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.&nbsp; <br>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… Read more

Zscaler delivered better-than-expected second quarter results as the company platform is gaining due to its zero trust architecture and the need to secure AI applications.

The cybersecurity vendor reported a second quarter net loss of $7.7 million, or 5 cents a share, on revenue of $647.9 million, up 23% from a year ago. Non-GAAP earnings were 78 cents a share in the second quarter.

Wall Street was expecting Zscaler to report second quarter earnings of 69 cents a share on revenue of $635.35 million.

Jay Chaudhry, CEO of Zscaler, said the company was seeing strong demand for its platform. "By combining AI with Zero Trust, we are delivering several key innovations to secure our customers’ use of AI applications, creating new avenues of growth," said Chaudhry.

Zscaler is part of a trio of cybersecurity vendors looking to consolidate enterprises on their AI-driven platforms. CrowdStrike and Palo Alto Networks also reported strong results. SentinelOne is a smaller vendor with an AI-driven cybersecurity platform and Fortinet has expanded its reach too.

• Cybersecurity platformization: What you need to know
• CrowdStrike, Palo Alto Networks duel over platforms vs. bundles

As for the outlook, Zscaler's fiscal 2025 outlook for revenue and earnings were above estimates. The third quarter earnings outlook was above expectations with revenue a bit lighter than expected.

The company projected third quarter revenue between $665 million to $667 million with non-GAAP earnings of 75 cents a share to 76 cents a share. For fiscal 2025, Zscaler projected revenue of $2.64 billion to $2.65 billion with non-GAAP earnings of $3.04 a share to $3.09 a share.

Zscaler in the quarter launched its Zero Trust Network Access service natively integrated within RISE with SAP. it also launched a segmentation tool for branches and cloud environments.

By the numbers:

• Zscaler said it landed several 7-figure deals across its platform.
• More than 85% of more than $1 million deals in annual recurring revenue included two or more data protection modules.
• Data protection was included in more than 40% of new and upsell deals.

Here's what Chaudhury had to say on the Zscaler earnings call:

• "Our go-to-market investments are resulting in increased sales productivity, double-digit new and upsell business growth and lower sales attrition. I expect sales productivity to continue growth in the second half, driven by ongoing success of our go-to-market initiatives and growing number of ramped sales reps."
• "Our mission is to create a Zero Trust Everywhere world. With the upcoming hardware refresh cycle, CXOs are increasingly looking for ways to eliminate the legacy security stack including firewalls, VPNs, SD-WANs and more."
• "We are leaning into the opportunity presented by the refresh cycle with surgical field campaigns to educate our customers on how they can leapfrog to Zero Trust everywhere and free themselves from firewalls and other legacy appliances forever."
• "In Q2, many customers purchased data protection to securely adopt public AI, including a Global-2000 hospitality company, a Global-2000 technology company, a Global-2000 manufacturing company and more. In addition to securing the use of public AI apps, we are investing to deliver solutions to secure customers' private AI apps such as LLM and SLM models, chatbots and inference engines."
• "We are also leveraging AI in many other areas, including automated data classification, image classification, zero-day vulnerabilities detection and prevention, app segmentation, IoT, OT device discovery and more." 

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.&nbsp; <br>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… Read more

Will Box become the content and context enabler of the agentic AI food chain? Box CEO Aaron Levie is betting on it.

With an investor day on tap, Levie laid out Box's AI and genAI master plan, which has been advancing over the last 18 months or so. With the rise of agentic AI, Box's vision is playing out.

The company reported in line fourth quarter earnings with a light first quarter outlook--largely due to a currency exchange headwind due to operations in Japan. Box reported fourth quarter earnings of $1.12 a share, on revenue of $279.5 million, up 6%. Non-GAAP earnings were 42 cents a share. For fiscal 2025, Box earnings were $1.36 a share on revenue of $1.09 billion.

As for the outlook, Box projected first quarter revenue of $274 million to $275 million with non-GAAP earnings between 25 cents a share and 26 cents a share. For fiscal 2026, Box projected revenue between $1.15 billion to $1.16 billion with non-GAAP earnings between $1.13 a share and $1.17 a share.

Box recently launched an Enterprise Advanced version of its platform along with a credit system as customers consume AI agents going forward. Box is also benefiting as systems integrators and services providers include the company in AI implementations.

• Box launches new AI features, Box AI Units
• Box acquires Alphamoon Technology, aims to integrate LLMs, OCR into Box AI
• AI agents bring consumption models to SaaS: Goldilocks or headache?

"We are seeing companies start to adopt Enterprise Advanced to power intelligent metadata extraction from documents, automate workflows and dashboards with Box Apps, gain access to Forms, Doc Gen, and Archive, and create custom AI agents with the AI Studio," said Levie, who cited legal and public sector use cases in prepared remarks.

He added:

"AI Agents are entering the workforce and will augment and accelerate our work; our unstructured data is enabling intelligence that we can now use to gain new insights about business; and we can begin automating any workflow in the enterprise, especially the long tail of work that we couldn't automate before."

With Box adding context and insights to previously untapped unstructured data, it could become a cog in agentic AI workflows. Levie said that Box is using its own platform to boost productivity, give employees the ability to get HR and sales information, and use Box AI to write sales pitches, conduct code reviews and give the company more insights.

"Any employee can gain the same level of expertise as the most knowledgeable employee just by asking questions of the existing enterprise data that's already there; the hidden information inside of contracts, invoices, financial documents, and customer data turns into business critical insights that drive better execution; Agentic AI can automate workflows that were expensive and time consuming; and by understanding what's in our content, we can better secure and protect it at scale," said Levie.

Levie said that Box has multiple product announcements in fiscal 2026 focused on extracting data from documents, no-code Box Apps, workflow automation and AI platform advances for Box AI Agents. Levie said that Box will continue to add models to its platform.

• Agentic AI: Three themes to watch for 2025
• Agentic AI without process optimization, orchestration will flop

"We believe we're an asset in this environment. In dynamic times, you want to have more leverage from your technology, you want to be able to retire more legacy systems, and you want to automate more workflows," said Levie.

Indeed, Box appears to be landing more high-level CxO interest as part of broader enterprise transformation plans.

"We were usually in core infrastructure within the CIO organization. But the Chief Data Officer realizes now that once you have AI on unstructured data, they can treat that as another data type to pull business insights from," said Levie. "We're having more conversations with company CTOs that are trying to deliver better experiences, and they know that if they can get data from within their unstructured information, they could go and automate a better client-facing experience."

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.&nbsp; <br>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… Read more

Salesforce launched a developer edition of Agentforce and a marketplace for pre-built partner agents and actions.

The launch comes as Salesforce follows up with its next phases of its Agentforce rollout. The focus on developers, announced at Salesforce's TDX conference, is designed to build an ecosystem around Agentforce.

For Salesforce, it's critical that Agentforce courts developers as well as administrators. Salesforce is betting that generative AI as well as AI agents revamp how user access software.

• Salesforce landing Agentforce deals, but Q4 and outlook mixed
• Salesforce, Google Cloud expand partnership: Here's what it means
• Behind the Scenes: The Force Behind Agentforce
• Salesforce launches Agentforce 2.0 as it ramps its release cadence
• Salesforce Dreamforce 2024: Takeaways on agentic AI, platform, end of copilot era

The company has unified its various clouds and integrated them with Data Cloud, which enables Agentforce in many ways.

Agentforce Developer Edition, which will provide Agentforce, Data Cloud and Salesforce APIs in a free developer environment, will include features that enable enterprise builders to manage the life cycle of an AI agent including, planning, building, configuring and deploying them.

Other tools will include a metadata explorer and change tracker to assist with building agents.

Agentforce Developer Edition will also include tools for monitoring costs, analyzing performance and testing to ensure agent deployments are efficient.

Key items include:

• Batch testing of agent quality using AI-assisted test case generation.
• Zero copy data integration.
• Open ecosystem and model choices.
• Tools to convert bots into agents.

Salesforce will demo the steps in the Agentforce developer lifecycle. Those steps and features include:

• Plan with a bot to agent migration tool and developer edition for Agentforce and Data Cloud.
• Build agents with AI assistance, AppDev bar and configure Agentforce APIs.
• Test via Testing Center.
• Release and deploy via DevOps Center.
• Monitor costs with Digital Wallet, which tracks consumption, Agent Analytics and Agentforce Interaction Explorer.

The company at its developer conference also outlined Agentforce 2dx, a new version of Agentforce that adds low-code tools to deploy agents. 

Agentforce 2dx, available in April, includes:

• Agentforce API to integrate back-end processes, systems and applications. 
• Agentforce Invocable Actions, which enable Agentforce to be embedded into Salesforce business logic. 
• MuleSoft for Agentforce, which includes a topic center to use natural language to create Agentforce topics into MuleSoft APIs. Salesforce is using the MuleSoft API Catalog to simplify AI agent development. A MuleSoft Agentforce connector gives developers the ability to integrate AI agents into existing workflows and integrations. 
• Agentforce Steps in Slack Workflow Builder to create no-code automation within Slack. 
• Agentforce Employee Template.
• Agentforce Surfaces, which leverages AI agents across digital engagement channels, Agentforce Cards that put Lightning web components in agent actions, and Tableau Semantics to create data structures and semantic models. 

Salesforce also launched AgentExchange, which will allow developers to integrate new actions into agents. Enterprises will also be able to discover Agentforce agents from partners. AgentExchange builds on Salesforce's long-running AppExchange. 

AgentExchange will use Agentforce to instantly find apps and agents using natural language and recommend partner actions and topics in Agent Builder.

According to Salesforce, AgentExchange includes more than 200 partners including Google Cloud, DocuSign, Workday and Box.

Components available on AgentExchange include:

• Actions that can expand the job agents built with Agentforce can do with new integrations.
• Prompt templates including pre-written, reusable prompts.
• Topics to focus and refine agent behavior.
• Templates for agents across multiple topics and actions with metadata and instructions.

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.&nbsp; <br>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… Read more

Microsoft launched a series of AI agents and an AI accelerator program for sales as it outlined a bevy of customer references implementing the software giant's copilots and agents.

The company's AI agent tools are being rolled out in Dynamics 365 and are natively integrated across Microsoft 365 productivity apps. The AI agents will connect to an enterprise's data platform (Azure and third parties) and use Microsoft's horizontal data across productivity apps and LinkedIn to include context.

Here's what's rolling out:

• AI Accelerator for Sales, a program that brings services and expertise to enterprises adopting agentic AI, which will be available in April.
• Sales Research Agent, which will be in public preview in April.
• Sales Agent, which brings agentic AI to salespeople in various environments such as Dynamics 365 and Outlook. Sales Agent will be in public preview in May and autonomously researches and prioritizes leads.
• Sales Chat, which allows you to interact with sales data in natural language, will public preview in May.

Sales Agent and Sales Chat agents can be accessed in Microsoft 365 Copilot, Copilot Chat, Dynamics 365 and Salesforce.

Microsoft also announced a variety of customer references for Microsoft 365 Copilot. Many of these customers were highlighted by CEO Satya Nadella on Microsoft's most recent earnings conference call.

• Microsoft launches Copilot Actions, Agents in SharePoint at Ignite
• Microsoft outlines Copilot agents for enterprises

The list of customers hits back at Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff who has argued repeatedly that Microsoft couldn't show what customers were doing with Copilot or AI agents. Microsoft said more than 160,000 organizations have used Copilot Studio to create more than 400,000 customer agents in the last three months.

• AI agents bring consumption models to SaaS: Goldilocks or headache?
• Agentic AI: Three themes to watch for 2025
• Agentic AI without process optimization, orchestration will flop

Enterprise customers leveraging AI agents and Copilot include Holland America Line, Vodafone, Novartis, Campari, Dow, ABN Amro, Accenture, and Estee Lauder to name a few.

Constellation Research got a demo of Sales Agent, Sales Chat and an AI canvas applications that enabled enterprises to delve into data and dashboards in natural language. A few takeaways:

• The ability for Sales Agent to interact with sales folks within various applications like Outlook with context in an autonomous way was notable. Tasks can be sped up dramatically.
• Sales Agent can carry out tasks and automatically update Dynamics 365.
• Performance tracking on engagements on metrics such as emails sent and open rates, meetings booked and opportunities created enable enterprises to gauge ROI of agents and optimized.
• A Sales Management AI workspace highlights the future of workflows as well as the ability to get specific data points and discover new insight. This "infinite canvas" approach can be helpful and enable enterprises to make better decisions.

Constellation Research analyst Martin Schneider outlined his thoughts in a post. He said:

"These advancements underscore an overarching theme occurring across front-office application development. Where we used to think of suites like CRM as a collections of applications with their own user interfaces….today we are seeing “Copilots” (and their relative cognates) as the new collective UI that can draw functionality and present insights from a wide swath of applications. Also, where we saw workflow as something that needed to be considered, built, and managed - now agents have streamlined workflow to the point where we can simply create complex and effective workflows with a single sentence added to a prompt. And where we looked at CRM systems as a data store, now we can finally start looking at them as a tool for access to knowledge beyond just the data we put into it. High composability, the simplicity of conversational interfaces and more fluid data integration capabilities are driving these rapid changes."

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.&nbsp; <br>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… Read more

CrowdStrike reported better-than-expected fourth quarter results as the company was seeing strong enterprise demand for its AI driven security platform

The company, which is competing with Palo Alto Networks as a "platformization" play, reported a fourth quarter net loss of $92.3 million, or 37 cents a share, on revenue of $1.06 billion, up 255 from a year ago. Non-GAAP fourth quarter earnings were $1.03 a share.

Wall Street was expecting CrowdStrike to report non-GAAP earnings of 86 cents a share on revenue of $1.04 billion.

For fiscal 2025, CrowdStrike reported a net loss of $19.3 million, or 8 cents a share, on revenue of $3.95 billion, up 29% from a year ago. The company appears to be fully recovered from its July outage. 

• Cybersecurity platformization: What you need to know
• CrowdStrike, Palo Alto Networks duel over platforms vs. bundles
• Palo Alto Networks delivers strong Q1, says industry on platformization bandwagon now
• How Platformization Applies to Cybersecurity

CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz said the company is "on the flight path to our $10 billion ending ARR (annual recurring revenue) goal." Kurtz added the company was seeing strong demand for its Next-Gen SIEM, Cloud Security, and Identity Protection businesses. Falcon Flex, CrowdStrike's cybersecurity platform, added more than $1 billion in deal value in the fourth quarter.

As for the outlook, CrowdStrike projected first quarter revenue of $1.1 billion or so with non-GAAP earnings of 64 cents a share to 66 cents a share. Wall Street was expecting non-GAAP earnings for the first quarter of 96 cents a share. For fiscal 2026, CrowdStrike projected revenue of $4.74 billion to $4.8 billion with non-GAAP earnings of $3.33 a share to $3.45 a share. Analysts were expecting $4.43 a share for fiscal 2026. 

• CrowdStrike buys Adaptive Security
• CrowdStrike, AWS expand partnership revolving around CrowdStrike Falcon and Amazon Bedrock

Speaking on a conference call, Kurtz said:

• "CrowdStrike is the first cybersecurity ISV to cross $1 billion in deal value on AWS Marketplace in a single calendar year, setting a new standard for ecosystem execution."
• "We find ourselves placed at the epicenter of a rapidly evolving demand environment. A new administration, a new wave of technology, and a new threat landscape necessitate all businesses to evolve their cybersecurity programs. Consolidation, cost reduction and automation are now the accepted enterprise and federal priorities."
• "We're still in the early, but rapidly evolving innings of the AI revolution. Businesses and governments across the globe are looking for their AI investments to yield both improved efficiencies and novel outputs. At CrowdStrike, we're requiring every team and function to leverage the power of AI."
• "Businesses are equally grappling with how to secure their environments in this AI age. Here's my take on what this means. First, more AI everywhere means more data, more access, and more processes, services, and products requiring cybersecurity."
• "With tools such as DeepSeek making AI access easier and cheaper, the pace and prevalence of adversarial AI adoption is only accelerating."
• "More access to more third-party and in-house agentic applications and services requires rethinking identity and data protection. Who is accessing data and where is it traveling matters more now than ever before." 
• "Securing AI starts a broader enterprise data discussion. I'm seeing CISOs, CIOs, and CEOs going to the drawing board to reinvent their technology stack with AI-powered platforms of record for their next decade and beyond. And for security, it's even more pressing."

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.&nbsp; <br>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… Read more

Google Cloud and Microsoft are launching generative AI tools aimed at healthcare by streamlining documentation and searching unstructured data to optimize workflows. Vendors keep rolling out healthcare focused AI and automation, but the industry still struggles with transformation as well as data interoperability.

Google Cloud said it added a feature called Visual Q&A in its Vertex AI Search for healthcare. Visual Q&A is designed to search tables, charts, medical images and diagrams for data. Google Cloud also said Gemini 2.0 models are available in its healthcare offering.

The idea is that physicians will leverage multimodal search and models to get a better view of patient health.

Microsoft launched Microsoft Dragon Copilot, an AI assistant for clinical workflows. The Dragon Copilot will be combined with DAX, a natural language voice dictation platform that includes ambient listening, genAI models and healthcare guardrails. Microsoft acquired Nuance in 2022 for its healthcare foothold and later launched Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare.

According to Microsoft, Dragon Copilot can streamline documentation with multilanguage ambient note creation, surface medical information from trusted sources and automate tasks such as notes, evidence summaries and referral letters. Microsoft's Dragon Copilot can also navigate electronic health records.

The news from Microsoft and Google Cloud are a barrage of releases timed for HIMSS, a large healthcare technology conference. 

• Oracle launched its Oracle Health Clinical AI Agent, which is a multimodal and screen driven assistant, is available for more than 30 medical specialties. The company said physicians using the AI agent are seeing a decrease of 30% in documentation time. 
• Salesforce made a similar claim as it launched Agentforce for Health, a library of prebuilt skills and actions for healthcare teams.
• Epic, which is essentially the ERP system for healthcare, also said it added a host of generative AI tools to make healthcare workflows more efficient.  

AI in healthcare: Are we there yet?

At Constellation Research's Ambient Experience Summit 2025, there were multiple talks about healthcare, AI and patient experiences. See: Constellation Research Ambient Experience Summit 2025: 10 CX takeaways on people, data, AI

Joseph Anzalone, VP of Marketing at GE Healthcare, said the company is transforming from a capital equipment company to one focused on AI applications. GE Healthcare is planning to leverage the 96% of unused data from its devices to enhance clinician experiences.

"We're focusing on the clinician experience now and building AI applications on top of foundation models that will give clinicians usable data and predictive analytics," said Anzalone, who added that healthcare workflows are often slowed by data silos across various systems, insurance providers and channels.

• How GE Healthcare is approaching generative AI, LLMs, and transformation

The bet is that AI can help overcome legacy infrastructure.

Kimberly Powell, VP of Healthcare at Nvidia, said digital devices, digital biology and clinical will all be big markets for agentic AI systems.

Powell argued that AI agents will serve as a digital workforce due to shortages. AI agents will succeed because they can sit on top of existing infrastructure. She said:

"I believe agentic AI can overlay on the healthcare system unlike technology in the past. Agents can connect and have a foundation model through an API. Since there's an API, AI agents can navigate autonomously over what is otherwise a antiquated and very complex and disaggregated healthcare system."

Also see: BT150 Spotlight: Centurion Health's Johnny Wu on delivering healthcare in prisons

• BT150 Spotlight: MultiCare Health System's Laurie Wheeler on optimization, change management and healthcare transformation
• BioNtech, InstaDeep bet on genAI models to advance R&D, drug discovery, cancer treatment
• AI 15O's Matt Lewis on GenAI adoption, psychology and life sciences
• Welldoc Chief AI Officer Anand Iyer on AI, data and healthcare transformation
• How ResMed’s data prowess sets it up for AI, sleep health market expansion

Data interoperability needed

While these AI visions for healthcare are in progress and impressive, Constellation Research CEO Ray Wang argued in a report that the industry needs to focus on healthcare data interoperability.

Wang said:

"Healthcare systems around the world are facing a confluence of challenges such as aging and declining populations, rising cost of delivery, clinical workforce shortages, and increasing expectations for better outcomes at lower prices. Although healthcare systems have accelerated their digitization projects in an effort to modernize, the results have not shown massive efficiency. One of the biggest opportunities to accelerate digitization and prepare for the Age of AI is improved healthcare data interoperability. In fact, interoperability will play a significant role in driving down costs and improving patient outcomes."

The industry needs to focus on interoperability because "current patients, physicians, and healthcare providers and payors face a constant struggle to integrate, manage, and orchestrate across a hodgepodge of physical and digital functional fiefdoms and silos."

Ultimately, the healthcare industry needs to focus on vendors that support data interoperability, hone data consistency, make interoperability part of governance and leverage standards.

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.&nbsp; <br>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… Read more

Qualcomm fleshed out its Dragonwing platform as it launched a series of fixed wireless access building blocks designed to enable AI inference use cases as well as industrial applications.

At Mobile World Congress, Qualcomm aimed to stretch beyond its 5G modems, smartphones and PCs to enterprise use cases. Qualcomm launched its Dragonwing branding designed to target enterprises and industrial IoT use cases as well as a partnership with IBM.

The company is looking to expand from handsets, autos, PCs and augmented reality to industrial, networking and other devices.

Qualcomm launched Dragonwing Fixed Wireless Access Gen 4 Elite, a platform that has 40 TOPS Edge AI integration, tops downlink speeds up to 12.5 Gbps and has on-device AI-enhanced traffic classification.

• Qualcomm launches Dragonwing, expands into industrial AI
• Qualcomm Q1 strong as on-device generative AI ramps
• Top 5 Takeaways from Qualcomm AI Day | With Analyst Andy Thurai
• Qualcomm, Arm cheer cheaper models, AI inference at the edge

To go along with Dragonwing, Qualcomm launched X85 5G Modem-RF. The Dragonwing FWA Gen 4 Elite platform can deliver long-range 5G mmWave, NTN Satellite communication and dual SIM connectivity along with cellular, Wi-Fi and Ethernet.

The news from Qualcomm is part of a broader strategy to be seen as an AI processor company as more workloads go to the edge of the network. The company launched a series of modems--Qualcomm E41 4G Modem-RF, Qualcomm E51 4G Modem-RF and Qualcomm E52 4G Modem-RF--designed for industrial use cases.

According to Qualcomm, the modems are designed to be deployed in multiple environments such as warehouses, manufacturing plants and other areas with poor signals. The modems can be positioned in any environment and incorporates iSIM technology into the hardware for easy programming.

With the effort, Qualcomm is looking to develop use cases in energy and utilities, retail and autonomous robots.

• Physical AI, world foundation models will move to forefront

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.&nbsp; <br>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… Read more

Although AI--generative, agentic and everything in between--is viewed as a tool that can improve customer experience there is the risk that enterprises may rely too much on the technologies.

At Constellation Research's Ambient Experience Summit 2025, we held a workshop on ways to think different about experiences and address one key challenge. Over-reliance on AI was a big theme as was disjointed customer journeys.

• Constellation Research Ambient Experience Summit 2025: 10 CX takeaways on people, data, AI
• AX100 Spotlight: RentSpree's Michael Storey on the intersection of CX, AI and success metrics

One group noted that CX can be harmed by overreliance on AI. AI can only be so personal and the big workflow issue is figuring out where to insert a human into processes. To date, AI is viewed as a productivity enhancement that can add digital labor and in many cases replace humans.

Yes, CX leaders need to implement AI, but have no control about how it's deployed. In addition, the models can be experimental and simply off the mark. AI isn't a human replacement and it's a big reason why we're hitting #0 every time we call customer service.

Constellation Research analyst Liz Miller noted:

"Let's be honest, if we keep training AI on the nonsense that it's been trained on so far, it is going to get even worse. I do not want my customer experience to be over reliant on AI, because it can be unreliable, lacks human touch, and it is experimental, but it can help when it's deployed."

A few takeaways from the workshop:

• CX leaders need to think through AI's deficiencies and know the problems they're trying to solve. Is the issue cost efficiency? Is it growth? Is it boosting the lifetime value of the customer relationship?
• CX leaders need to think through the customer journey and where AI can help. Why are journeys mapped the way they are? It's quite possible that AI and workflow automation may make the customer journey even more disjointed.
• AI is going to occupy a larger chunk of the customer experience, but don’t go crazy. Humans will have to find the balance needed to blend AI with real-life touchpoints.

One company worth watching on this AI-CX front is Intuit. Speaking on Intuit's fiscal second quarter earnings conference call, CEO Sasan Goodarzi talked about how it was blending AI and humans to create experiences with Intuit Assist.

"We are making strong progress across our platform with our data and AI investments to deliver done-for-you experiences with AI-powered human expertise,” said Goodarzi. “Our focus is on automating tasks, end-to-end workflows, and entire functions, connecting customers to one of our more than 12,000 AI-powered human experts for that last mile or to complete all of the work."

Goodarzi said Intuit is seeing higher conversions across its product line with personalized product experiences. "With the scale of our data and AI capabilities, Intuit Assist is the control tower automating tasks and workflows, with human experts engaging where needed to deliver done-for-you experiences for our customers," said Goodarzi.

Intuit also highlights one of the key takeaways from our CX summit: Data quality is everything. Intuit has invested heavily in its cloud-based data architecture that set the stage for AI.

• Intuit embraces LLM choice for multiple use cases
• Intuit sees 'green shoots' from its generative AI strategy
• Intuit’s bets on data, AI, AWS pay off ahead of generative AI transformation (PDF)