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Event Report: Capgemini Business to Planet Connect at Climate Week New York

Event Report: Capgemini Business to Planet Connect at Climate Week New York

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Five Trends From Capgemini's Business To Planet Event

On September 25th, 2024, Capgemini hosted delegates as part of Climate Week 2024 in New York.  Attendees learned how organizations and their leaders have transformed operations, built sustainable supply chains, and applied AI to improve their green strategies.

  1. Sustainability by design addresses root causes. Attendees and speakers reiterated how important product and service design plays a role in enabling sustainability.  From low carbon package design to efficient energy consumption, many organizations have achieved quantifiable achievements.
     
  2. Circular economy business models show promise.  In many sessions, concrete examples include product use extension, resource recovery, sharing platforms, resource efficient production, and recycling of waste to material.  These circular business models consider circular inputs, value chains, and market places.
     
  3. Pragmatic decarbonization lower costs. Investment has increased in increasing energy efficiency, developing lower carbon products, electrifying processes, replacing thermally-driven prices, and collaborating around the supply chains.  Users see a benefit with a comprehensive approach in reducing carbon emissions with consderation of cost, timing, impact, and feasibility.
     
  4. Data-driven AI supercharges sustainability.  Today's projects often involve a heavy digital and data component in not only quantifying inputs, but also reducing outputs.  The heavy use of sensors and computing at the edge enables both digital and AI capabilities.  Consequently, this has led to a rise in new  startups putting this data to good use in operational efficiency, regulatory compliance, and revenue growth.
    .
  5. Advances in climate tech create new opportunities to democratize action.  New climate tech startups focus on bringing hard earned advances to the masses.  Some examples include:
  • Altana - helping companies see intelligent maps of the global supply chain
  • BeZero - carbon credit rating systems
  • BioPlaster Research - seaweed based biodgradable packaging
  • Form Energy - long duration energy storage
  • Harvest Thermal - home heagina nd colling
  • InFarm - urban and vertical farming
  • OCN.Ai - a movement towards a healthier, more resilient ocean,
  • ZeroAvia - hydrogen fueled aviation

The Bottom Line: The Pendulum for Climate Solutions Has Shifted

Most attendees at Climate Week and at the Capgemini event shared similar insights on the climate for sustainability policies.  In the US, boards have pushed back on DEI and ESG. The combination of a public wary of greenwashing and a tighter economic environment has led to the deprioritization of green policies. Policies that show a green bottom line such as circular economy, waste reduction, and compliance have had the most success.

Your POV

How far along are you with your sustainabilty projects?  Are you ready to put these into full production?  What risks have you overcome?

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Disclosures

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Constellation Research recommends that readers consult a stock professional for their investment guidance. Investors should understand the potential conflicts of interest analysts might face. Constellation does not underwrite or own the securities of the companies the analysts cover. Analysts themselves sometimes own stocks in the companies they cover—either directly or indirectly, such as through employee stock-purchase pools in which they and their colleagues participate. As a general matter, investors should not rely solely on an analyst’s recommendation when deciding whether to buy, hold, or sell a stock. Instead, they should also do their own research—such as reading the prospectus for new companies or for public companies, the quarterly and annual reports filed with the SEC—to confirm whether a particular investment is appropriate for them in light of their individual financial circumstances.

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With Oracle Cloud win, AMD MI300X gains traction as Nvidia counterweight

With Oracle Cloud win, AMD MI300X gains traction as Nvidia counterweight

AMD is starting to land hyperscale deals for its AMD Instinct MI300X AI accelerators with ROCm open software and the wins portend more competition for Nvidia.

The chipmaker said that Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) chose AMD Instinct MI300X and ROCm for its latest OCI Computer Supercluster instance. The OCI Supercluster with AMD MI300X supports up to 16,384 GPUs in a single cluster.  OCI outlined AMD MI300X performance in a June blog. 

Oracle's cloud, AI plans are a master class in co-opetition

AMD's OCI win came a day after Vultr, a privately held cloud computing platform, said it will use MI300X and ROCm. Vultr focuses on AI workloads. At a recent Goldman Sachs investor conference, AMD CEO Lisa Su said the company is rolling out MI300X at scale. Su said:

"We launched MI300X in December. It has had just tremendous customer traction and customers have been really excited about it. We have several large hyperscalers, including Microsoft, Meta, Oracle, which have adopted MI300 as well as all of our OEM and ODM partners."

Su said AMD's biggest efforts have been on the software side with ROCm and working with large language models (LLMs). AMD has also built out its AI business with the acquisition of Silo AI and ZT Systems. AMD will follow up the MI300X with the MI325 in the fourth quarter and then the MI350 series and MI400. AMD will hold an event Oct. 10 to highlight its upcoming AI roadmap.

For now, AMD's AI processors are just getting traction, but enterprises will be happy to have a counterweight to Nvidia and some additional competition.

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IBM upgrades IBM Quantum Data Center with Heron

IBM upgrades IBM Quantum Data Center with Heron

IBM has installed its second-gen IBM Quantum Heron processors in its Poughkeepsie data center as it builds out its quantum infrastructure.

Big Blue launched its latest Heron quantum processor and IBM Quantum System Two late last year. Now those systems have been deployed in IBM's Quantum Data Center, the company has more than a dozen quantum computers in its fleet, which is available via IBM Cloud.

Constellation Research analyst Holger Mueller said the move to install the latest Heron quantum processor gives IBM's quantum efforts a big boost. Mueller said:

"IBM is showing the commercial viability with Heron, with its second system available for quantum use cases. This is great news for the quantum community as it can run new use cases on the largest set of available qubits. All eyes are now on how IBM will be connecting these Heron systems together.

Heron is the Lego block that IBM wants to use to put a massive quantum system together built on racks. A lot can go wrong, as we know with traditional racks - but IBM has HPC experience. It's good to see Heron - the quantum Lego block - is working."

IBM said its Heron-based quantum system offers a 16-fold improvement in performance and a 25-fold increase in speed over previous IBM systems. The company said its two Heron-based systems in addition to its other quantum systems mean its IBM Quantum Data Center can run quantum circuits better than classical systems simulating them.

Quantum computing has been developing quietly as the tech industry has been focused on generative AI. Ultimately, generative AI and AI could converge for computing breakthroughs.

Recent quantum computing developments include:

Big Blue said its quantum data center can push new algorithms forward to reach quantum advantage. IBM also touted its Qiskit software to program quantum computers.

IBM said it will continue to expand its IBM Quantum Data Center as it executes on its roadmap. The Poughkeepsie location is the global hub for IBM's Quantum Network, but it is expanding with a second quantum facility in Ehningen, Germany.

Here's a look at IBM's quantum roadmap (click to expand).

 

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Trust & Safety Challenges in the Age of AI

Trust & Safety Challenges in the Age of AI


I recently hosted a conversation about trust and safety with two leaders in the field: Kanti Kopalle, VP of Intuitive Operations and Automation at the information and cloud services giant Cognizant, and Louis-Victor de Franssu, co-founder of the content moderation platform Tremau. We were joined by Constellation Research founder & chair, Ray Wang.

The bumpy road from analog to digital

As the world becomes more digital and borders seem to be disappearing, one of the paradoxes is that sovereignty remains such a sticky issue. I see this as one of the many dimensions of humankind’s grand analogue to digital conversion. This “project” has been running for a couple of decades and has a long way to go. 

Online today, nations want to retain and enforce their own safety rules, as part of their national identity. In some regions, increasingly assertive regulators are holding multi-national digital platforms to account for meeting local media and content rules.

There are huge challenges for digital and cloud businesses operating globally. Automation of Trust & Safety controls is inevitable, for reasons of scale, cost and responsiveness.

So content moderation as a service is emerging.  Tremau was launched in 2021 to provide auto-moderation managed services to the global digital platforms. Co-founder Louis-Victor de Franssu was educated in the humanities and cut his teeth in financial risk management before joining the French government at a key period of digital regulation development. As Deputy to the French Ambassador for Digital Affairs, Louis-Victor worked on landmark initiatives including the Christchurch Call to Action to fight terrorist content online and the EU Digital Services Act (DSA).

He saw the pressure mounting on platforms and their ad hoc content governance. Content management with its challenges of scale, cultural and legal nuance, needed to shift to “the center of their operations” Victor-Louis told us. And so he helped launch Tremau.

The results of democratizing creativity

Prior to personal computing, laser printing and digital photography, media content was a very special type of product. You needed special equipment and complex skills in order to generate audio and video.

Kanti told us that seventy percent of content online now is user-generated. That’s a mind-blowing paradigm shift.

It’s been well documented how the democratization of content creation has overturned the businesses of print media, television, video rental, book sales and advertising.  But it seems to me that the implications for content regulation have taken longer to emerge.

The print and TV media industries in their heyday were largely monocultures. They became pretty cosy; compliance with public standards was mostly self-enforced.

But as media companies lost their monopoly over creation and distribution, it forced content moderation to come out into the open.

The benefits of objectivity

In our conversation, Kanti Kopalle reflected on the balance between human and automated content moderation. While automation is essential for scale, “we also need humans for the nuance” he said. “How do we seamlessly do the handover between an auto-moderation (using AI or some of the traditional techniques) to how a human overlays on top of that?”

Cognizant focuses on a balance between scale and nuance, aiming for consistency within the many and varied policy environments of its clients.

It strikes me that a less obvious benefit of automating content moderation is the potential for AI to fine-tune the rules deployed in different regions for what is acceptable and what’s not. With dozens of statutes to deal with, most of which are in flux, platforms trying to deliver millions of pieces of new content every day cannot hope to stay up to date without automation.

There is always going to be a judgement call about whether certain content is culturally acceptable and/or legal under prevailing norms in each place. If AI can make that call in a reasonably reliable manner, the efficiency dividends will be enormous. The algorithms don’t need to be perfect; after all, any human’s opinion about the acceptability of content is always debatable.

I can see advantages in making content moderation decisions purely mechanical, because the resulting disputes will be more technical than subjective, and may be easier to resolve systemically.

If the acceptability of content can be assessed algorithmically, then the algorithms can themselves be reviewed and improved in a methodical way.  

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Accenture strong Q4, sees IT budget savings funding genAI projects

Accenture strong Q4, sees IT budget savings funding genAI projects

Accenture CEO Julie Sweet said enterprises aren't increasing IT budgets for generative AI, but are looking to save money on technology and reallocate spending toward genAI and data projects.

Speaking on Accenture's fourth quarter earnings call, Sweet said IT budgets for 2025 are likely to be more of the same as enterprises are forming spending plans. She said:

"What we are seeing is the continued trend of trying to save money on IT to free up the spending on areas of GenAI. We haven't seen a change in overall spending. We'll see what the budgets come in January and February, but we're not expecting a big change. But what we also are seeing is that as they're saving money, they want to invest it in things like GenAI and data."

Sweet said the IT spending environment remains cautious and discretionary spending isn't likely to move higher.

Accenture ended the fourth quarter with $3 billion in genAI bookings for the fiscal year and expects another healthy increase in 2025. "We know there's clear demand. We're starting to see more of our clients move from proof-of-concept to larger implementations," said Sweet. "We're also continuing to see data pull-through."

In a nutshell, Sweet said that genAI and AI will be a lot like digital efforts in enterprises. At some point, AI will touch every unit, use case and operation in an enterprise. Sweet said Accenture generative AI deals were averaging around $1 million, but have moved to larger deals of $10 million or more.

She said:

"Like digital, AI is both the technology and a new way of working, and the full value will only come from strategies built on both productivity and growth. And it will be used in every part of the enterprise. We believe the introduction of GenAI signifies a transformative era that is set to drive growth for us and our clients over the next decade much like digital technology has in the last decade and continues to do so."

Accenture is also adopting genAI for productivity gains and to hone its services.

Q4, fiscal 2024 results

Accenture reported better-than-expected fourth quarter earnings of $2.66 a share on revenue of $16.4 billion, up 3% from a year ago. Non-GAAP earnings were $2.79 a share.

Generative AI new bookings for the fourth quarter were $1 billion.

For fiscal 2024, Accenture reported earnings of $11.44 a share on revenue of $64.9 billion, up 1% from a year ago.

As for the outlook, Accenture projected fiscal 2025 revenue growth of 3% to 6% in local currency and earnings of $12.55 a share to $12.91 a share.

Accenture has 774,000 employees.

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CFOs in Q3 hold optimism, but cautious about spending plans

CFOs in Q3 hold optimism, but cautious about spending plans

A pair of CFO surveys highlight how finance chiefs remain optimistic about the economy, but are cautious about investment plans due to uncertainty.

Duke University's Fuqua School of Business and the Federal Reserve Banks of Richmond and Atlanta released its third quarter The CFO Survey, which has 450 respondents.

According to The CFO Survey, companies are still expecting a soft landing in the economy and plan to invest in infrastructure. However, 30% of firms are postponing, scaling down or canceling investment plans due to uncertainty about the US elections.

CFOs were more concerned about demand, sales and revenue in the third quarter than the second quarter. Concerns about inflation, labor and monetary policy receded in the third quarter compared to the second quarter.

The CFO Survey landed a week after Deloitte released its third quarter CFO Signals survey, which had 200 respondents from companies with at least $1 billion in revenue.

Deloitte said, "finance chiefs expressed concern about how talent shortages, wage inflation, and recent regulatory changes and proposals could impact their ability to manage and retain a skilled workforce."

The CFO Signals survey found that CFOs were also more cautious about spending. Deloitte found that CFOs were expecting 2024 earnings growth of 2.1%, less than the two-year survey average of 4.7%. CFOs also expected a slowdown in capital spending with growth of 3.4% in the third quarter, down from 6.2% a year ago.

Just 14% of CFOs rate the current North American economy as good, and only 19% see it improving in a year, according to Deloitte's CFO Signals survey.

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Micron Technology: Q4, 2025 outlook driven by AI data center boom

Micron Technology: Q4, 2025 outlook driven by AI data center boom

For Micron Technology more memory due to data center demand and AI workloads is going to mean more money.

The company reported better-than-expected fourth quarter results due to a boom in data center demand. Like other vendors in the infrastructure space, Micron Technology is riding the AI wave. Micron Technology reported record data center revenue and saw strong demand for its data center DRAM and high bandwidth memory as well as data center SSD sales.

Micron Technology delivered fourth-quarter net income of $887 million, or 79 cents a share, on revenue of $7.75 billion, up 93% from $4 billion in the same quarter a year ago. Non-GAAP earnings were $1.18 a share. Wall Street was expecting non-GAAP fourth quarter earnings of $1.11 a share on revenue of $7.65 billion.

As for the outlook, Micron Technology said first quarter revenue will be about $8.7 billion, well ahead of Wall Street estimates of $8.21 billion. Non-GAAP earnings for the first quarter are expected to be $1.74 a share compared to estimates of $1.54 a share.

In prepared remarks, CEO Sanjay Mehrotra said:

“Robust data center demand is exceeding our leading-edge node supply and driving overall healthy supply-demand dynamics. As we move through calendar 2025, we expect a broadening of demand drivers, complementing strong demand in the data center. We are making investments to support artificial intelligence (AI)-driven demand, and our manufacturing network is well positioned to execute on these opportunities. We look forward to delivering a substantial revenue record with significantly improved profitability in fiscal 2025, beginning with our guidance for record quarterly revenue in fiscal Q1."

Constellation Research analyst Holger Mueller said:

"Micron is on a roll, almost doubling its revenue – and showing a stark contrast to YoY performance – where the company had an operating loss of close to  $1.5 billion – and now an operating profit of more than $1.5 billion - all a sign of high demand of course fueled by AI to its high performance memory chips. Kudos to Sanjay Mehrotra to have the intestinal fortitude to keep the cost base and investment base intact. Micron is riding the chip rollercoaster, which for Micron is on the way up."

Other key points from Micron Technology:

  • Data center demand is being driven by AI servers, but there's a refresh cycle for traditional servers that's just starting.
  • The high-bandwidth memory (HBM) total available market is expected to top $25 billion in 2025, up from about $4 billion in 2023.
  • "Our HBM is sold out for calendar 2024 and 2025, with pricing already determined for this time frame," said Mehrotra. "In calendar 2025 and 2026, we will have a more diversified HBM revenue profile as we have won business across a broad range of HBM customers."
  • Micron said data center SSDs topped $1 billion in sales in the fourth quarter.
  • PC makers have built up inventory due to rising memory prices and AI PCs, but Micron expects a better inventory picture by spring of 2025.
  • Micron expects to benefit as PC makers move to a minimum of 16GB of DRAM for value PCs and 32GB to 64GB for higher priced PCs. The same memory buildout is expected for the smartphone market too.
  • For fiscal 2024, Micron reported net income of $778 million, or 70 cents a share, on revenue of $25.11 billion, up from $15.54 billion a year ago.

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Meta AI upgraded with Llama 3.2 models as Meta melds AI, AR, spatial computing

Meta AI upgraded with Llama 3.2 models as Meta melds AI, AR, spatial computing

Meta has updated Meta AI with its Llama 3.2 models, launched new Ray Ban smart glasses, Meta Quest 3S and Orion, the company's first augmented reality glasses.

With the moves, announced at Meta Connect, the company is looking to meld AI, augmented reality and spatial computing. Meta also outlined Meta AI features that can be useful to businesses.

Meta said that more than 400 million people use Meta AI across its portfolio--Facebook, Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp--on a monthly basis with 185 million using it each week. Llama 3.2 will give Meta AI multimodal features.

Here's a look at what's new for Meta AI:

  • Meta AI can be prompted by voice and it'll respond with answers out loud with different voice options.
  • Meta AI will answer questions about photos and edit them. Meta AI can also share AI-generated images and suggest captions.
  • A Meta AI translation tool will be tested with automatic dubbing and lip synching for creators.
  • Businesses can use Meta AI to set up AIs that talk to customers, offer support and drive sales. Meta also added that advertisers have used Meta genAI tools to create more than 15 million ads in the last month.

Meta's plan for Meta AI is to use its platform and hardware ecosystem to drive usage. For instance, Ray Ban Meta glasses will be able to record and send voice messages on WhatsApp and Messenger, get video help and suggest items and places when you're out.

The company also said that Meta AI will play a role in Meta Quest 3S, its mixed-reality headset. Meta Quest 3S has the same performance as Meta Quest 3, but at a lower price point of $299.99. Meta also said it has revamped its Meta Horizon OS to support 2D apps, adding travel mode and improving Meta AI on the device with a Hey Meta wake word. Meta Quest 3 prices for the 512GB version will drop from $649.99 to $499.99.

Meta's Orion glasses aim to build off of what the company has learned from the Ray Ban partnership, but the device will only be available to Meta employees and "select external audiences." Orion has a large field of view in the smallest AR form factor so far.

Meta AI will also run on Orion to add visualizations to the physical world. The company noted:

"While Orion won’t make its way into the hands of consumers, make no mistake: this is not a research prototype. It’s one of the most polished product prototypes we’ve ever developed and is truly representative of something that could ship to consumers. Rather than rushing to put it on shelves, we decided to focus on internal development first, which means we can keep building quickly and continue to push the boundaries of the technology, helping us arrive at an even better consumer product faster."

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Verint builds out CX bots, analytics suite as AI approach resonates

Verint builds out CX bots, analytics suite as AI approach resonates

Verint said it expanded its analytics suite for contact centers as it launched a series of bots designed to automate customer experience.

At its Engage conference this week, Verint, which bills itself a CX Automation Company, launched the following:

  • The expansion of Verint Data Hub, which unifies behavioral data across customer touchpoints, to include the new Verint Genie Bot in the company's speech analytics platform as well as the Verint Data Insight Bot. The idea is to enable analysts to deliver CX insights faster by having a natural language conversation with the Verint analytics platform.
  • Verint Knowledge Automation Bot, which joins the company's portfolio of Agent Copilot Bots. The Verint Knowledge Automation Bot searches across enterprise content and uses generative AI to summarize results for human agents.

During Verint's recent second quarter earnings call, CEO Dan Bodner said contact centers are in the early stages of adopting AI. "We believe the AI opportunity in the contact center market is very large. The CX industry is spending about $2 trillion annually on labor costs and brands are seeking AI-powered bots that can deliver tangible business outcomes," he said. "AI adoption in our market is currently in its early stages."

Verint's stack includes the Verint Open Platform, Verint Da Vinci, a factory for specialized bots and then ongoing training, and the Data Hub. Verint launched its Open Platform a year ago with 40 AI bots. Bodner added that customers are typically buying a few bots and then scaling with returns.

This over-the-top hybrid strategy for Verint is working out since enterprises can get rolling in weeks instead of months. Verint said it is seeing bot consumption gains as enterprise realize they can deploy one for a use case and then scale without deciding on a complete platform overhaul.

Constellation Research analyst Liz Miller said:

"Verint's AI approach has been one that encourages customers to start their AI journey from right where they stand, selecting a singular challenge or need to address and deploying preconfigured Bots to address those very specific needs. One example of this is their newly revealed "Genie Bot" which will be released as a Beta for now.

This bot addresses the reality in the contact center that there is more business intelligence demands than resources as analytics and operations teams are often spread thin asked to dive deep into the data and answer big "why" questions around interactions and experiences. With the Bot, agents and supervisors will be able to interrogate data themselves to better understand where and how interactions can be improved, even identify trends in agent performance that can be proactively addressed with training or upskilling. This understanding can then be turned into data rich slides to share insights and intelligence with peers and leadership."

Bodner said:

"It's the very beginning of AI impacting the capacity. It's also interesting that from those customers that now have the capacity increased, they’re not just choosing to reduce agent count, some of them are choosing to dedicate agents to improve customer retention, and some of them are actually dedicating agents to increased sales. So, we see really an interesting trend. AI can turn the contact center from a service center to a revenue generating center."

What remains to be seen is how the CX AI agent/bot market develops. Verint is in a competitive market and giants like Google Cloud are getting into the contact center space. OpenAI and T-Mobile also announced a genAI CX partnership. Verint's Bodner argued that the company is in a good position because it is neutral and can put customers on an AI journey quickly and generate cost savings.

Verint said its fiscal year 2025 revenue will be $933 million with non-GAAP earnings of $2.90 a share. Verint's AI bookings in the second quarter increased more than 40%. 

Bodner said:

"There are a lot of companies that are now attracted to the contact center market because obviously there’s a growing TAM and it looks like a great opportunity to for more automation based on Gen AI. But we see companies coming to the market with Gen AI and then IT is struggling to really take that Gen AI technology and create real business outcomes.

And that’s true for the hyperscalers, but also for smaller companies who just want to deliver Gen AI tools. And there’s a big difference between a generic Gen AI model and basically to train the model, to embed the model into existing workflow based on the contact center expertise that we have."

 

 

 

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Agentic AI, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, Dreamforce | ConstellationTV Episode 89

Agentic AI, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, Dreamforce | ConstellationTV Episode 89

ConstellationTV episode 89 just dropped! 📺 Co-hosts Martin Schneider and Larry Dignan discuss the latest #tech news, focusing on Salesforce and its Dreamforce announcements around the integration of agentic #AI and the upgraded data #cloud supporting unstructured #data.

Then Larry interviews Constellation analyst Holger Mueller about Oracle's success with its #cloud infrastructure, #AI capabilities, and strategic partnerships, including Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft. Holger also touches on Workday's AI strategy and public cloud adoption.

🎙 Finally, watch a live interview from Constellation's #AIF24NYC with Tina Chakrabarty from Sanofi, who emphasizes data literacy and a balanced approach to AI development in Sanofi's 2025 strategies.

00:00 - Meet the hosts
01:30 - #Enterprise tech news updates (Dreamforce updates, agentic AI)
13:05 - Oracle and Workday analysis with Holger Mueller
24:00 - 2025 AI strategies with Sanofi's Tina Chakrabarty
27:43 - Bloopers!

ConstellationTV is a bi-weekly Web series hosted by Constellation analysts, tune in live at 9:00 a.m. PT/ 12:00 p.m. ET every other Wednesday!

On ConstellationTV <iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/SMb-SGZMKqo?si=Hrr0RVCeC63S0u25" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe>