. The partnership will also enable Google Cloud customers to train and deploy Hugging Face models within Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) and Vertex AI, the company’s ML platform offering Gemini, a multimodal platform from Google DeepMind. Vertex AI and GKE will be available on the Hugging Face platform during H1 2024.

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Cloud-Based Collaboration in 2024: Change Will Come on Multiple Fronts

January 29, 2024January 30, 2024 by Gregg Willsky, posted in Cloud Enable, Communicate

G. Willsky

Summary Bullets:

• The pandemic drove the ascent of cloud-based collaboration platforms, and the ripple effects are still being felt today.

• In 2024, AI – along with the contact center, hybrid work, and mobility – will witness important new dynamics.

Recently, dramatic winds of change have swept across cloud-based collaboration platforms. The pandemic drove the ascent of these platforms and competitors battled in successive rounds of feature enhancements. Cooler heads eventually prevailed, and a ‘truce’ was issued in the form of interoperability between rival platforms. In 2023, things came full circle with competitors reaching deep into AI’s treasure trove and circulating AI features platform-wide. However, AI was not the only force shaping the landscape. 2024 promises to be as exciting as 2023. Along with AI, GlobalData expects contact center, hybrid work, and mobility to witness important new dynamics.

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Generative AI Watch: European Startup Mistral is Not Afraid of OpenAI and has the Open-Source Goods to Prove It

January 25, 2024August 29, 2024 by Beatriz Valle, posted in Big Data, Cloud Enable, IT Leader

Summary Bullets:

• Startup Mistral AI was founded nine months ago in April 2023 and was the talk of Davos amid speculation about the future of AI.

• The French company recently released its most powerful model yet, Mixtral 8x7B, under the Apache 2.0 license.

The two-horse race between Microsoft-backed OpenAI and Google for the GenAI crown may be a thing of the past. French startup Mistral AI seems poised to disrupt the status quo and was the center of generative AI talks at the World Economic Forum in Davos (Switzerland) last week.

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Generative AI Watch: 8×8’s New ‘XCaaS’ Features Yield Benefits but Arrive Late

January 19, 2024January 22, 2024 by Gregg Willsky, posted in Cloud Enable, Communicate

G. Willsky

Summary Bullets:

• 8×8 is positioning the new video meeting features well in the age of GenAI.

• The introduction is tarnished somewhat by the late arrival to market.

8×8 has announced the addition of AI-generated transcriptions, summaries, and action items for video meetings to its experience communications-as-a-service (XCaaS) platform. XCaaS melds communication/collaboration (UCaaS) and contact center (CCaaS) capabilities. 8×8 introduced the ‘XCaaS’ platform nearly three years ago in May 2021. The platform is noteworthy having served as a blueprint since then for competitors to offer their own integrated UCaaS/CCaaS offers, and customers have come to expect these as part of vendor portfolios. In this regard, 8×8 has been a trend-setter.

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Partner or Do – a Telco Technology Dilemma

January 19, 2024 by Rob Pritchard, posted in Communicate, Internet of Things, Mobilize, Secure

Summary Bullets:

• Vodafone has partnered Microsoft for generative AI (GenAI) and to scale its soon-to-be standalone IoT business with the goal of targeting over 300 million business and consumer customers.

• Telcos need to make difficult decisions over what they need to keep in-house as market differentiators and where they need to partner for best-of-breed solutions.

On January 16, 2024, Vodafone and Microsoft announced a 10-year strategic partnership “to bring generative AI, digital services, and the cloud to more than 300 million businesses and consumers” across Vodafone’s footprint in Europe and Africa. Vodafone is to invest $1.5 billion over that period in cloud and customer-focused AI services in conjunction with Microsoft, with Microsoft returning the favor by using Vodafone’s fixed and mobile connectivity services. Microsoft also intends to invest in Vodafone’s managed IoT connectivity platform as it becomes a standalone business by April 2024 (for more details, please see: Vodafone’s Microsoft AI and IoT Partnership is Bold but Raises Vendor-Neutrality Questions, January 16, 2024).

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OSS Technology Set to Revolutionize the World of Observability

January 18, 2024 by Charlotte Dunlap, posted in Cloud Enable

Summary Bullets:

• Developer buzz around enhanced OSS technology will heavily impact observability solutions.

• eBPF’s kernel-level OS access ensures deeper visibility into system events and processes.

Little-known open-source software eBPF improves on observability’s modern monitoring techniques through deep visibility into systems, detection of problematic issues, reduction of downtime, and a boost in performance and security of applications.

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Positioning Considerations for Cybersecurity Providers Targeting the Energy Sector

January 18, 2024 by Rajesh Muru, posted in Big Data, Cloud Enable, IT Leader, Secure

Summary Bullets:

• The energy sector is complex with a highly interconnected ecosystem. This will impact client organizations’ security posture, often influenced by the inherent nature of their infrastructure.

• Cybersecurity providers, and in particular managed security companies, will need an ‘integrated’ approach to security addressing the energy sector value chain.

Cybersecurity Providers Should Factor in Energy Sector Future Economic Challenges
From a market performance perspective, 2023 continued to be a difficult year for the world’s energy market, with some analysts speculating it to be one of the worst sectors in terms of crises resulting in a cascaded impact effect both economically, globally, and socially. The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the Conference of the Parties to the Convention (COP) continue to strive in ambition and responsibilities as well as identify and assess climate measures. In addition to progressing toward the existing Paris goals, COP28 in Dubai (UAE) gained agreement on a number of areas, covering fast-tracking the move to clean energy sources, cutting greenhouse gas emissions before 2030, delivering money for climate action from richer to poorer countries, and working on a new deal for developing nations.

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GenAI’s Killer App in 2024 Will Arm Citizens With Medical Knowledge

January 17, 2024January 18, 2024 by Charlotte Dunlap, posted in Cloud Enable

Summary Bullets:
• GlobalData predicts 2024’s killer app will be medically-related.

• VCs have indicated a major shift in investments from LLMs to the application layer in 2024.

Following a year of investment upheaval resulting from the dawn of ChatGPT and generative AI (GenAI), Silicon Valley based venture capitalists (VCs) have indicated that major funding will now shift to the application. VCs and leading cloud platform providers invested heavily in 2023 for LLMs–infrastructure services that are computational and capital-intensive to build. This year, attention will be turned to the application layer of GenAI innovation.

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

January 2, 2024December 11, 2024 by Rena Bhattacharyya, posted in IT Leader

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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