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During this season of cloud platform conferences, rivals are vying to own the headlines and do battle in the cloud wars through their latest campaigns and strategies involving AI agents.
Continue reading “The Season of Agentic AI Brings Bold Promises”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.
Continue reading “Tech Leaders Leverage Unique Strengths to Tackle AI Agents”
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• NVIDIA believes enterprises are evolving from digital transformation driven by large language models (LLMs), and towards physical AI, or spatial AI, and multimodal AI.
• The industry at large is turning to “reasoning” models, capable of offering more analysis and autonomy than LLMs, especially combined with AI agents.
GTC is NVIDIA’s most important conference, focused on developers, who are the core of the AI market. This year, the event was held on March 17-21 in San Jose, California (US). NVIDIA believes that enterprises should be diversifying from purely digital transformation driven by LLMs, and towards physical AI or spatial AI, as well as multimodal AI, robotics, and AI at the edge. For this reason, the event tilted towards the industrial, automotive, and manufacturing sectors. The industry at large is turning to “reasoning” models, capable of offering more analysis and autonomy than LLMs, especially combined with AI agents. This transition should bring further demand for raw computing power, despite efficiency gains in terms of chipset architectures.
Continue reading “Generative AI Watch: At GTC 2025, NVIDIA Envisioned a World Beyond Large Language Models”
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• Alibaba Cloud is expanding its presence in Malaysia with a new data center and wider ecosystem.
• It is closing the competitive gap in cloud and AI, but still lacks local references.
Local Expansion
At the recent Alibaba Cloud AI Tech Day 2025 in Malaysia, Alibaba Cloud shared its latest initiatives in the country including the development of its third facility there (the first opened in 2017). This is part of its $53 billion investment in global AI and cloud within the next three years. The Chinese hyperscaler is also expanding its ecosystem in the country to strengthen its presence and further penetrate the market. For example, it has groomed over 50 ISVs with AI and expanded its partner network with key players such as YTL, Agmo, PIKOM, and National AI Consortium (KAIN). At the event, the hyperscaler announced two MoUs: with Permodalan Nasional Berhad (PNB), a local investment firm, and with HiSEVEN, a regional digital marketing provider headquartered in Malaysia. Alibaba Cloud is also actively driving programs to build skillsets especially in new technologies such as AI and cloud. It has trained over 21,000 talents in the country and announced Alibaba Cloud AI Hackathon this year – the first in Malaysia.
Continue reading “Alibaba Cloud AI Tech Day Malaysia – Closing the Competitive Gap with Global Hyperscalers”
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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.
Continue reading “AI Agents Take Center Stage at Salesforce TDX25”Summary Bullets:
• On February 4, 2025, the European Commission published the Guidelines on prohibited AI practices, as defined by the AI Act, which came into force on August 1, 2024.
• The AI Action Summit took place in Paris (France) on February 10/11, 2025, with heads of state and government, leaders of international organizations, and CEOs in attendance.
It has been a busy few weeks for observers of AI in the European continent: firstly, the issuance of new guidance around the AI Act, the most comprehensive regulatory framework for AI to date; secondly, the AI Action Summit, hosted by France and co-chaired by India. The stakes were high, with almost 100 countries and over 1,000 private sector and civil society representatives in attendance, and the ensuing debate delivered in spades. With the summit following the latest issuance of the AI Act by a matter of days, part of the event concentrated on issues around regulation vs innovation.
Continue reading “The AI Act: Landmark Regulation Comes into Force”
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• Critical Digital Shift: Hyperscalers and data center providers have started competing for cloud networking services, competing for enterprise dollars in space previously dominated by telcos.
• New AI Driven Dynamic: The emergence of enterprise AI is highlighting the importance of network infrastructure and the need to run more distributed workloads, opening new ways for telcos and hyperscalers to collaborate.
Generally telcos and hyperscalers are cautious collaborators. After a brief period where telcos tried to use their pre-existing data center assets to compete in the emerging cloud market, most have decided to move on from those assets. With the emergence of hyperscale data centers, their ubiquitous presence and common operating platforms, they have slowly taken over the market. While some telcos still offer private data center services, most have given up data center assets and instead moved their own IT environments to hyperscale platforms. Some enterprise focused telcos will still function as cloud service providers, migrating applications and maintain the underlying infrastructure they, for the most part, do not own the data centers themselves. While this may be some lost revenue for telecoms, this area was never their specialty.
Continue reading “Enterprise AI is Driving New Dynamics for Telco Hyperscale Competition”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.
Continue reading “HCLTech Builds Customer Confidence by Offering Outcomes-based Pricing Models for Generative AI (GenAI)”
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AI is for hyperscalers, data centers, large corporates, and geeky consumers. Right? Wrong. Research from Verizon Business has found that small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) in the US are rapidly adopting AI. Verizon’s annual State of Small Business Survey found that the proportion of SMBs using AI has more than doubled in the past year (39% from 14% in 2023, with a further 35% considering using AI), as awareness and accessibility to AI in business applications has grown. The leading sectors adopting AI are largely the entertainment, hospitality, and accommodation verticals, which also tend to dominate much of the SMB market. The main use cases for adoption of AI cover marketing/social media, data analysis, and customer service – which makes sense as this has been largely the early adopter case across most markets to date.
Continue reading “SMBs Are Part of the AI Boom – Show Me the Telco Money?”Summary Bullets:
• 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.
Continue reading “Generative AI Watch: Text-based Data is the Next Logical Evolution of Synthetic Data”
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