BT150 zeitgeist: AI agent questions, SaaS ate the opex and job woes
AI agents are going to run into problems with standards, operating budgets are being squeezed by SaaS vendors and the war for talent is going to get interesting.

Data to decisions examines the enablement of data-driven decisions across organizations. Holistic, data-informed decisions require a multi-disciplinary approach that combines performance monitoring with traditional business intelligence and analytic technologies. In addition, data-driven decisions are increasingly delivered in the context of business applications rather than in separate, analytic interfaces.
AI agents are going to run into problems with standards, operating budgets are being squeezed by SaaS vendors and the war for talent is going to get interesting.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang poked holes in all the arguments against the company during the company's third quarter conference call. Concerns about power, costs, LLMs hitting a wall and hyperscale cloud providers digesting all the GPUs already acquired were all brush aside.
Amazon will invest another $4 billion in Anthropic to bring its total investment to $8 billion. Anthropic will also use AWS as its primary training partner and use AWS Trainium and Inferentia processors to deploy its largest large language models.
Elastic upped its outlook for the third quarter following better-than-expected second quarter results as its plan to extend from search into generative AI paid off.
Palo Alto Networks reported better-than-expected first quarter results and said that it is benefiting from enterprises looking to consolidate cybersecurity vendors. Palo Alto Networks focused on a "platformization" strategy designed to land more wallet share on its platform.
Nvidia reported a better-than-expected third quarter, raised its outlook and said that Blackwell shipments will begin in the fourth quarter. Data center revenue in the third quarter was up 112% from a year ago.
Snowflake said it has inked a multi-year deal to bring Anthropic's Claude models to Snowflake Cortex AI. Anthropic's Claude will be a part of Snowflake Intelligence and Cortex Analyst. The company also reported strong third quarter earnings.
LogicMonitor raised $800 million in a move that's designed to accelerate its observability growth, fund mergers and acquisitions and expand into new markets and industries.
Walmart's ongoing bets in technology, AI, automation and omnichannel customer experiences are paying off as the retailer lands more share among higher-income shoppers.
Hitachi Vantara in recent weeks has built out its AI infrastructure offerings with the aim of expanding its market share and genAI footprint in data centers.
Microsoft rolled out more than 80 new products and features to round out its Copilot and artificial intelligence stack as it moved to position itself as an early enterprise AI leader and a platform that can provide model choices.
Nvidia said that it is working with Google Quantum AI to design quantum computing AI processors. The quantum computing partnership with Google was part of a series of Nvidia announcements at the SC24 conference in Atlanta.