Cloud Wars Live with Bob Evans

In today's Cloud Wars Minute, I explore why Google Cloud could achieve an astonishing 90% to 100% revenue growth rate in Q3.

Highlights

00:03 — We got some big numbers coming out later this week from SAP for Q3, and then next week we've got Google Cloud, Microsoft, ServiceNow, all on October 28 and October 29. Palantir will release its Q3 numbers the first week of November, but let's take a look here at Google Cloud's Q3.

00:25 — I think there's a very good chance the revenue growth for Q3 could be anywhere from 90% to 95%, even 100%. Let me show you the...

00:10 —Microsoft has launched MAI Transcribe to Streaming, a real-time speech-to-text model and Microsoft's first model in the streaming transcription category. The new model has already proven to be incredibly powerful.

00:31 — It operates in 60 languages with continuous automatic language detection, and according to Microsoft's testing, the new model ranks number one for accuracy in both final and partial transcripts. The new model can handle partial text as the speech is arriving, which means reasoning can begin even before a speaker finishes talking, and this is particularly useful for voice agents.

00:59 — Microsoft is also launching two new voice...

Bob Evans welcomes Christopher Lochhead, Head Buccaneer at Category Pirates, to Cloud Wars Live, exploring the extraordinary opportunities and challenges emerging from artificial intelligence. Drawing on decades of experience in technology, entrepreneurship, and category design, Lochhead examines the rise of personal AI, the disruption of digital commerce, California's proposed billionaire tax, and growing concerns about AI regulation and corporate accountability.

Trust, Technology, and Entrepreneurship

The Big Themes

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 emer...

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 i...

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 thre...

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, alth...

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 pa...

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 comp...

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...

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 asso...

In today's Cloud Wars AI Minute, I break down why ServiceNow and Microsoft are embracing open protocols as the AI Agent War shifts to the control layer.

Highlights

00:01 — What I want to talk about today is that we're actually seeing the Agent War moving up to the control layer. You're seeing that there's a new control layer that's becoming the core part of what everyone is fighting over in this space, and this is really where we're going to start seeing governance and control becoming the more important part as we continue to move forward.

In today's Cloud Wars Minute, I look at why SoftBank is turning to the bond market to finance its latest $10 billion OpenAI investment.

Highlights

00:03 — It's fair to say that we're at an interesting inflection point when it comes to how AI innovation is set to progress, what might constrain it, and where, eventually, lines may be drawn. However, that hasn't slowed planned investment in some of the biggest U.S. firms.

00:19 — Most recently, Japanese investment giant SoftBank has announced that, through the issuance of senior unsecured bonds, it will be borrowing over $11 billion to h...

Key Takeaways

In today’s Cloud Wars Minute, I look at how SAP is moving industry AI into the mainstream while expanding its autonomous enterprise strategy at Connect.

Highlights

00:03 — SAP is having a big event in Las Vegas this week called Connect, and whereas its Sapphire event every year really is aimed at its traditional IT audience, and lays the technical foundation for its strategy, Connect, now in its second year, was brought about to focus on the LOB users, business users, non-tech users.

00:24 — And this year at Connect, SAP is getting ready to crank up its...

John Siefert sits down with Christopher Jones, Vice President of Ecosystems and Partner Alliances at T-Mobile, to explore why enterprise connectivity is becoming foundational to the AI Era. Jones explains how T-Mobile for Business is moving beyond the traditional perception of a telecommunications provider to become an infrastructure layer supporting distributed workforces, AI agents, enterprise applications, and data at the edge.

AI Runs on Connectivity

The Big Themes:

In today's Cloud Wars Minute, I explain how AWS is combining custom silicon, enterprise applications, and agentic AI to drive its resurgence.

Highlights

00:02 — I wanted to talk about an interesting development at AWS, which over the past several quarters has been on a very nice upswing in its business, powered in part by their development of what is now a very large and extremely fast-growing custom chips business.

00:37 — That comes down to a billion-dollar chip deal that AWS has just secured with Synopsys, a chip designer that AWS has been working with closely over...

In today's Cloud Wars Minute, I explore why Gartner expects many agentic AI projects to disappear as enterprises get more serious about measurable business value.

Highlights

00:14 — We're starting to see some interesting analysis coming out of organizations like Gartner. Gartner is saying that 40% of agentic AI projects die by 2027. There are a lot of projects that are going on within organizations that don't actually have good business value or good return on investment.

00:52 — And we already started to see a lot of pilots that were just failing over and over and over because peop...

Bob Evans speaks with Chris Leone, Executive Vice President of Applications Development at Oracle, about Fusion Claw and Oracle’s push toward increasingly autonomous enterprise applications. Leone explains how Fusion Claw combines AI reasoning with deterministic enterprise computation to tackle complex, long-running work involving optimization, simulation, reconciliation, and planning.

The Rise of Fusion Claw

The Big Themes:

In today's Cloud Wars AI Minute, I explore the shift from using AI for workforce reduction to using it to amplify human productivity.

Highlights

00:18 — There's starting to be a better understanding that there's not a lot of value necessarily in just using AI to be able to do automation. What we're seeing is it does do a great job at this, and it frees up your resources to be able to go do other things.

00:36 — What we're starting to see, though, is some analysis coming back that is allowing us to be able to u...

In today’s Cloud Wars Minute, I break down the latest Cloud Wars Top 10 growth chart and the extraordinary momentum reshaping AI and cloud.

Highlights

00:03 — Got the latest Cloud Wars Top 10 growth chart numbers for you, in which we lay out here the hottest AI and cloud vendors in the world. And right now, we've got number one, Palantir; number two, Google Cloud; number three, Oracle. For Palantir, number one, 93% [growth].

00:53 — Google Cloud, up 82% to $24.8 billion. Like Palantir, Google Cloud has been on an upswing for the past few quarters. Oracle's cloud business, powere...

In today's Cloud Wars AI Minute, I look at how Microsoft is using Work IQ to make AI agents faster, more efficient, and potentially less expensive to operate.

Highlights

00:10 — Today, the topic is going to be Work IQ, and we're actually starting to see Microsoft make very interesting moves inside of Work IQ. We've already seen AI agents doing a lot of really interesting things, specifically around the Graph API. But the big difference here is Microsoft is really looking to monetize the ability for them to be able to do preloaded context, and so th...

In today's Cloud Wars Minute, I look at why Microsoft Work IQ could become increasingly valuable as enterprises deploy more specialized AI agents.

Highlights

00:12 — Microsoft's much-anticipated Work IQ is finally going into preview. Quick refresher: Work IQ is an intelligence layer that gives Copilot and AI agents context about how work happens across an organization.

00:27 — That understanding is grounded in business data from D365 and Power Platform. Cloud Wars CEO John Seifert has written up a great analysis of the launch and what it means for customers, which you can read now on Clou...

In today's Cloud Wars Minute, I unpack Sam Altman's comments on AI safety, security, and responsibility during his Dreamforce conversation with Mark Benioff.

Highlights

00:03 — I wanted to talk today a little bit about a discussion at Salesforce's recent Dreamforce event. It was a conversation with Salesforce CEO Mark Benioff and the CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman, and they talked specifically about this whole notion of AI safety, AI security, responsibility, trust, and the recent disaster that OpenAI had when one of its models went rogue and attacked a Hugging Face server.

00:39 — Altman and Anth...

In today's Cloud Wars Minute, I look at how Salesforce plans to unleash trapped data, make software do more of the work, and expand beyond its CRM roots.

Highlights

00:03 — Had some time to digest the big things that happened at Salesforce's recent Dreamforce event, and I wanted to share with you some thoughts of what I think are the five big takeaways from that big combination of Dreamforce, AI partnerships, and Salesforce moving in some new directions outside the traditional CRM space.

00:40 — The big promise that I took away from it was that it i...

In today's Cloud Wars Minute, I unpack Workday's move toward agentic contract lifecycle management and greater workflow automation.

Highlights

00:03 — Workday has announced that its next mission is to bring agentic AI across the entire contract lifecycle, instead of just AI for individual contract-related tasks. The company is launching the Workday Contract Workflow Agent, which is now in early access.

00:22 — But before I get into that, I want to share some other findings that kind of support Workday's intentions here. The company recently conducted a survey of nearly 7,000 professionals and found that 89% said their orga...

In today's Cloud Wars Minute, I examine Microsoft’s plans to more than triple its data center capacity as AI compute demand continues to soar.

Highlights

00:09 — According to reports, Microsoft plans to more than triple its data center capacity, from around 12 gigawatts today to about 38 gigawatts by 2032.

00:23 — So, right now, only about two gigawatts of Microsoft's current capacity is centered on AI-specific chips, but that's expected to grow to around one-third of the 38 gigawatts that it's planning. These data centers will be a mix of owned and leased capacity.

00:56 — Microsoft expects $50 billion...

In today's Cloud Wars Minute, I look at Microsoft’s new AI-powered Dynamics 365 Activate and what it could mean for Salesforce customers.

Highlights

00:11 — Microsoft has launched Dynamics 365 Activate. It's an AI-powered tool for migrating from Salesforce to Dynamics 365. In practice , this means analyzing a company's existing Salesforce setup, its data workflows, customizations, and integrations.

00:31 — And then mapping what should be migrated, simplified, or redesigned in Dynamics 365. Now, the goal is to reduce the cost, the complexity, and the friction of switching enterprise software. So this is just the start for Activate, and Microsoft plans...

In today's Cloud Wars Minute, I examine what Salesforce’s reported interest in Listen Labs could mean for the future of Agentforce.

Highlights

00:04 — Salesforce is reportedly in talks to acquire Listen Labs for close to $2 billion. Listen Labs is an AI-powered customer research company that uses AI tools to carry out really large-scale customer interviews and analyze those conversations.

00:23 — And it's got a pretty impressive client base, with companies like Microsoft, Perplexity, and Robinhood among its customers. So, why the interest from Salesforce? Because while it's one of the world's best-known CRM companies, it isn...

In today's Cloud Wars Minute, I recap some of the comments from CEO Marc Benioff's keynote at Dreamforce about the value of partnerships that enable extended, end-to-end capabilities for customers that a single company cannot provide alone.

Highlights

00:32 — CEO Marc Benioff said the arrival of Salesforce's new AIforce UI changes everything. No one company can handle all of the changes, so the corresponding expansion of partnerships that Salesforce undertook with these other great companies is a sign that customers want the simplicity, speed, and wide-ranging end-to-end solutions that will require all of the Cloud Wars To...

In today’s Cloud Wars AI Minute, I break down Gartner’s $2.59 trillion AI infrastructure spending figure and why rising compute and memory costs are shifting where the economics of the AI boom are landing.

Highlights

00:11 — Let's talk about this new Gartner number that just came out. Gartner is claiming that it's $2.59 trillion in CapEx expenditures that we're starting to see companies investing in the AI infrastructure space. Well, this is a very big number, and in an earlier video, I covered the fact that now we're starting to see cash flow not being able to kee...

In today’s Cloud Wars Agent and Copilot Minute, I break down Microsoft’s rollout of OpenAI’s GPT-6 Astra in Foundry and why enterprise controls could be a major differentiator for agentic AI.

Highlights

00:09 — So a quick recap before I get into this story: at the start of September, OpenAI launched GPT-6 Astra, which it described as the world's most intelligent and aligned model. Now, I'd urge you to check out the promotional video that accompanied that launch, because it's pretty mind-blowing in terms of what this model can do.

00:31 — It's been a shift aw...

In today’s Cloud Wars AI Minute, I break down the explosive growth in AI infrastructure spending and the growing pressure on hyperscalers as CapEx begins to exceed operating cash flow.

Highlights

0:14 — The thing I'm going to talk about today is the fact that we are now seeing over $700 billion in AI buildout as far as the investment in CapEx that's starting to be spent. Well, this is really an interesting situation because we're starting to see that the actual CapEx expenditures are exceeding the cash flow funding it at this point.

0:57 — Amazon is say...

In this Cloud Wars Minute, I dive deeper into comments from Oracle's Q1 earnings call on its philosophy, position, and strategy where agents meet applications.

Highlights

00:16 — I think Oracle has, by far, been speaking with the most clarity about what the interplay between apps and agents will be. This is incredibly important for customers. Just a couple of years ago, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella turned the whole apps world upside down when he suggested that the arrival of AI, agents, and copilots would hollow out applications.

00:46 — During the Q1 earnings call, CEO Mike Sici...

In today’s Cloud Wars AI Minute, I break down the rise of AI model fatigue and why the industry’s rapid release cycle may be moving faster than buyers can keep up.

Highlights

00:16 — The thing we’re going to talk about today is going to be model fatigue. And this is a real thing that’s starting to happen in the industry as these models keep coming out, and they come out so quick that you’re starting to see that the race of the releases are just outrunning the buyer’s ability to be able to con...

In today's Cloud Wars Minute, I look at why OpenAI is developing automated shutdown capabilities for its AI systems.

Highlights

00:04 — Weeks after disclosing that one of its AI tools had escaped a sandbox environment during testing, OpenAI has revealed yet more model safeguards. The company has understandably been under scrutiny in this area since the news broke about the rogue AI.

00:23 — OpenAI has reportedly told two House Democrats that it was developing automated shutdown capabilities for its AI systems. We're still waiting to hear more news on what these automated shutdown capabilities might be...

In today's Cloud Wars Minute, I review Oracle's Q1 cloud revenue and how its business model innovation could propel the growth rate to rise even higher.

Highlights

00:54 — Oracle reported Q1 cloud revenue of $11.6 billion, which is up 62%. $7.4 billion came from cloud infrastructure, with OCI having a growth rate of 121%. Oracle's RPO (remaining performance obligation), or its backlog that hasn't been recognized as revenue yet, jumped 46% to $664 billion. So, there's this enormous backlog waiting to be converted to revenue.

01:41 — Over the last several quarters, the OCI growth rate has been steadily, and often dramatically, risi...

In today's Cloud Wars Minute, I look at OpenAI’s decision on Cursor and what it reveals about the importance of mutual trust across the AI industry.

Highlights

00:04 — OpenAI has announced that it's planning to wind down its contract with Cursor following the company's acquisition by SpaceX, meaning OpenAI models will no longer be available through Cursor after November 12 this year.

00:22 — So, just a quick recap: Cursor is an AI-powered code editor that was acquired by SpaceX on August 14 this year. Now, OpenAI says it's made this decision because it can't be confident that S...

In today's Cloud Wars Minute, I explore Oracle’s blowout Q1 and the numbers signaling its growing power in AI and cloud infrastructure.

Highlights

00:03 — Yesterday, Oracle reported what I'm calling a blowout Q1, and let me talk about some of the key numbers here that formed that impression for me. Its overall cloud revenue was up 62% to over $11 billion. It breaks that out in two ways. Its cloud apps business grew about 10%, a little over $4 billion in revenue.

00:26 — But this is the star now: the cloud infrastructure business grew 121% to $7.4 billion. And that is, of...

In today’s Cloud Wars Minute, I look at how Google Cloud is combining AI agents, enterprise data, specialized skills, and partners to transform industry-specific solutions.

Highlights

00:04 — Over the last few years, Google Cloud has made different moves to address what I believe is an enormous opportunity in industry-specific solutions. It's gone about this a few different ways, always leaving the door open to work very closely with partners, whether that's integrators or ISVs. And, I think it's on to now the right way, as they have now gone industry-specific with Gemini Enterprise.

00:32 — It's p...