Wendy's to pilot Google Cloud's generative AI models for drive thru: What to watch

Larry Dignan

Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights
Constellation Research

Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights at Constellation Research, where he leads editorial coverage focused on enterprise technology, digital transformation, and emerging trends shaping the future of business. He oversees research-driven news, analysis, interviews, and event coverage designed to help technology buyers and vendors navigate complex markets with clarity and context. ...

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Wendy's move to deploy Google Cloud's generative AI technology for drive-thru ordering starting in June is worth watching as large language modeling (and the fine tuning for industry use cases) go mainstream.

Speaking on Wendy's first quarter earnings conference call, Wendy's CEO Todd Penegor said Wendy's Fresh AI pilot is part of a larger digitalization push.

"We have partnered with Google to pilot Wendy's Fresh AI, a voice AI solution for drive-through ordering that utilizes Google Cloud's generative AI and large language models technology. We believe this solution creates a huge opportunity for us to deliver a truly differentiated, faster and frictionless experience for our customers and allows our crew members to continue focusing on making great food and providing exceptional service.

 

We plan to launch this pilot in June and are incredibly excited about the potential unlocks to speed of service, customer satisfaction and profitability that this technology could drive over time."

Wendy's has been a Google Cloud partner and news of the Wendy's Fresh AI pilot was announced a day before Google I/O 2023. 

According to Wendy's, 75% to 80% of customers choose drive-thru as the preferred ordering channel. Wendy's is hoping that automation can make ordering more seamless. The catch is that the fast-food restaurant chain has to customize Google Cloud's models for menu options, terms unique to Wendy's and special requests.

The Wendy's FreshAI pilot launches in a Columbus, OH area restaurant and then will expand from there. Wendy's will use Google's Vertex AI and other models that were outlined yesterday.

• At Google I/O 2023, Google Cloud launches Duet AI, Vertex AI enhancements
• Google I/O 2023: Google makes its generative AI case, Bard becomes ingredient brand
• Google’s generative AI strategy from Google I/O 2023: Hits and misses
• AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud themes: Optimization, generative AI and the long game

This project is worth watching for a bevy of reasons. Here are a few takeaways and open questions to ponder:

Will this AI drive thru concept work this time? Constellation Research Analyst Liz Miller noted that the Wendy's pilot sounded a bit familar. That's because the AI in the drive thru experiment was tried a year ago. Here's Miller's history lesson:

In 2022, McDonalds launched an AI assistant in 24 locations after an initial 10 store rollout in 2021. By summer 2022, the company had only reached 80% drive thru voice ordering accuracy. The roll out stopped because McDonalds wanted 95% accuracy. McDonalds' AI assistant also was torched on TikTok. 

Panera, Sonic, White Castle, Checkers and Rally's also tried the AI drive thru technology. In 2022, the storyline was AI was being used to address talent gaps and labor shortages. Vendors include Open City, which has a Tori bot used at Popeyes, Presto, which counts Applebees and KFC as customers, and Valyant.

Wendy's and Google Cloud's models will have to hit their accuracy rates to expand from the pilot phase. 

What's the integration process with enterprise data? Wendy's is integrating Google foundational LLMs with data on the menu, business rules and logic, conversational guardrails and integration with restaurant systems including point of sale.

How are returns measured? Penegor said on Wendy's earnings call that efficiency and throughput will be primary metrics. Customer and employee satisfaction will also be core metrics. If FreshAI can speed up ordering, Wendy's can drive more sales velocity. Employees can focus less on the order station and more on food prep and expediting it.

What do companies need to do ahead of time to get to the generative AI phase? Hint: Get your data act together. Yes folks, master data management matters. Penegor said:

"I think now is the right time. We've done a lot of work on our tech stack and our restaurants. And we've had Kevin Vasconi, who joined us several years ago now from Domino's, and his team have done a nice job really setting ourselves up to lean in even more on technology. Clearly, it starts with the global next-gen design. That's all digital forward. We've got work that we can continue to do even on the digital menu board. So that's still growth in front of us."

Now Wendy's has been a Google Cloud partner since 2021, but its digital transformation efforts started with kiosks, mobile ordering and agile software development back in 2017. Through the first quarter, 12% of Wendy's sales were digital.

Wither the human drive-thru order taker? Should Wendy's FreshAI effort succeed, rest assured other restaurants will follow. Companies like Starbucks and McDonald's also have significant digital efforts as well as loyalty programs. Both companies have drive-thru operations as do a bevy of others in the category including Taco Bell, Chik-Fil-A and others. Also see: Starbucks’ new CEO: ‘We can enhance our tech stack to lower costs and reinvest’

Google’s generative AI strategy from Google I/O 2023: Hits and misses

Andy Thurai

Vice President and Principal Analyst
Constellation Research

About Andy Thurai Andy Thurai is an accomplished IT executive, strategist, advisor, enterprise architect and evangelist with more than 25 years of experience in executive, technical, and architectural leadership positions at companies such as IBM, Intel, BMC, Nortel, and Oracle. Andy has written more than 100 articles on emerging technology topics for publications such as Forbes, The New Stack, AI World, VentureBeat, DevOps.com, GigaOm and Wired. Andy’s fields of interest and expertise include AIOps, ITOps, Observability, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Cloud, Edge, and other enterprise software. His strength is selling technology to the CxO audience with a value proposition rather than the usual technology sales pitch. Find more details and samples of Andy’s work on his…...

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Google I/O 2023 kicked off and the proceedings could be summed up in two words: Generative AI. Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai and Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian walked through Google’s new models, how it’ll incorporate generative AI across the product line and advance business transformation.

Here’s a look at the hits and misses from Google’s strategy session on generative AI. Keep in mind, that this launch follows a rocky debut of Bard, which was upstaged by Microsoft’s ChatGPT rollout. In some areas, Google shined with its generative AI plans. In others, Google is playing catchup to the combination of Microsoft and OpenAI.

Hits

1. The Gmail feature of AI writing a contextual-based email is pretty good. You can have AI write emails based on context with short one-liner responses or detailed. The Help Me Write feature should boost productivity.

2. Google is known for its map capabilities and analysis of traffic patterns. Now with AI integration, someone can integrate traffic, weather, air quality, etc. when mapping out a route at different times and planning a trip ahead. The immersive view looks intriguing. When it comes to mapping Google owns it.

3. AI for image editing is very good. Available until now on Pixel phones only, it moves to Google Photos now. In addition to the Magic Eraser, the Magic Editor can allow for contextual editing easier without the need for expensive tools from Adobe. The additional integration with Adobe Firefly for graphic workers seems compelling.

4. The LLM model called Gemini when ready will be available in multiple sizes based on needs instead of boiling the ocean down like ChatGPT-4, etc.

5. I really like the option of identifying synthetic content with a combination of water marking and metadata embedding. This by far is the best responsible AI theme I have seen. As I repeated many times, fake content, especially during election cycles, can do much harm. This is a good start.

6. Generative AI integration with Google Workspace products such as Sheets, Docs, Gmail and Slides are all very good.

7. The AI-enabled "real-time" cognitive search to mix both Bard AI synthesized content along with regular Google search is brilliant. Combining those results with Google Shop can be good for websites and e-commerce enterprises. These features can be a differentiator for Google while Microsoft is struggling with the market size.

Misses

1. The variations of Codey, code generation tools offered by Google are still limited. CoPilot has been around for more than a year now and its code generation has been improving tremendously.

2. Microsoft has already started moving towards an industry-specific solution set using AI, but Google seems to be missing many steps in that direction.

3. While there were compelling releases, there was no mention of enterprise-specific integration with ERP, HR, CRM, and other systems. It is going to be hard for Google to gain traction without a broad integration strategy. Google did note a Salesforce integration.

4. While Kurian threw big numbers out there about AI-optimized infrastructure, AWS has the lead for enterprises that want to use variable sizing. Not sure if Google can catch up on that. The Google Cloud offering is extremely limited and didn't come across as compelling.

Commerce pulse Q1: What PayPal, Block and Shopify are saying

Larry Dignan

Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights
Constellation Research

Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights at Constellation Research, where he leads editorial coverage focused on enterprise technology, digital transformation, and emerging trends shaping the future of business. He oversees research-driven news, analysis, interviews, and event coverage designed to help technology buyers and vendors navigate complex markets with clarity and context. ...

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PayPal, Block and Shopify have all reported earnings in recent days. Here's a look at what those three companies are saying about the economy, generative AI and their product plans.

PayPal: Controlling what it can

The economy

PayPal CEO Daniel Schulman said the company had a good start to the year but is also focusing on the things it can control given macroeconomic uncertainty. See first quarter results. 

Schulman said:

“Even with the strong start, there remain many challenging issues to navigate as we look forward. Both the macroeconomic and geopolitical environments are complex and difficult to predict.

In these times, the strong message I'm giving the PayPal team is to focus on the things we can control. We know that job number one is to invest and innovate to improve our value proposition to our merchants and consumers.”

Generative AI

PayPal is looking internally to leverage generative AI. Schulman said:

“With the new advances of generative AI, we will also be able to accelerate our productivity initiatives. We expect AI will enable us to meaningfully lower our costs for years to come. Furthermore, we believe that AI, combined with our unique scale and sets of data, will drive not only efficiencies, but will also drive a differentiated and unique set of value propositions for our merchants and consumers.

This is not just about efficiencies. By the way, it's not about cost reduction. It's about doing things better. There's no question that AI is going to impact almost every function inside of PayPal, whether it be our front office, back office, marketing, legal, engineering, you name it. AI will have an impact and allow us to not just lower cost but have higher performance and do things that are not about trade-offs. It's about doing both in there.”

The other thing that the teams are doing and doing extremely well is they're improving processes.

Venmo meet PayPal

Schulman added that PayPal and Venmo will be connected as part of product updates this year. He said:

“Later this year, we will add the ability for a Venmo user to pay a PayPal user and vice versa, bringing more utility to both customer bases. We are currently piloting the upcoming launch of Venmo teen accounts, which have been requested by both parents and teens for some time.”

Block: Macro challenges, Regulation, Global financial system shifts

The economy

Block Chairman and President Jack Dorsey laid out the landscape.

“There are three macro challenges affecting all businesses now and over the long-term. Number one, constant state of global crisis. Number two, regulatory fragmentation. Number three, global financial system shifts. The world seems to be moving from one global crisis to the next and suffering from an overwhelming amount of information, which is causing people and organizations of all sizes to be distracted and reactive to the moment. From COVID to inflation, to the war in Ukraine, to bank failures, the number of things we all need to pay attention to grows unbounded.”

Dorsey said the company has more than 30 products focused on specific verticals (see Block results). "We see a lot of growth upmarket because we provide flexibility," said Dorsey. "Our solutions addressing key verticals of restaurants, retail and beauty allow us to serve much more complex sellers with very specific needs, which again goes back to that flexibility point and the strength of our ecosystem. And the developer platform continues to be stronger and stronger as we move forward."

Regulation

Dorsey said:

“Regulators around the world are coming up with slightly or entirely different answers to problems facing their citizens. Instead of having global standards, we end up with rules which are different for every market, effectively slowing the pace of development. While this might be a good thing for each market and makes it very challenging to grow a global internet business, especially for smaller companies. Part of our job will be to help our customers navigate this complexity by taking it on ourselves.”

The future of money

Dorsey said:

“There have been numerous challenges to the global financial system, and it's experiencing some significant shifts, from new global reserve currency candidates, centralization of banks through failure of smaller ones, to adoption of central bank digital currencies with entirely new capabilities. These all affect our core business and are all trends we need to navigate carefully.”

Generative AI

Dorsey said that Block is focused on artificial intelligence and staying ahead of the curve. "More and more effort in the world will shift to creative endeavors as AI continues to automate mechanical tasks away and we believe we are well positioned for that shift with our strategy for artists on title," said Dorsey.

Shopify: Expanding into enterprise retail, shedding logistics

Shopify President Harley Finkelstein said the company is "leaning into our partner model ecosystem" with the sale of its logistics business to Flexport. The company also cut headcount.

"We also realized that in order to adapt and stay at the forefront of commerce, Shopify must operate with even greater speed and efficiency. So, we are making changes and refocusing the priorities that we believe will get Shopify to the size and the shape necessary to unlock the next era of growth and innovation," he said.

Shopify expanded its merchant base across all geographies and merchant sizes.

Targeting large retailers

The company said it had success selling its enterprise retail product, Commerce Components by Shopify (CCS). CCS is a composable stack where retailers can use Shopify components they want and integrate them with existing systems. The move makes Shopify checkout and storefronts available to large retailers.

"There is a perception shift happening in the marketplace as enterprises begin to realize that they are now able to combine Shopify's cutting-edge commerce solutions with their existing infrastructure, all while optimizing their operating expenses," said Finkelstein. Shopify has added large retailers such as Tim Hortons, Ted Baker and Zulily, which is owned by QVC.

In addition, Shopify inked partnerships with IBM Consulting and Cognizant to expand its reach.

Shopify is also thinking globally as 15% of its total GMV was cross-border. Market Pro has been scaling as Shopify handles international commerce headaches such as taxes on the back end for businesses.

For its core business, Shopify is driving usage of the Shop App and Point-of-Sale offerings.

Generative AI

Finkelstein said Shopify has "one of the best chances of using AI to help our customers."

He said:

"How do we integrate it into the tools that help us build and ship better products to our merchants. You're already seeing that in certain areas of Shopify. For example, the task of writing product descriptions is now made meaningfully easier by injecting AI into that process. And what does that -- the end result of that is merchants spend less time running product descriptions and more time making beautiful products and communicating and engaging with their customers."

Shop at AI is also an effort to create "the coolest shopping concierge on the planet, whereby you as a consumer can use Shop at AI and you can browse through hundreds of millions of products," said Finkelstein.

More importantly, Shopify is looking to AI to drive experiences and the products delivered to merchants.

Google I/O 2023: Google makes its generative AI case, Bard becomes ingredient brand

Larry Dignan

Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights
Constellation Research

Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights at Constellation Research, where he leads editorial coverage focused on enterprise technology, digital transformation, and emerging trends shaping the future of business. He oversees research-driven news, analysis, interviews, and event coverage designed to help technology buyers and vendors navigate complex markets with clarity and context. ...

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Google I/O in previous years focused on Android, Pixel devices and cool features such as Magic Eraser. This year, Google I/O is all about the models.

Against the backdrop of a never ending stream of generative AI announcements and Microsoft's move to infuse its applications with OpenAI's ChatGPT, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai took the stage and made the case for its generative AI advances. "AI is having a very busy year," quipped Pichai. Here's the case in a nutshell.

Google has been using AI for years. Pichai said Google has been using AI to be more helpful for years with features such as smart reply in Gmail, Magic Eraser in Google Photos and various Maps innovation. "Today, we are taking the next generative AI step with a bold and responsible approach across all of our products," said Pichai.

AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud themes: Optimization, generative AI and the long game

Google is innovating with its models. The company launched PaLM 2, which has various models aimed at mobile as well as larger implementations. "25 products and features are delivered by PaLM 2 today," said Pichai.

The demos highlighted how a coder could fix a bug and add comments in Korean.

PaLM 2 was also highlighted in a medical analysis of an Xray to highlight specific use cases.

Bard is an ingredient brand. Bard has been updated and will have extensions to various applications. Built on PaLM 2, Bard will be updated to handle images and update them. A demonstration featured a natural language question about universities in Pennsylvania, refining the results through questions and putting the answer in a Google Sheet.

Bard is also out of waitlist mode and will be available in 180 countries.

Google Workspace will use generative AI to boost productivity. Generative AI capabilities are being added to Gmail, Docs, Sheets, Slides and Meet. Demos included using generative AI for job descriptions, marketing content and emails using the Help Me Write feature. The idea is that generative AI supplies the starter content for refinement. In Sheets, generative AI can create starter tables.

Search gets conversational. Google search will also use generative AI where Google will add aspects to consider when making a purchase as well as reviews from Google Shopping Graph. Google will be rolling out new experiences in search including "converse" or "as a follow up question." There will also be a conversational mode for search that aims to understand your intent. Experiences will be integrated so more results can be found with a scroll. 

Constellation Research analyst Holger Mueller said: "Google elevates the search battle by making search multimodal - AI adjacent to traditional search results... and even in dialogue mode - traditional search results will show up. That's a good compromise for traditional usage - and a more fail safe approach to introducing AI into search than the current solely conversational UX approaches." 

Android 14 will get generative AI features. Messages will get Magic Compose, which will use generative AI to adjust tone such as more professional or playful. There will be new customizations for wallpapers will use generative AI for cinematic photos as well as original wallpapers.  Pixel devices will also leverage generative AI for Pixel Call Assist, Pixel Speech and new camera features. 

More models are coming. Google outlined Gemini, a new model in development. Gemini will be able to find synthetically generated content via watermarking and metadata.

At Google I/O 2023, Google Cloud launches Duet AI, Vertex AI enhancements

Larry Dignan

Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights
Constellation Research

Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights at Constellation Research, where he leads editorial coverage focused on enterprise technology, digital transformation, and emerging trends shaping the future of business. He oversees research-driven news, analysis, interviews, and event coverage designed to help technology buyers and vendors navigate complex markets with clarity and context. ...

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Google Cloud is launching Duet AI, which takes Google's foundational generative AI models to make building and deploying cloud applications easier. Developers can also optimize code with Generative AI Support in Vertex AI with three new foundation models.

The launch of Duet AI was announced at Google I/O. Google Cloud was a headliner during CEO Sundar Pichai's keynote, which focused on generative AI as well as examples of where the company was using AI across Google Workspace, Gmail, Docs, Slides and Meet. Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian's appearance at Google I/O highlights the unit's maturity. Google Cloud was profitable in the first quarter.

"All of these generative AI advancements are coming to business," said Kurian. He added that Google Cloud's AI technologies for business are secure and rightsized based on the compute needed. 

Google Cloud's announcements land as Google outlined its Transformer architecture as well as its next-generation language model called PaLM 2. PaLM 2 has improved multilingual, reasoning, and coding capabilities. Competitively, Google Cloud’s Duet AI and Generative AI Support in Vertex AI will face off with Microsoft’s numerous OpenAI ChatGPT integrations, notably CoPilot.

AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud themes: Optimization, generative AI and the long game

Duet AI, which is available today for early adopters via Google Cloud's AI Trusted Tester Program, is designed to make developing cloud applications less complicated by offering the following across multiple services:

• Code assistance with AI provides recommendations, generates functions and code blocks while flagging errors and security risks. Code assistance will be available across Google Cloud including services such as Cloud Workstations, Cloud Shell Editor and Cloud Code IDE. Code assistance will support multiple languages including Go, Java, JavaScript, Python and SQL.
• Chat assistance that uses natural language to deliver answers on development and cloud-related questions. Users can engage with chat assistance, learn how to use services, and get implementation plans while providing architecture and coding best practices.
• Duet AI for AppSheet, which will allow Google Cloud users to create business applications, connect data and build workflows into Google Workspace in a natural language no-code format. Users will be able to describe an app guided by prompts.

Generative AI support in Vertex AI

Google Cloud also outlined Generative AI support in Vertex AI, which enables enterprises to fine-tune Codey models using their own code base. Codey models will be available directly in Vertex AI and ultimately connect to Duet AI. In March, Google Cloud outlined Gen App Builder to enable generative chat and search apps, Generative AI support in Vertex AI, Model Garden and Generative AI Studio.

MARKET OVERVIEW: Analytics and Business Intelligence Evolve for Cloud, Embedding, and Generative AI

At Google I/O, Google Cloud outlined three new foundation models including:

• Codey, a text-to-code foundation model to improve code generation and completion and quality. Codey suggests the next few lines based on the code entered, generates code based on natural language prompts, and features a bot to help with documentation and questions.
• Imagen, a text-to-image foundation model to generate and customize studio-grade images.
• Chirp, a speech-to-text foundation model to provide native language captioning and voice assistant. Chirp is a version of Google Cloud's 2 billion parameter speech model that supports more than 100 languages.

The company also added embedding API for text and images so developers can more easily build classifiers, question and answering systems and other applications and reinforcement learning with human feedback to extend Vertex AI's tuning. Human feedback is handy to generate accurate models for industries like healthcare.

Google Cloud also said Generative AI Studio, Model Garden, and PaLM 2 for Text and Chat are moving from trusted tester availability to preview. Google Cloud also announced A3 instances to run AI workloads. 

Generative AI guide: ChatGPT: Hype or the Future of Customer Experience

• What to Expect from Generative AI in Analytics and Business Intelligence
• Don’t Kill Innovation, But Apply Guardrails For AI
• How Generative AI Has Supercharged the Future of Work

IBM launches Quantum Safe security portfolio

Larry Dignan

Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights
Constellation Research

Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights at Constellation Research, where he leads editorial coverage focused on enterprise technology, digital transformation, and emerging trends shaping the future of business. He oversees research-driven news, analysis, interviews, and event coverage designed to help technology buyers and vendors navigate complex markets with clarity and context. ...

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IBM launched a portfolio of security tools designed to protect data from quantum computing attacks.

The portfolio, IBM Quantum Safe technology, aims to address quantum computing security risks. While quantum computing can address multiple problems, it can break most of the security systems in place today.

Announced at IBM Think, Big Blue outlined the following:

• IBM Quantum Safe Explorer, which can find cryptographic assets, dependencies and vulnerabilities to view potential risks.
• IBM Quantum Safe Advisor, which tracks cryptographic inventory and provide guides to remediation and compliance.
• IBM Quantum Safe Remediator, which tests best practices and quantum-safe remediation patterns.

The company also published its IBM Quantum Safe Roadmap that outlines milestones on the way to quantum-safe technology.

IBM's Quantum Safe push comes as U.S. agencies are developing quantum resistant security measures. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) selected four quantum-resistant algorithms for standardization including three by IBM. The National Security Agency (NSA) also outlined requirements for national security systems to transition to quantum-safe algorithms by 2025.

Constellation Research Shortlists:

Quantum Computing Platforms
Quantum Computing Software Platforms
Quantum Full Stack Players

Tableau Pulse aims to bring analytics, insights to business users

Larry Dignan

Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights
Constellation Research

Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights at Constellation Research, where he leads editorial coverage focused on enterprise technology, digital transformation, and emerging trends shaping the future of business. He oversees research-driven news, analysis, interviews, and event coverage designed to help technology buyers and vendors navigate complex markets with clarity and context. ...

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Tableau launched a series of updates to its platform including Tableau Pulse, which aims to bring analytics and insights directly to business users.

The move to provide automated insights and personalized analytics via Tableau Pulse recognizes a key issue: Many data consumers track dashboards sporadically. Constellation Research analyst Doug Henschen said Tableau Pulse can make the analytics platform more prescriptive.

"In addition to pattern analysis against the graph of user and data interactions, Pulse also enables individuals and subject matter experts to clearly define what’s important to specific users and groups and to deliver alerts, driver analyses and recommendations to those users so they can take action proactively to get performance back on track or do more of what’s working well."

The news, delivered at Tableau Conference, comes as Salesforce, owner of Tableau, integrates more of its technology. For instance, Tableau will incorporate Salesforce's Einstein generative AI with the launch of Tableau GPT. Salesforce Data Cloud for Tableau also adds more customer data integration.

• The Constellation Research 2023 “Multicloud Analytics and Business Intelligence Platforms” ShortList
• MARKET OVERVIEW: Analytics and Business Intelligence Evolve for Cloud, Embedding, and Generative AI

Here's a look at the key items and Henschen's take:

Tableau GPT can generate visualizations based on natural language prompts with progress and recommendations. Tableau GPT is a "reimagining of Tableau" using natural language.

Henschen: "Tableau and Salesforce acquired Narrative Science, one of the industry’s leading NLP vendors, a couple of years ago. I expect that the technology and expertise gained through that acquisition will help give Salesforce and Tableau a leg up in exploiting generative AI capabilities, but we’ll have to wait to see the proof in generally available functionality."

Tableau Pulse will feature tight integrations with Slack and email so people can collaborate on insights.

Henschen: "Pulse is not available yet, but the promise is that it will spot what data and metrics are important to specific users and groups and when those metrics are changing and why. Alerts and explanations can go a long way toward driving action. Assuming Pulse delivers as promised, it could be a tremendous boon to personal and group productivity and proactive responses to changing conditions."

Tableau Data Cloud will unify corporate data across interactions into one view with Instant Analytics.

Henschen: "The Tableau Data Cloud is a lakehouse architecture that’s bringing all the advantages of such platforms to Salesforce customers, including those using Tableau. Advantages include bringing together all your disparate data, separating compute and storage decisions, and enabling many types of analysis and many different use cases against the data cloud without replication and redundant copies of data. There are many business benefits, but it’s the data engineers, analysts and Salesforce administrators who will be the ones that implement it." 

IBM launches Watsonx, an AI platform with open source models, governance

Larry Dignan

Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights
Constellation Research

Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights at Constellation Research, where he leads editorial coverage focused on enterprise technology, digital transformation, and emerging trends shaping the future of business. He oversees research-driven news, analysis, interviews, and event coverage designed to help technology buyers and vendors navigate complex markets with clarity and context. ...

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IBM launched Watsonx, a platform for artificial intelligence models and generative AI, in a move that revives the Watson brand. IBM also announced a partnership with Hugging Face to bring open source AI models to the enterprise.

Last week, ServiceNow and Hugging Face announced a partnership on open source AI models.

For IBM, the Watsonx launch is a way to bring together foundational models for code, AIOps, digital labor, security and sustainability. IBM is looking to capitalize on the generative AI boom as well as its various use cases.

IBM announced the news at its Think conference. IBM said it is looking to provide a full enterprise stack to train, tune and deploy AI models. In addition, IBM is outlining GPU-as-a-service to support AI workloads.

Watsonx includes the following:

• An AI development studio to access curated and trained open source models. The AI studio will also enable enterprises to manage the data and AI lifecycle.
• The ability to build models on language as well as code, time-series and tabular data, geospatial data and IT events.
• Access to a data store to train and cleanse data via IBM Watsonx.data, which is built on an open data lakehouse architecture. It will be generally available in July and manage workloads on-premise and in multi-cloud environments.
• A set of governance tools via IBM Watsonx.governance, which aims to govern customer privacy, model bias and drift as well as provide transparency.
• Hugging Face will contribute open-source libraries, models and datasets. IBM is looking to use the open source approach it has used historically for AI applications.

IBM will also include a Watson Code Assistant, AIOps Insights, Watson Assistant and Orchestrate and Environmental Intelligence Suite as part of the Watsonx foundation.

Here's Constellation Research analyst Andy Thurai's take:

As with many announcements lately, IBM has YAGAIA (Yet another generative ai announcement). It is sad to say this time it is the granddaddy of AI, IBM.

 

Among the WatsonX announcements, AI studio and datastore won't move the needle much. There are other vendors who are offering better AI data stores data lakes for many years. However, the governance toolkit is an interesting option. This allows companies to build trusted AI workflows and help with building explainable and transparent AI workflows. Though it is not available currently, slated to be released late this year, IBM can be differentiated in the crowded AI market.

 

As far as the Hugging Face relationship is concerned, it is more of a win for Hugging Face than for IBM. Hugging Face has become the de facto standard for public model repositories. They have partnerships with many recently among the same lines - AWS, ServiceNow, and even Azure. Most of these companies don't want to compete in the LLM arms race instead they want to enable enterprises to train their own models by providing the necessary components and providing a way those models can be easily created, shared, and monetized across the marketplace.

 

IBM’s GPU as a service is very late to the market. Many Cloud and HPC vendors have been offering this for years. While it is not a game changer, it is good to see that IBM is catching up in this area. This is a much similar story to IBM entering the cloud market very late when the other players had already established and matured their services. Their AI-optimized infrastructure is still not available, yet, which is scheduled for a full release later this year. While the efficiency in itself needs to be proven, it is going to be hard to win against other players in this area.

 

IBM’s Center of Excellence of AI experts is a brilliant idea. This is one of the areas where most of the other AI companies struggle - to create an army of practitioners to help customers. IBM Consulting has been in front of customers helping major enterprises with digital transformation for decades. This practice, with over 1,000 experts, who are focused on WatsonX-practices can be developer advocates in creating traction for the technology with the customers. While this is still just in the announcement stage, the move can put IBM in the right AI direction.

 

The Environmental Intelligence Suite, which helps calculate environmental risks and provides a carbon calculator can be a unique offering for companies that care about the environment. However, no one in the AI space is worried too much about emissions, carbon footprint, or even efficiency. Fast to market and AI washing everything at a faster pace than others seem to be the norm now.

 

Overall, IBM had a good set of announcements, mostly catching up with others. I still need to see the execution to believe this is all real.

7 future of work themes to know now

Larry Dignan

Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights
Constellation Research

Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights at Constellation Research, where he leads editorial coverage focused on enterprise technology, digital transformation, and emerging trends shaping the future of business. He oversees research-driven news, analysis, interviews, and event coverage designed to help technology buyers and vendors navigate complex markets with clarity and context. ...

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The future of work is being rewritten as we speak as technologies such as generative AI and collaboration change the game in real-time.

DisrupTV Episode 321 brought together Paul Sheard, Author of The Power of Money and former Vice Chairman of S&P Global, Sue Watts, President at Sapience Analytics and Phil Simon, Author of The Nine: The Tectonic Forces Reshaping the Workplace.

Sheard got everyone thinking about the value of money and where fiscal policy and digital currency is headed. That backdrop provided a handy segue into the future of work. Here are 7 themes worth pondering from the episode.

Generative AI: Empowering or replacing workers? Maybe both. Simon acknowledged that there's a lot of uncertainty. "I'm not hearing a lot about generative AI empowerment, but you can go back and look at the arrival of the commercial Web, which destroyed jobs and created new ones," said Simon. "There is a lot of uncertainty that's justifiable."

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The pendulum has shifted back to employers, but not much. Simon said generative AI has swung the pendulum back to employees a bit more after two years of paying up due to labor shortages. But let's not get carried away. "Has the dynamic completely changed for employers. Absolutely not. I'd say the pendulum swung back a little bit, but if you look at the data employees feel empowered too," said Simon. "Labor union approval is up, and you have employees who will quit en masse if forced to go back to the office Monday through Friday. I detailed a few examples in my book."

Simon also noted that unemployment is low, the economy is adding jobs in the US and there still is a lack of workers so it's hard to say we have reverted to a pro-employer environment.

Employer, employee leverage varies by industry. Simon said historically blue-collar workers have taken the hit from automation, but now tech workers and white-collar workers are taking the hit.

Data and transparency into how work gets done will be critical--especially for contingent workforces. Watts' company Sapience Analytics is looking to help customers save and better track their contingent workforce.

In the contingent workforce environment, your company is bringing on resources that they source through other channels. Typically, these resources are billed on time. Timecards show up to be approved and then the supplier gets paid for the services rendered.

"What we've found at Sapience is companies don't know what's truly happening. If everyone agrees with the premise that the workplace is very complicated and it is hard to know what people are doing you know no one in the business has figured it out if you're entrusting part of your workforce to a supplier," explained Watts. "The supplier is telling you through a timecard what should be invoiced and paid. But that's a difficult place for companies. If I'm struggling to know what my people are doing imagine how hard it is with a contingent workforce. "

"What's the likelihood my supplier knows what its people are doing and what's the likelihood that invoice and timecard is going to be accurate?" asked Watts.

DisrupTV Episode 321, Paul Sheard, Sue Watts, Phil Simon - Hosted by Vala Afshar & R "Ray" Wang from Constellation Research on Vimeo.

Sapience collects metadata of what people are doing and then it is turned into structured data, so companies know what's exactly happening down the individual level. Sapience has found that 30% to 50% of the time billed hasn't actually been worked. "You're discovering not only overpayment but the reality you probably don't need as much headcount as before," said Watts.

Geographic freedom has had a big impact on work. With workers going remote, that labor market has dispersed. "With tools like Slack, Microsoft Teams, Zoom etc., remote work has become a lot more plausible. I don't have to relocate my family to take a new job," said Simon.

The hybrid work approach is being sorted out--in real time. Simon said that it is clear that employees have been as productive if not more so working at home so it's tough to say everyone should be back in the office. "But it's not unreasonable to want people back in the office," he said. "Work in the office needs to be more purposeful." For younger workers, it's also important to have in-person mentors and develop social capital.

One thing is certain: The right mix of hybrid work will be found. "There are massive benefits to hybrid including the ability to attract the best employees and retain them," said Simon. "I don't see how we're going back to the way it was before."

"Almost every other company is seeing that it is very difficult to know what's happening in the workplace,” said Watts. "There is a high percentage of the workforce that's still working from home. There's no company that has figured it out in terms of what is the right combination of work from home and work from office. How much flexibility should exist?"

Future work models will emerge. Simon noted there are massive financial advantages to being remote so there will be co-working arrangements as well as new ways to work. "If companies pooh pooh remote and hybrid and pretend that they don't matter, I'm betting your company won't be around in five years," said Simon.

"There's a tremendous amount of uncertainty for both the workers as well as the company," said Watts. "There's a need to know the data in regard to what's truly happening in the workplace in a way to create the transparency and clarity so both the employee and employer can exist in the new modern workplace."

What do you tell someone entering the workforce today? Given the rate of change in technologies such as generative AI, recent graduates entering the workforce should assume everything they've learned is going to change in two years. "People will have to get comfortable with ambiguity. With AI tools taking the world by storm it would be foolish to not know how to use them, but you will also need to roll up your sleeves," said Simon. For instance, a computer science major that can only use ChatGPT for coding will be exposed if she doesn't understand the core concepts and think critically.

"You'll need to lean into the uncertainty and steer into the skid," said Simon.