Larry Dignan

Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights Constellation Research

About Larry Dignan: Dignan was most recently Celonis Media’s Editor-in-Chief, where he sat at the intersection of media and marketing. He is the former Editor-in-Chief of ZDNet and has covered the technology industry and transformation trends for more than two decades, publishing articles in CNET, Knowledge@Wharton, Wall Street Week, Interactive Week, The New York Times, and Financial Planning. He is also an Adjunct Professor at Temple University and a member of the Advisory Board for The Fox Business School's Institute of Business and Information Technology.  Constellation Insights does the following: Cover the buy side and sell side of enterprise tech with news, analysis, profiles, interviews, and event coverage of vendors, as well as Constellation Research's community and…...

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This post first appeared in the Constellation Insight newsletter, which features bespoke content weekly.

PepsiCo's second quarter earnings were better than expected, but the real story is that its transformation efforts for processes, supply chain, technology and business services have gone so well it has good visibility into 2024.

The company's quarterly report featured top and bottom line results ahead of estimates, a solid third quarter outlook and this tidbit about 2024. For the year ahead, PepsiCo in prepared remarks noted that the company will be at the upper end of its long-term ranges for organic revenue growth of 4% to 6% and earnings per share growth in the high single digits.

Companies usually don't provide their annual outlooks until they report first quarter results in January and February.

Analysts quickly asked PepsiCo CEO Ramon Laguarta and CFO Hugh Johnston what gave the company confidence in a 2024 outlook given a variety of wild cards ranging from the financial health of the consumer to inflation to the effect of obesity drugs on snacking and beverage sales. The short answer is that PepsiCo has been using technology and process improvement to drive costs lower.

Johnston said:

"We've put even higher focus than we've had in the past on driving productivity and driving out unnecessary costs using the tools that we've discussed, the investments in digitalization, the investments in global business services, the investment in driving out overlaps within the organization. Because that work has been going on for a longer period of time, I think that gave us an earlier line of sight into what we would expect our cost outcome to be for next year."

Laguarta added that PepsiCo is seeing "long-term structural tailwinds of our categories" including demographics, urbanization and a lifestyle that's revolving around snacking.

Simply put, it's easier to forecast business when you have your costs under control and continual efficiency improvement. PepsiCo has an initiative called pep+ (PepsiCo Positive) that features product innovation, new markets and a lot of cost management. In a nutshell, PepsiCo has been carrying out the following transformation efforts.

• Cost management through supply chain and distribution efficiencies.
• Identifying waste throughout its value chain.
• Leveraging global business services to cut general and administrative expenses.
• Using analytics, process mining and data to speed up decisions, optimize routes and execute in stores.
• Modernizing IT systems across businesses and countries.

That transformation is enabling PepsiCo to adapt and execute no matter what the market brings.

In February at the Consumer Analyst Group of New York (CAGNY) conference, PepsiCo outlined its transformation. Laguarta noted that PepsiCo set out in 2019 to become more agile and efficient while innovating in its categories. The company invested in e-commerce and direct-to-consumer and tools that improve how PepsiCo works.

Laguarta said PepsiCo has been delivering $1 billion in productivity savings a year for the last four years by consolidating and connecting systems, leveraging automation amid labor shortages and optimizing routes. Laguarta said:

"We've invested a lot in AI, we've invested a lot of Internet of Things, automation, et cetera, to drive the output. I would maybe go deeper into what I think is one of the most important competitive advantages of our company is the fact that we get to the point of sale ourselves. And we've been investing in technology and information for our salesmen to optimize the portfolio with precision store by store. So, we can read who lives around that store, who buys in that store, and our salesmen have that information to optimize the planogram on that particular store to maximize the throughput. And that has been a pretty powerful tool.

I think we're only scratching the surface."

As for the tech stack, PepsiCo has appeared as a reference account for Salesforce, SAP, ServiceNow and Snowflake among others.

PepsiCo is also a Celonis customer and has used process mining for multiple processes including accounts receivable, sales orders, distribution and inventory to name a few. PepsiCo is also migrating to SAP S4/HANA and was a featured customer at SAP Sapphire 2023. Johnston said in February at the CAGNY investment conference that "we're all going through the upgrade as SAP is moving to the cloud, moving to S/4HANA."

That migration isn't unique in consumer product goods since SAP is forcing the cloud move, but Johnston noted there are benefits in that you have more harmonized data for future platforms and analysis for supply chain, logistics and store optimization. "There's a ton of power once you get the data right," he said.

Here are two slides that sum up PepsiCo's core transformation technologies.

More from the buy side:

• Domino's Pizza eyes generative AI, Microsoft and Uber tech to drive growth
• JPMorgan Chase: Why we're the biggest tech spender in banking
• Walmart Chief Sustainability Officer: ESG is integrated into operations, business
• AI Meets Mental Health Assessments: How Futures Recovery Healthcare, Aiberry Co-innovated
• How Magnox is Transforming Employee Experience
• Cenlar's Chief Digital Officer Josh Reicher on automation, AI and staying ahead
• Bank of America: Why 'digital superiority' matters
• Rivian: AI, data power customer experiences
• How JetBlue is leveraging AI, LLMs to be 'most data-driven airline in the world'
• Hyundai Motor's innovation strategy: What we can learn
• How Home Depot blends art and science of customer experience (PDF)
• JPMorgan Chase: Digital Transformation, AI and Data Strategy Sets Up Generative AI
• AI is everywhere including your supermarket, homebuilder and soup
• Goldman Sachs CIO Marco Argenti on AI, data, mental models for disruption
• Enterprise tech buyers wary of generative AI hype, security
• Walmart, Target highlight intersection of supply chain, customer experience
• How 4 CEOs are approaching generative AI use cases in their companies
• Zillow, Redfin aim to use OpenAI ChatGPT-4 to find your next house
• Starbucks’ new CEO: ‘We can enhance our tech stack to lower costs and reinvest’
• Uber aims to press its 'data advantage' for AI, model training

Larry Dignan

Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights Constellation Research

About Larry Dignan: Dignan was most recently Celonis Media’s Editor-in-Chief, where he sat at the intersection of media and marketing. He is the former Editor-in-Chief of ZDNet and has covered the technology industry and transformation trends for more than two decades, publishing articles in CNET, Knowledge@Wharton, Wall Street Week, Interactive Week, The New York Times, and Financial Planning. He is also an Adjunct Professor at Temple University and a member of the Advisory Board for The Fox Business School's Institute of Business and Information Technology.  Constellation Insights does the following: Cover the buy side and sell side of enterprise tech with news, analysis, profiles, interviews, and event coverage of vendors, as well as Constellation Research's community and…...

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Domino's Pizza is known as a tech savvy company that has been ahead of the mobile and data curves and now it plans to leverage integration with Uber Eats, revamp its loyalty program and reinvent its customer experience and boost productivity with generative AI.

The company has been transforming from a pizza maker with delivery service to a food delivery platform. CEO Russell Weiner said on Domino's Pizza's third quarter earnings call that its "initiatives are designed to create significant shareholder value in the months and years ahead."

According to Domino's, these new experiences will "lead to loyal customers who will provide considerable lifetime value for our brand and our company." Domino's has more than 6,700 US stores and about $4.5 billion in annual sales with two-third of revenue coming from digital channels.

Here's a look at what Domino's is cooking up:

Revamped loyalty program. For firms like Domino's loyalty programs are key to drive customer engagement. The company changed its Domino's Rewards levels to drive more consumption by lowering spend thresholds and the point system to redeem items. "This change will make us even more competitive in the carryout segment where ticket tends to be lower," said Weiner, who added that the data shows higher engagement.

Domino's also said that customers who use the company's e-commerce platform will automatically earn an Emergency Pizza. 

Also see: Starbucks’ new CEO: ‘We can enhance our tech stack to lower costs and reinvest’

Uber Eats integration. In July, Domino's and Uber announced they would integrate platforms. The idea was to drive sales through delivery orders. For Domino's the move was a reversal given it had previously shunned delivery aggregators. In its regulatory filings, Domino's cited delivery aggregators as competitors along with traditional rivals.

Weiner said that "our integration into the Uber Eats platform is proceeding as planned." Uber Eats will be to deliver from Domino's US stores by the end of the year. He said:

"We expect this initiative will drive incremental delivery volume from new customers, increase our share of the pizza delivery market and create stronger economics for our company and franchisees. This will begin in a measurable way in the first quarter of 2024. We want to exceed the expectations that the incremental customers will get through Domino's Rewards and Uber Eats."

Right now, Weiner said it is piloting the integration to work out "the handshake between two really large platforms." "We already deliver more pizzas than anyone in the country, and so as we take on these incremental orders, we just need to make sure that technology works. That's what we're doing now and then certainly making sure the staffing is right, and we're working with Uber and our franchisees to do that," said Weiner.

Microsoft partnership on generative AI. In October, Domino's announced it is partnering with Microsoft on generative AI to "create the next generation of pizza ordering and operations technology."

Weiner said:

"Our teams are focused on two important goals: first, transforming customer experiences by enhancing the ordering process through personalization and simplification; and then second, streamlining operations and quality control with more predictive tools."

These projects are expected to drive sales starting in the fourth quarter and 2024 and drive a more efficient model for the company.

For Domino's, the Microsoft partnership is also about choosing to buy rather than build. Domino's historically had invested in technology at the expense of product innovation. Today, Domino's wants to be more product focused with proprietary technology driving competitive advantage. Weiner said:

"As you look back in the history of Domino's, we certainly have built more things internally when it comes to competitive points of difference. I think we've always said, you can't outsource a competitive point of difference. There's going to be a competitive point of difference with generative AI solutions, and we think we've got the resources and the pizza expertise internally.

What we've got with Microsoft is the best in the field externally. And so, you take those two things together, and it's not just cost, it's also an impact."

"This is kind of a hybrid here, best-in-class, both best-in-class pizza, best-in-class AI."

Larry Dignan

Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights Constellation Research

About Larry Dignan: Dignan was most recently Celonis Media’s Editor-in-Chief, where he sat at the intersection of media and marketing. He is the former Editor-in-Chief of ZDNet and has covered the technology industry and transformation trends for more than two decades, publishing articles in CNET, Knowledge@Wharton, Wall Street Week, Interactive Week, The New York Times, and Financial Planning. He is also an Adjunct Professor at Temple University and a member of the Advisory Board for The Fox Business School's Institute of Business and Information Technology.  Constellation Insights does the following: Cover the buy side and sell side of enterprise tech with news, analysis, profiles, interviews, and event coverage of vendors, as well as Constellation Research's community and…...

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JPMorgan Chase executives were asked a simple question during its third quarter earnings conference call: What's the benefit of spending the most on technology in the banking industry? The answer illustrates how every company is a tech company to stay relevant and customer engagement has to span multiple channels.

The banking giant is known as a big spender on technology. Some of this spending is to maintain infrastructure, but a lot of it is tied to automating processes, engaging customers and investing in artificial intelligence. For the AI strategy at JPMorgan Chase, see our recent customer story. View full PDF

Here are some of the reasons JPMorgan thinks it's wise to spend heavily on IT.

Customer engagement. CFO Jeremy Barnum answered the technology spending question with a digital customer lens. JPMorgan Chase has more than 53 million mobile consumer banking customers. Barnum noted that digital engagement is higher than the overall growth in customer accounts. Digital-only customers remain a small percentage of the overall customer base.

Barnum said:

"What are the benefits of being the biggest tech spender? I just think it's sort of mandatory right? I mean, we're a big and very technology-centric business, and the world is competitive. And everything is changing. Younger generations have different expectations, and we have to be nimble, and we have to be on our front foot. And otherwise, we risk getting severely disrupted."

Competition. JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon said the bank has to invest in technology to stay relevant. He said Wells Fargo is an obvious competitor, but there are non-traditional rivals too like Apple, Stripe, Chime and Dave too. "There’s a lot of people coming up with these businesses in different ways. Some have been quite successful, like Stripe in payments. And so, we want to be very good and very competitive," said Dimon.

AI and the customer experience. Dimon was asked about JPMorgan Chase's AI investment and whether the bank could control the front-end customer experience. Dimon said AI is a tool that goes well beyond being the front-end of an app.

Dimon said:

"Banks have an extraordinary amount of proprietary data in addition to a large language model of public data. AI is an extraordinarily good tool to use. And there are multiple types of AI. So, we use AI for risk, fraud, marketing, prospecting. The management team is getting better and better at using data to do a better job of reducing errors, to serve clients better and to have a salesperson with co-pilots. We simply have to do it. Does it create opportunity for disruptors to come in? Yeah, of course. That’s always been true with technology, but we'll be quite good at it."

Spending going forward. Barnum said the company is still going through the budget process for the year ahead, but IT spending will likely be up. However, much of that technology spending is for futureproofing as well as increasing returns. "We're always very focused on cost. You can be rest assured of that. That discipline internally is as aggressive as ever as we go through the budget cycle. But there are long-term plays," said Barnum.

Larry Dignan

Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights Constellation Research

About Larry Dignan: Dignan was most recently Celonis Media’s Editor-in-Chief, where he sat at the intersection of media and marketing. He is the former Editor-in-Chief of ZDNet and has covered the technology industry and transformation trends for more than two decades, publishing articles in CNET, Knowledge@Wharton, Wall Street Week, Interactive Week, The New York Times, and Financial Planning. He is also an Adjunct Professor at Temple University and a member of the Advisory Board for The Fox Business School's Institute of Business and Information Technology.  Constellation Insights does the following: Cover the buy side and sell side of enterprise tech with news, analysis, profiles, interviews, and event coverage of vendors, as well as Constellation Research's community and…...

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Each week I comb through Constellation Research's DisrupTV transcripts and videos for insights, news nuggets and items that can provide context on enterprise trends and topics.

What has come from this exercise--aside from a bevy of articles--is a bevy of life and work lessons. DisrupTV at times is one part book club and one part wisdom dispenser with a dash of professional career therapy. To that end, I'm going to start aggregating things from DisrupTV that made me go hmm and may not fit with the daily enterprise tech grind.

Here's the running list:

Mike Hayes, Chief Operating Officer, VMware; Author, Never Enough: A Navy SEAL Commander on Living a Life of Excellence, Agility, and Meaning.

• "Life is really about people, whether you're in the Seals, White House, Boardroom or any enterprise of any size."
• "Wisdom is a series of learnings from a bunch of things you wish you could have done differently or wish came out differently."
• "You're only excellent if you know, you're never excellent enough."
• I think it's so incredibly important to really think about doing more for others than self. And when you solve hard problems, then you share in the victory and in the win and whether it's life or in business, you share in the economic value that you create.
• "In the Seals, we could be absolutely up or absolutely down. But what matters the most is relativism because on any team, somebody is always relatively up and somebody else is always relatively down. The person who's relatively up has to reach in to help the person who's relatively down today because tomorrow I'm gonna be the one who's down. In the words of my grandfather, when you are down, the best thing to do is find somebody who else is further down than you are and pull them up."
• "When somebody succeeds or fails, you can't yet know if they failed. You have to go down the logic tree one more node and say, did you fail and learn? If you failed and learned, then you succeeded."
• "Agility is like one of those words, like leadership, where everybody's got a different definition and it never sounds quite right because there's always something that's missing. My thoughts about agility are really like the way Seals plan for missions. We go into a mission with a plan, but the plan from the beginning is for that plan to change. What I describe is that there are no playbooks. You have one playbook and it's called the meta playbook, which is the playbook for how to create the playbook in the moment. You can have 100 playbooks and that's not gonna win anything. You need one playbook. It's how do you define the vision, the outcome you want and then the strategy, which is how you're gonna get there. Then the execution."
• "How do you self-actualize? Do you need to be the one on the stage getting the award or would you rather have one of your people getting recognized? I very, very deeply, would rather have people around me be recognized because their success is my success. And I don't need my name up in lights. And so as soon as you get to the point of your career where you no longer need any sort of credit because you have that confidence that the recognition just doesn't matter that liberates you to really think differently."
• "I think being intrusive is so important. I've buried about 70 friends and unfortunately many of them have died by suicide. Unfortunately, I've become very comfortable asking people if they've ever considered things like harm to self. Those aren't easy conversations and 99 times out of 100 it's cringy and awkward. But I'll take 99 awkwards for one yes."

David Dodson, Author of The Managers Handbook

• "The manager's handbook is not about how I ran companies. It happens to be how I wish I had run companies, but it was really the curation of this observation that I made about other managers. The differentiating factors among the people who are great at getting things done and everybody else was really skill based. And there were no exceptions.
• "I was looking at people like, you know, Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos, People think they have x-ray vision, and they can see around corners and they're larger than life, but they didn't actually have red capes. They just mastered the basics and then they made sure their organizations mastered the basics."
• "Call on people in reverse order of seniority. If you really want to pull out the wisdom of the crowd and get the benefit of having everybody in the room together that is one of the like easiest things, you can do."
• "Walk behind the tractor comes from where I grew up. I grew up in rural Colorado. My dad manufactured farm equipment and you sell farm equipment through farm dealers. He never sold his equipment directly to the end user. He'd follow them home and essentially walk behind the tractor to know what the customers are about."

Frances Frei and Anne Morriss, authors of Move Fast & Fix Things

Frei:

• "You can accelerate excellence if you learn how to go fast. In accelerating excellence, moving fast and fixing things can go even faster than reckless disruption."

Morriss:

• "I think speed's bad reputation was confusing people. One of the main lessons of our work is that the most effective leaders know they're solving problems at an accelerated pace, but they're
• also taking care of their customers and employees and shareholders along the way. We wanted to get the word out because this ethos of moving fast and breaking things is still out there and still influencing the decisions that builders and operators are making."

Frei:

• "Create a good enough plan. And a good enough plan is distinct from the perfect plan, which is this fantastical creature that's actually never existed in the wild."
• "You are more likely to trust me if you experience my authenticity while also experiencing my logic, while also experiencing my empathy. And it's only when you experience all three that you'll have the involuntary reaction of trusting me. And every single time you don't trust me, it will be because of one of those three drivers."
• "Here are a couple of classic mistakes companies make. They're like, ok, I've done all of the things I'm supposed to, I'm gonna go fast. So now I'm gonna try to be great at everything. Here's what we can guarantee. If you try to be great at everything, you will end up with exhausted mediocrity."

Morriss:

• "We love middle management as a place to go and learn and diagnose what's not working in the organization. It's a really powerful stakeholder group because they usually have all the information about what's happening. So, it's often the first place that will go."

Lisa Sun, Author of GRAVITAS: The 8 Strengths That Redefine Confidence

• "Society has defined confidence as a behavior. When someone says we're confident it's standing on a stage, speaking up, being assertive, being in command. And if you look up the word, I, I challenge everyone to go look it up in the Oxford English dictionary. Confidence is an understanding and appreciation of your own abilities. There's nothing about swagger, there's nothing about bravado. This is why sometimes the quietest person in the room is often the one that you're saying that person has gravitas."
• "In our adolescence, there are six forces that start to hold us back. We start to become self-aware, and we start to doubt ourselves. As adults, confidence actually requires us to make a choice to see the best in ourselves and to channel a mindset that then drives behaviors."
• "Oftentimes when people tell you to be more confident, they're asking you to be in command or asking you to perform and be extroverted and charismatic. Less than 26% of people in our data set had those two qualities. Does that mean 80% of us aren't allowed to feel good about ourselves? Have we not valued other traits?”
• “We do undervalue things like achieving and knowing because we expect people to perform in leading and performing. By the way, if we were all leaders and performers, nothing would get done."

Larry Dignan

Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights Constellation Research

About Larry Dignan: Dignan was most recently Celonis Media’s Editor-in-Chief, where he sat at the intersection of media and marketing. He is the former Editor-in-Chief of ZDNet and has covered the technology industry and transformation trends for more than two decades, publishing articles in CNET, Knowledge@Wharton, Wall Street Week, Interactive Week, The New York Times, and Financial Planning. He is also an Adjunct Professor at Temple University and a member of the Advisory Board for The Fox Business School's Institute of Business and Information Technology.  Constellation Insights does the following: Cover the buy side and sell side of enterprise tech with news, analysis, profiles, interviews, and event coverage of vendors, as well as Constellation Research's community and…...

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Atlassian said it will acquire video messaging company Loom for $975 million in a move that brings asynchronous video to its team collaboration platform.

In a statement, Atlassian said it will acquire Loom for $975 million including Loom's cash balance. Atlassian said it will pay $880 million in cash and the remainder in equity awards. The deal is expected to close in Atlassian's fiscal third quarter.

Loom has more than 25 million users and its customers record nearly 5 million videos a month.

Atlassian, which has collaboration and productivity software aim at distributed workforces, said asynchronous video is the next evolution of team collaboration. Atlassian has more than 260,000 customers using products such as Jira and Confluence.

For the fiscal year ended Aug. 3, Atlassian delivered revenue of $3.53 billion with a net loss of $486.7 million. Non-GAAP earnings for fiscal 2023 were $492 million. The company said it was playing offense and driving enterprise sales, expanding from ITSM to supporting teams in legal and HR with Jira Service Management and adding generative AI capabilities to its platform.

Atlassian appears in the following Constellation ShortLists:

• Constellation ShortList™ Work Coordination Platforms
• Constellation ShortList™ DevOps
• Constellation ShortList™ Incident Management

According to Atlassian, Loom's investments in AI will also be useful to provide video, transcripts, summaries, documents and workflows. Loom customers will be able to add asynchronous video into Jira and Confluence. Loom will continue to be sold as a standalone product similar to Trello, which is a subsidiary of Atlassian.

In a blog post, co-founders and co-CEOs Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar said:

"The rise of distributed work has meant a greater reliance on tools to help teams work asynchronously, across different geographies and time zones.

This is where async video comes in, a tool increasingly sitting side-by-side with other modes of communication like text, presentations, and spreadsheets."

Atlassian's move comes at an interesting time. For instance, video-first communications firms such as Zoom are branching out into broader collaboration.

Constellation Research’s take

Constellation Research analyst Liz Miller handicapped Atlassian’s Loom acquisition. She said:

“While this feels like a video channel pick up for the project management and work collaboration platform, Atlassian picking up Loom opens the doors to cross team collaboration and best practice documentation and exchange. Bringing Loom into the Atlassian portfolio is a good signal that the project management and collaboration platform understands that the WAY teams want to engage, share and collaborate around work is forever shifting.

In a relatively brief period of time, Loom has become one of the hottest ways for teams to communicate, share and collaborate with a growing list of use cases and applications emerging at a pace driven by users. Everyone from sellers to HR teams has used Loom videos as a quick and easy way to communicate. Some of the most interesting use cases have been teams cataloging best practices and “how to” sessions as they learn tools, tricks and shortcuts to getting the job done. We have also seen other CX functions leverage “Looms” from customer service knowledge center clips to quick bite demos being used to deliver brief introductions in sales motions to tutorials around company policy or team on boarding.

Asynchronous communication across project teams is just one step to this pick up…and to be sure, it is an important addition to enable cross project team collaboration via video messaging. However, what this deal also opens for organizations managing complex projects with Atlassian is historical knowledge exchange and documentation. Loom videos have become a powerful connection between the teams of today and the teams of tomorrow. It can also provide a critical content pipeline to teams looking to gain insights from video conversation transcripts or AI powered summaries or analytics.”

Related:

• How Leading Digital Workplace Vendors Are Enabling Hybrid Work

Larry Dignan

Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights Constellation Research

About Larry Dignan: Dignan was most recently Celonis Media’s Editor-in-Chief, where he sat at the intersection of media and marketing. He is the former Editor-in-Chief of ZDNet and has covered the technology industry and transformation trends for more than two decades, publishing articles in CNET, Knowledge@Wharton, Wall Street Week, Interactive Week, The New York Times, and Financial Planning. He is also an Adjunct Professor at Temple University and a member of the Advisory Board for The Fox Business School's Institute of Business and Information Technology.  Constellation Insights does the following: Cover the buy side and sell side of enterprise tech with news, analysis, profiles, interviews, and event coverage of vendors, as well as Constellation Research's community and…...

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UiPath launched Autopilot, which melds generative AI, domain specific AI and its automation platform, to automate work via natural language. The launch adds to the automation platform push at UiPath that's well underway as the company aims to shed its image as a robotics process automation (RPA) company.

On the surface, UiPath Autopilot is YAGAIA (yet another generative AI announcement), but if you zoom out a bit you'll see what the vendor is trying to do. The short version: UiPath plays in process mining, RPA, task mining, automation across multiple domains and optimization and if you roll all of those things up you get a platform. That platform can create business value. 

To UiPath CEO Rob Enslin the company's narrative is a spin on the platform always wins theme. Autopilot aims to further that narrative and position the company to be a more AI at work play. UiPath is betting that there will be process and automation focused generative UI use cases that will remain above the foundational model commoditization. Autopilot capabilities include generative AI experiences for developers to create workflows and build automations, target business users and enable faster testing of automation.

Customers cited in UiPath's press release noted that Autopilot within the company's automation platform can consolidate various copilots and systems, so they act in concert to follow business and process rules. For good measure, UiPath is adding its UiPath Trust Layer, which will govern data and interactions with generative AI and large language models.

As Constellation Research analyst Andy Thurai noted, UiPath wants to be between you and generative AI. Enslin added that UiPath isn't an RPA company but an AI at work company. In an interview with Diginomica's Jon Reed, Enslin noted UiPath is a business automation platform with a complete stack of tools to discover processes, automate them and then optimize from there.

UiPath is also working with ERP giants like SAP, which is a big partner, and has connectors to multiple enterprise systems. The company will also connect you to Amazon Bedrock and multiple generative AI connectors. Enslin wants UiPath to be more than the sum of its parts. Sure, UiPath process mining is running at Colgate, Verizon and Pfizer, but it's the expanded platform that's driving the benefits. The problem? Every vendor wants to be an automation platform.

Nevertheless, UiPath is well on its way to be seen as something bigger than RPA. Indeed, UiPath said it will start to sell and market an iPaaS offering in 2024 that will include the following:

• The company's library of connectors, templates and accelerators.
• Delivery options for Automaton Suite in multiple regions.
• Data mapping and transformaton capabilities.
• API design, creation and management tools. 

These two slides from UiPath's recent Investor Day lay out the automation narrative, which is bigger than generative AI. For UiPath, generative AI provides semantic capabilities to the broader automation platform. 

In the end, UiPath has to sell its narrative to CXOs. Don't count Enslin on this one given his sales history at Google Cloud and SAP. UiPath sells business outcomes and returns to CXOs. With process, task and document mining along with automation, UiPath can generate some heady returns for customers. The company prioritizes financial services, healthcare, manufacturing, and the public sector.

More:

• UiPath,Q2 better than expected, sees second half strength
• Constellation ShortListâ„¢ Robotic Process Automation

For its part, UiPath is planning to become more efficient, move customers to a cloud model and keep sales and marketing expenses at about 30% to 35% of revenue on a non-GAAP basis. And UiPath plans to leverage its SAP partnership and gain wallet share with its platform.

Add it up and UiPath's Autopilot launch isn't groundbreaking but spins the company's broader narrative forward. Now it just has to get buy-in from CXOs.

Larry Dignan

Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights Constellation Research

About Larry Dignan: Dignan was most recently Celonis Media’s Editor-in-Chief, where he sat at the intersection of media and marketing. He is the former Editor-in-Chief of ZDNet and has covered the technology industry and transformation trends for more than two decades, publishing articles in CNET, Knowledge@Wharton, Wall Street Week, Interactive Week, The New York Times, and Financial Planning. He is also an Adjunct Professor at Temple University and a member of the Advisory Board for The Fox Business School's Institute of Business and Information Technology.  Constellation Insights does the following: Cover the buy side and sell side of enterprise tech with news, analysis, profiles, interviews, and event coverage of vendors, as well as Constellation Research's community and…...

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Adobe launched a new model behind its Firefly generative AI image system and outlined GenStudio, which is a suite that will enable enterprises and marketers to better manage the content supply chain.

Although those two items were among the headliners at Adobe's Max conference in Los Angeles, the company launched several new enhancements, products and services with generative AI layered throughout the company's portfolio.

The company made its case that creativity is the new productivity and will take a huge leap due to generative AI, which will enable creatives to explore possibilities, scale and personalize experiences.

More: Adobe raises Creative Cloud prices, adds generative AI credits | Adobe Firefly heads to enterprises, Adobe Express | Adobe reports strong Q3, ups outlook for Q4 

Not surprisingly, Firefly and generative AI was a common theme for Adobe at Max. The new Firefly Image 2 Model provides enhanced photographic quality with higher resolution and colors and improves human rendering. Firefly Image 2 Model is available today at Firefly's site and roll out to Creative Cloud apps.

Firefly Image 2 Model will also enable generative match, new photo setting and prompt guidance. Adobe also outlined Firefly Vector Model, which provides the highest quality output for vectors used in logos, website graphics, product packaging and icons, Generative Match, which matches output with existing brand styles, and Firefly Design Model, which is generative AI for template designs.

Adobe added that Firefly models will also play a big role in GenStudio. For instance, teams can customize Firefly with branded assets and automate and integrate custom models in Creative Cloud workflows.

GenStudio is Adobe's enterprise play to improve the content supply chain. Adobe's plan is to move manual processes to AI and automation, connect workflows across silos, democratize content creation and be transparent.

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The company said GenStudio brings together applications across Adobe's portfolio including Creative Cloud, Express and Experience Cloud. Firefly and Adobe Experience Manager Assets are also included along with other applications.

Here's what Adobe GenStudio is hoping to do:

• Scale content creation with generative AI including ideation, creation and editing.
• Minimize manual tasks for creatives and automate production.
• Use models to customize content to brands.
• Automate workflows and handoffs.
• Improve collaboration.
• Provide metadata across the content cycle.
• Minimize waste and centrally manage approved assets.
• Give enterprises insights on performance.

To accomplish those goals, Adobe said GenStudio will be available in modules to cover workflow and planning, creation and production and delivery and activation. All modules will have an analytics engine. GenStudio is available now.

Adobe deployed GenStudio internally and said it saw an 83% decrease in time spent packaging content and an 88% decrease in time spent activating content. Amit Ahuja, senior vice president, Digital

Experience Business at Adobe, said GenStudio "can take tasks that would normally take hours or days down to minutes."

Here's a selection of other Adobe announcements at its Max conference.

• Adobe Experience Manager Sites gets updates to be better equipped as an enterprise content management system.  Adobe said Experience Manager Sites has performance improve to boost search rankings, traffic and conversions, tools to optimize web content and experiment. The platform also simplified its authoring tools and enabled marketers to drag and drop Microsoft Word and Google Doc content and layouts into Experience Manager Sites. 
• Creative Cloud gets more than 100 new features with Illustrator, Photoshop and Stock adding Firefly features and web-based workflows. Other apps including Lightroom, Premiere pro and After Effects will get AI features.
• Illustrator will get Text to vector Graphic capabilities via Firefly. Other Illustrator additions include Mockup and retype. 
• Adobe Express will use Generative Fill and Text to Template. Aside from a bevy of new features in Express, Adobe said the software will have an integration with Wix for web pages. Adobe will also make Express available on Google Chromebooks.
• Premiere Pro users can publish videos directly to Instagram, Facebook, YouTube and TikTok. 

Constellation Research's take

Constellation Research analyst Liz Miller said:

"While much of the world is launching their first go-round of generative AI tools, Adobe is introducing a significant evolution of the Firefly portfolio of models with Firefly 2. The quality of output from Firefly is truly impressive with more detail, clarity and accuracy with every prompt. But it should also be noted that while the models are being refined to improve output, the business model is similarly being updated and upgraded to answer some of the significant business, ethical and creative concerns the market has. From creator and artist protections to content authenticity data to ensure availability for enterprise use, Adobe is focused on making this new ago of AI creativity positive for creators and users alike.

Adobe has also applied AI tools in smart places, helping creatives, marketers and business users alike be more efficient, effective and authentic. While it might sound trite, for a team to take hours of mundane work off their plate while simultaneously giving space for new paths to creativity to emerge is game changing. AI has revitalized so many creators who can now unleash their ideas in entirely new mediums. Adobe fully intends to stay ahead of that turn.

Adobe's differentiator has always been in the capacity to redefine and reapply creativity, be it through artistry or through portable document formats. The next step will be Adobe bringing these communities of creativity and connecting them in the name of profitable, durable growth."

Looking ahead

Adobe also showcased 11 early-stage innovations that revolved around generative AI. The prototypes may not make it to be commercial offerings but give Adobe's engineers and researchers to highlight their work.

The headliner at Adobe Max Sneaks was Project Stardust, an object aware editing engine. Project Stardust gives users the ability to select, edit and delete elements in any image. You can select people in a photograph, move them to a different place and fill in the background where they were standing. Elements like clothing can also be changed.

Other select innovations highlighted include:

• Project See Through, an AI tool that makes it easy to remove reflections from photos.
• Project Fast Fill, which takes Firefly to video with the ability to add, remove and expand content with text prompts. This tool, available in Photoshop now, would be added to Adobe's video applications.
• Project Dub Dub Dub uses AI to improve video dubbing and automatically translate an audio track to a supported language.
• Project Poseable, which takes an image generation model that can interact with 3D objects including poses from photos of real people.
• Project Draw & Delight, a suite of generative AI tools that can take an initial doodle or scribble and turn it into polished and refined sketches. Users can then experiment with colors, styles and backgrounds.

Larry Dignan

Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights Constellation Research

About Larry Dignan: Dignan was most recently Celonis Media’s Editor-in-Chief, where he sat at the intersection of media and marketing. He is the former Editor-in-Chief of ZDNet and has covered the technology industry and transformation trends for more than two decades, publishing articles in CNET, Knowledge@Wharton, Wall Street Week, Interactive Week, The New York Times, and Financial Planning. He is also an Adjunct Professor at Temple University and a member of the Advisory Board for The Fox Business School's Institute of Business and Information Technology.  Constellation Insights does the following: Cover the buy side and sell side of enterprise tech with news, analysis, profiles, interviews, and event coverage of vendors, as well as Constellation Research's community and…...

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Zoom Video Communications held its annual Zoomtopia conference, rolled out a series of generative AI capabilities across its platform and made it clear that it all about reinventing work with tools like Zoom Docs as well as customer experience. What was missing? Talk about add-ons for Zoom's AI Companion, price increases, monetization strategies and ways to get more money out of customers.

If Zoom's analyst Q&A was any indication, Wall Street isn't thrilled about delivering value without charging more. Wall Street is hooked on this concept of $30 extra a month per user for generative AI features.

The abbreviated list of questions went like this:

• What is your monetization strategy and where can we expect incremental revenue?
• How do you monetize virtual agent vs. human agent capabilities in Zoom Contact Center?
• How can the company monetize and upsell Zoom One?
• GPU costs aren't cheap so what's the plan for pricing AI Companion?
• Please explain the decision to offer AI Companion at no additional cost relative to the competition.

See a theme here?

Zoom executives didn't exactly alleviate concerns about monetization. Customers, however, are happy that Zoom isn't prematurely gouging them. For adoption, Zoom's approach to refrain from add-ons isn't a bad idea. The company said nearly 30,000 companies have enabled AI Companion so far.

CFO Kelly Steckelberg said the AI products recently announced are free. Regarding Zoom Docs, the company will outline monetization closer to general availability.

As for Zoom Contact Center, Steckelberg added that Contact Center is sold on a per seat basis and Virtual Agent is based on queries. "They're priced according to bring value to the customer," she said. Features like AI Expert Assist for Contact Center could be monetized at some point, but that's separate from AI Companion.

Zoom One is a big opportunity, said Steckelberg, who noted that the bundle approach will see more traction as renewals come up. Zoom One Pro prices increased at the beginning of 2023.

On GPU costs, Steckelberg noted that Zoom outlined that it expected gross margins to fall a bit due to "the computing power we are continuing to acquire."

Zoom's Mahesh Ram, Head of AI Applications, addressed the elephant in the AI room for software companies. He said:

"When you listen to the customers intently, you hear what they're saying. And I think what we were hearing from customers was, if you make AI a premium offering, then I have to choose between the haves and the have-nots. And we see generative AI as being something that's just part and parcel of everyday work and collaboration.

If you have a 20,000, 50,000 employee workforce company and you're having to think about $30 a month, you're making decisions that are probably not in the best interest of your business.

We want to make Zoom the platform of choice. We want to make it as valuable to every employee as possible in every business. As you start talking to customers, there's a collective sigh of relief."

The upshot here is that Zoom is playing a long game with customers and that the future benefit is vendor consolidation. Workday is playing a similar game and Adobe’s generative AI pricing seems fair, but the club of vendors not focusing on add-ons is small. As vendors go add-on happy, CIOs are going to look to consolidate costs and vendors. That outcome will only benefit platform plays like Zoom that held back from the add-on pricing frenzy.