Michael Ni

Larry Dignan's quick coverage of Christian Klein's comments at the Goldman Sachs investment conference... is worth a read because it points to where SAP thinks the next AI advantage lies (inside business processes) and reminds us why SaaSpocalypse was an overreaction.

SAP's bet is pretty practical. Agents need to know the data, semantics, permissions, process state, and business rules ... and the learning loops around a decision before they should be allowed to act. That is hard to recreate outside the systems where the work already runs.

For data and AI leaders, the implication is important: the next architecture battle may be less about which model you use and more about who supplies trusted business context at runtime.

SAP has a real advantage there, but it also has a hard execution problem. Most large enterprises still have mixed estates, custom processes, and plenty of non-SAP data.

The takeaway: when evaluating agent platforms, ask less about how many agents they ship and more about how they handle context, permissions, exceptions, and process state across the real environment.

Read Larry's coverage here: https://www.constellationr.com/insights/news/sap-ceo-klein-our-ai-agents-want-solve-complex-business-processes

24% of consumers said they canceled or stopped buying from a brand over concerns about how AI uses their data.

52% said they would pay more for a brand that is clear about it.

Not a new story, but one that will become more central as companies add AI data leverage to their solutions.

For data and AI leaders, privacy and consent are not just compliance issues. They now affect retention, pricing, data quality, and how far customers will let you go with personalization. This brings back conversations about zero-party data and how you want to manage your direct relationship with customers and the promise you make about how you'll use their data.

Increasing model capabilities may give you new features. The customer still has to say yes.

Snowflake’s latest quarter gave the Street what it wanted: accelerating product revenue growing 37% to $1.49B, RPO reaching $9B, and higher full-year guidance. Importantly, management also said AI products have accounted for roughly half of recent growth acceleration.

The story: Snowflake is aggressively pushing its AI vision, and buyers are approving.

Since its bevy of announcements at Snowflake Summit in June, Snowflake has added model routing, agent governance, MCP connectivity, context services and AI development tooling around its data platform. Snowflake has been clear: it wants to sit between enterprise data and AI execution.

Databricks is pushing toward the same control point.

For CDAOs and CIOs, the platform decision keeps shifting as consolidation continues, with each player approaching from its starting point.

MyPOV:

• The question is no longer just where data is stored or analyzed … Snowflake is shaking off the perception that it's anchored in warehouse economics. The question is increasingly where AI gets its context, permissions, model choice, and rules for action.

• What you should do: keep ownership of your data, context, policies, and decision logic clear. Preserve model optionality. Be deliberate about where the AI execution control point lives.

Snowflake’s growth is the headline today, but the story I am following is that the data platform is moving closer to the decision layer.

For more:

• Larry Dignan: Q2’26 growth surges on AI & data demand: https://buff.ly/iAYTBlj
• Snowflake’s release: https://buff.ly/6FiI61M
• Snowflake Summit 2026: Redrawing the Boundary Between Data, Context, and Action: https://buff.ly/3QHuvOy

Qdrant has released Qdrant-Fineweb-10B, a public benchmark dataset built on 10 billion documents with exact ground truth for 120,000 queries. It covers dense, sparse and metadata-filtered retrieval, with known nearest-neighbor results to k=1,000. Qdrant is also releasing Supernova, the toolkit used to generate the embeddings and compute the benchmark.

MyPOV

• Vector search is becoming table stakes (often embedded into DB or platform)
• Specialists like Qdrant need to differentiate: better retrieval quality, latency, scale economics
  CDOs, CDAOs and COOs neeed to understand retrieval is part of the AI operating architecture given retrieval determines what evidence reaches the model before an agent decides.
• Qdrant pushing to educate with making evaluation easier to force leaders to ask the question, “When does retrieval become important enough to operate, optimize and govern as its own infrastructure layer?”

--

News: https://www.techtarget.com/data-technologies/news/366649627/Qdrant-builds-dataset-to-benchmark-vector-retrieval-at-scale

Salesforce shares rose 22.6% after its Q2 FY27 results were announced on August 26 and continued higher Friday. Revenue reached $11.35B, +11% YoY, while cRPO reached $33.5B

• Driver: important was AI evidence where Agentforce ARR exceeded $1.5B, +240% YoY; Agentforce + Data 360 ARR approached $3.9B, +210%+; interestingly is growth in new AI consumption pricing approach where customers consumed 3.2B Agentic Work Units in Q2, +97% sequentially.
• Supporting moves: headless support (yes, older news), Anthropic partnership (just announced with Claude getting live access to SFDC context, delivering 37 prebuilt sales skills)

MyPOV:

• This quarter weakens the "AI kills SaaS" thesis, where the CR stance is that ownership of key data context (MDM, prioritization logic, policies), critical workflows/execution paths, and learning loops wins.
• CIO architecture evaluations need to consider which platform controls business context, permissions, state, and action when any model can become the interface.