This list celebrates changemakers creating meaningful impact through leadership, innovation, fresh perspectives, transformative mindsets, and lessons that resonate far beyond the workplace.
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.
<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…
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Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the company spend $60 billion to $65 billion in capital expenditures largely focused on artificial intelligence.
In a post on Facebook, Zuckerberg outlined the company's 2025 goals. Zuckerberg also highlighted how Meta will build a 2GW+ data center that "is so large it would cover "a significant part of Manhattan."
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.
<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
Verizon outlined Verizon AI Connect in a strategy designed to put its network, compute and edge computing infrastructure in the middle of artificial intelligence inferencing workloads.
With Verizon AI Connect, the company is looking to court hyperscale cloud providers and large enterprises with an edge to cloud network. AI Connect will feature Verizon's 5G network, high-speed fiber connectivity, edge locations and power and cooling.
Verizon added that it is looking to expand its AI efforts via partnerships with Nvidia, Vultr, which is a GPU-as-a-service provider, Google Cloud and Meta.
"Our industry sits at the center of the next wave of innovation as AI transforms how consumers and businesses operate," said Verizon CEO Hans Vestberg. "Our network assets and capabilities position us uniquely in this evolving landscape."
"If you think about where we are on generative AI today, today, it's large language modules that are trained at large data centers, and that requires enormous capacities. Over time, that will come much closer to the edge of the network, both for applications, but transport cost, and latency in some cases. This is creating an opportunity for us and has already created an opportunity as we had revenue and EBITDA impact in the fourth quarter. We are now looking into how we can use our assets and our capability to serve this market when it comes to the next step of generative AI."
Verizon's AI Connect effort is designed to utilize the company's existing assets including its fiber buildout and long-haul network to handle AI workloads. In addition, Verizon's Converged Intelligent Edge Network will play a role.
The biggest argument for Verizon's AI Connect is that the AI infrastructure being built will need networking and connectivity to data centers and the edge.
Kyle Malady, CEO of Verizon Business Group, said:
"As we move through our network transformation work, we will continue to free up more resources that could be made available for AI Connect. In addition, we have between 100 and 200 acres of undeveloped land, some currently zoned for data center build and much of it in prime data center-friendly areas."
In addition, Verizon has $1 billion in backlog just for its existing infrastructure, said Malady.
Verizon also reported fourth quarter and 2024 earnings.
The company reported fourth quarter earnings of $5.1 billion, or $1.18 a share, on revenue of $35.7 billion, up 1.6% from a year ago. Non-GAAP earnings were $1.10 a share.
For the year, Verizon reported earnings of $4.14 a share on revenue of $134.8 billion, up 0.6% from a year ago.
By the numbers:
Verizon reported fourth quarter wireless revenue of $20 billion, up 3.1% from a year ago.
The company had 568,000 postpaid net phone additions in the fourth quarter.
Broadband net additions were 408,000 in the fourth quarter.
Verizon added a net 373,000 fixed wireless access subscribers for a total of 4.6 million fixed wireless subscribers.
As for the outlook, Verizon is expecting total wireless service revenue growth of 2% to 2.8% and adjusted earnings per share growth of 0 to 3%.
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.
<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
Hostaway CEO Marcus Rader said the best way to serve an industry with software is to come to it completely as a novice. The software as a service company is focused on vacation rental properties and the small businesses operating them. Hostaway recently raised $365 million in a round led by General Atlantic. Hostaway, which was the first property management system to integrate directly into OpenAI's ChatGPT, said it will use the money to expand globally and invest in AI.
Insights Editor in Chief Larry Dignan caught up with Hostaway CEO Marcus Rader to talk about technology. Here are the key takeaways...
Hostaway's core pitch. The company provides software for vacation rental property managers in charge of anywhere from 10 to 8,000 properties. "All of our customers are running remote operations and for that you need software to know what's going on and connect to the biggest companies in the space like Airbnb and VRBO," said Rader.
The advantages of being an outsider. "Most vertical software companies were started by people who are running a business in a certain industry and start building tools for that," said Rader. "We did the opposite. We're software people and had no experience whatsoever in vacation rentals when we started 10 years ago."
SMB challenges. Rader said Hostaway's approach is to look at what has worked and failed in other industries and then apply it to its vertical. SMBs can also be a challenge in that they may not know how to run a business. Hostaway aims to make those tasks easier.
The role of AI. Rader said AI has the potential to save a lot of time and money for Hostaway's customers. "AI is extremely important in our segment, because just like any hospitality business, the biggest expense is either the time you spend trying to delegate and teaching your staff, or the money that you're paying your staff," said Rader. "Every hour, every minute counts, and AI has the potential to save a lot of time and money. It's our top priority in 2025 to build out that functionality for our clients."
Process and efficiencies. Rader said process and efficiency plays a big role in AI. "We hate inefficiencies, especially when a company makes a decision and then two years later reverts to the old way," he said. "That's my definition of inefficiency and it's terrible. I see a lot of smaller property managers struggle with that. Their business is doing well until one day it isn't and they don't know why. And there's a ton of people more than willing to tell them that they will solve all of their problems if they give them money. Our goal is to make it easy as possible to pick the right solution when it comes to operational efficiency."
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.
<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
OpenAI launched Operator, an AI agent that can use go to the web and perform tasks such as booking vacations, shopping for groceries and making restaurant reservations.
In a blog post and YouTube video, OpenAI walked through a few demonstrations. The general idea is that OpenAI's Operator can handle repetitive browser tasks using the same interface as humans. OpenAI is aiming to use agentic AI to popularize it with consumers, but the real money will be in business use cases. "Our plan is to expand to Plus, Team, and Enterprise users and integrate these capabilities into ChatGPT in the future," said the company.
For now, the Operator is available to ChatGPT Pro users.
Operator leverages GPT-4o's vision and reasoning features and a new model called Computer-Using Agent, or CUA, which interacts with graphical interfaces.
The key item here is that OpenAI Operator takes action on the web without APIs and custom integrations. If Operator gets stuck it can self-correct and hand back control to users.
Initially, Operator works with day-to-day services such as DoorDash, Instacart, OpenTable, Priceline, StubHub, Thumbtack and Uber. Over time, rest assured that OpenAI will expand to enterprise use cases.
OpenAI said it will provide an API for CUA for developers, enable Operator to handle more complex tasks and expand to enterprises.
On the safety front, Operator asks the user to takeover when it needs more information and credentials, confirm actions, decline sensitive tasks and require supervision to avoid mistakes.
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.
<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
Hostaway CEO Marcus Rader said the best way to serve an industry with software is to come to it completely as a novice.
The software as a service company is focused on vacation rental properties and the small businesses operating them. Hostaway recently raised $365 million in a round led by General Atlantic. Hostaway, which was the first property management system to integrate directly into OpenAI's ChatGPT, said it will use the money to expand globally and invest in AI.
I caught up with Hostaway CEO Marcus Rader to talk about technology. Here are the takeaways.
Hostaway's core pitch. The company provides software for vacation rental property managers in charge of anywhere from 10 to 8,000 properties. "All of our customers are running remote operations and for that you need software to know what's going on and connect to the biggest companies in the space like Airbnb and VRBO," said Rader.
The advantages of being an outsider. "Most vertical software companies were started by people who are running a business in a certain industry and start building tools for that," said Rader. "We did the opposite. We're software people and had no experience whatsoever in vacation rentals when we started 10 years ago."
Rader said the first step was to learn about the industry. "What are vacation rentals all about? We started renting out properties. Just learn, in addition to talking to people. And then we started building the tools and the only global solution that's really available," said Rader, who noted Hostaway's first customer was in Portugal with an initial office in Barcelona.
A child's eye to starting a business. Rader said entering a new industry has its advantages. He said:
"One of the great things with entering a new industry is that it has preconceived notions of how things are supposed to be done, or how people think. Those truths are true, but the industry experts are often the last ones to notice when things change. That's why so many industries can be disrupted.
Taxis were not a new industry, but they were just doing the same cab rides they’d been doing for 50 years. Suddenly Uber came and took everything away. Being new in an industry you don't have opinions. You just listen to what customers want and go build it."
SMB challenges. Rader said Hostaway's approach is to look at what has worked and failed in other industries and then apply it to its vertical. SMBs can also be a challenge in that they may not know how to run a business. Hostaway aims to make those tasks easier.
The role of AI. Rader said AI has the potential to save a lot of time and money for Hostaway's customers. "AI is extremely important in our segment, because just like any hospitality business, the biggest expense is either the time you spend trying to delegate and teaching your staff, or the money that you're paying your staff," said Rader. "Every hour, every minute counts, and AI has the potential to save a lot of time and money. It's our top priority in 2025 to build out that functionality for our clients."
Process and efficiencies. Rader said process and efficiency plays a big role in AI. "We hate inefficiencies, especially when a company makes a decision and then two years later reverts to the old way," he said. "That's my definition of inefficiency and it's terrible. I see a lot of smaller property managers struggle with that. Their business is doing well until one day it isn't and they don't know why. And there's a ton of people more than willing to tell them that they will solve all of their problems if they give them money. Our goal is to make it easy as possible to pick the right solution when it comes to operational efficiency."
Principal Analyst and Founder
Constellation Research
R “Ray” Wang is the CEO of Silicon Valley-based Constellation Research Inc. He co-hosts DisrupTV, a weekly enterprise tech and leadership webcast that averages 50,000 views per episode and blogs at www.raywang.org. His ground-breaking best-selling book on digital transformation, Disrupting Digital Business, was published by Harvard Business Review Press in 2015. Ray's new book about Digital Giants and the future of business, titled, Everybody Wants to Rule The World was released in July 2021. Wang is well-quoted and frequently interviewed by media outlets such as the Wall Street Journal, Fox Business, CNBC, Yahoo Finance, Cheddar, and Bloomberg.
Short Bio
R “Ray” Wang (pronounced WAHNG) is the Founder, Chairman, and Principal Analyst of Silicon Valley-based Constellation…
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🏔️ LIVE FROM #Davos25: R "Ray" Wang talks with IBM's Neil Dhar on the future of #AI and consulting at the World Economic Forum (#WEF25). Here's a few key takeaways...
📌 Companies are now focused on driving real ROI from their AI investments, targeting 2-3x returns through productivity gains, increased sales, and cost reductions.
📌 Regulation and governance are critical to building trust in AI systems, especially around sensitive #data. Unlike the early days of social media, this needs to be integrated upfront.
📌 Examples of AI driving #innovation, including drug development acceleration in pharma and enhanced customer service in retail.
📌 Growth strategies are a major focus for hashtag#business leaders post-election and amid market stability.
💡Watch below to get the whole scoop, and follow R "Ray" Wang on LinkedIn and X (@rwang0) for live Davos updates!
Principal Analyst and Founder
Constellation Research
R “Ray” Wang is the CEO of Silicon Valley-based Constellation Research Inc. He co-hosts DisrupTV, a weekly enterprise tech and leadership webcast that averages 50,000 views per episode and blogs at www.raywang.org. His ground-breaking best-selling book on digital transformation, Disrupting Digital Business, was published by Harvard Business Review Press in 2015. Ray's new book about Digital Giants and the future of business, titled, Everybody Wants to Rule The World was released in July 2021. Wang is well-quoted and frequently interviewed by media outlets such as the Wall Street Journal, Fox Business, CNBC, Yahoo Finance, Cheddar, and Bloomberg.
Short Bio
R “Ray” Wang (pronounced WAHNG) is the Founder, Chairman, and Principal Analyst of Silicon Valley-based Constellation…
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Tuning in from the World Economic Forum in Davos! 🌍 Constellation founder R "Ray" Wang talks with IBM's Mohamad Ali about 2025 consulting #trends... Key topics include:
📌 The critical importance of #AI adoption
📌 Overcoming cultural challenges to scaling AI
📌 Companies embracing AI will achieve 10x efficiency gains
📌Obstacles around employees adopting the new #technology
Both Ray and Mohamad agree there's more optimism in the air at Davos this year! Watch the full conversation here.
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.
<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
DigitalOcean, a cloud provider focused on AI workloads, launched its GenAI Platform, which compiles third party foundational models to enable developers to build AI agents quickly.
The company launched the foundational model platform at its Deploy developer conference in Austin.
DigitalOcean's GenAI Platform is designed to allow customers to set up agents with their data platforms. The company said the GenAI Platform is designed to reach developers on multiple levels. To that end, DigitalOcean features services like GPU Droplets, which enables customers to spin up Nvidia H100 instances in one and eight GPU configurations.
The ability to use third-party foundation models to build chat experiences with document analysis, semantic search and image generation.
A framework that's model agnostic.
Workflows to create use case specific agents with enterprise data and context.
The ability to integrate structured data from databases and APIs.
Guardrails for reliability and safety.
Support for private interfaces.
Bratin Saha, Chief Product and Technology Officer at DigitalOcean, said the GenAI Platform is designed to integrate with customers' existing infrastructure and cater toward multiple experience levels.
DigitalOcean said the GenAI Platform is available today. The company said it will add new features to the GenAI Platform including support for URLs as a data source, agent evaluations, auto-indexing for knowledge bases and model fine-tuning.
DigitalOcean has an annual revenue run rate approaching $800 million. Last year, DigitalOcean named Paddy Srinivasan CEO. Srinivasan had been CEO of GoTo and before that was co-founder of Opstera and an executive at Oracle and Microsoft.
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.
<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
OpenAI said it has launched the Stargate Project, a company that will invest $500 billion over the next four years building AI infrastructure in the US.
According to a joint statement, Stargate is designed to "secure American leadership in AI, create hundreds of thousands of American jobs, and generate massive economic benefit for the entire world." President Trump announced the $500 billion infrastructure effort.
With Stargate, OpenAI, which is operating the first site in Texas and the ones after it, will bring in Oracle as a cloud partner. Microsoft issued a separate statement. Both OpenAI and Microsoft said Stargate built upon a tight partnership already.
OpenAI said it will "continue to increase its consumption of Azure as OpenAI continues its work with Microsoft with this additional compute to train leading models and deliver great products and services."
Microsoft said the OpenAI terms of the partnership remain for the contract through 2030. Microsoft noted it has rights to OpenAI IP, an Azure exclusive with the OpenAI API and revenue sharing pacts.
"This new agreement also includes changes to the exclusivity on new capacity, moving to a model where Microsoft has a right of first refusal (ROFR). To further support OpenAI, Microsoft has approved OpenAI’s ability to build additional capacity, primarily for research and training of models."
Given the partners here, it looks like OpenAI will be using Oracle Cloud Infrastructure too.
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.
<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
Cognizant said that consumers that embrace artificial intelligence are likely to drive $4.4 trillion in AI-influenced consumer spending in the US by 2030.
In a report from Cognizant and Oxford Economics, the services firm argued that US consumers who embrace AI could drive 46% of spending by 2030. In Australia, that percentage rises to 55% over the same period followed by Germany at 46% and UK at 39%.
Cognizant's report puts a customer experience spin on enterprise AI investments. Generative AI is typically seen as a way to improve efficiency, but enterprises are also looking toward agentic AI to drive revenue and experiences.
Ravi Kumar S., CEO of Cognizant, said enterprises need to examine the "full potential of how AI can reimagine the customer experience and unlock tremendous value."
According to the survey, which was based on 8,400 respondents, 75% noted that they were frustrated with the buying process. These consumers saw potential in AI when learning about products, buying them and post purchase. Cognizant grouped respondents based on their attitudes toward AI.
Cognizant argued that enterprises will have to prepare for how agentic AI will impact consumers.
"Businesses will also have to understand and prepare for what comes next in the AI journey: the agentic internet, an interconnected ecosystem of AI-enabled tools and agents working on behalf of consumers to autonomously locate, evaluate, purchase and maintain the products and services they rely on. With the agentic internet, consumers will gain what amounts to a personal digital concierge that works with business AI agents to orchestrate complex tasks across the purchase journey."
Key items:
Conversational AI was the most popular tool for consumers who embraced AI. Digital voice assistants and chatbots followed.
Consumers are most comfortable with AI during the learning phase. The survey found 47% of respondents were comfortable using AI to help choose products and services.
75% of respondents are unlikely to allow AI to automatically reorder or pay for high-value items without direct authorization.
Only 16% of consumers who are older than 55 years are comfortable with AI during the decision making phase with 33% aged 18 to 44 years old comfortable.
28% of consumers were comfortable using AI to reorder low priced items.
Here's a look at how Cognizant sees the AI adoption waves forming.
