by twieberneit | Nov 6, 2023 | Analysis, Blog, News |
The News A lot is going on in the SAPverse during October and the early days of November 2023. First, SAP conducted its CXLive event with CX-related announcements, then the company reported good Q3/2023 figures, a new version of its CX software that includes new generative AI capabilities got released and lastly, it executed its SAP TechEd event with a good number of AI-, BTP-, and ERP related announcements. As this is quite a lot, let me focus on SAP CX in this post. I will cover the TechEd related parts in another post soon. During his keynote to SAP CX Live CEO Christian Klein named CX “a very critical part of SAP’s portfolio. There is no intelligent enterprise without CX”. This got later reaffirmed by Chief Marketing Officer for SAP’s industry and CX solutions, Sven Denecken, who said “SAP is very serious about customer experience. If you heard otherwise, that’s not true”. Why is this important? You’ll find out in the next section. The bigger picture Like every other company, too, SAP has jumped on the generative AI train. For some time now, we are hearing of a lot of announcements and available functionality. This includes an own co-pilot as well as an own foundation model that focuses on business data and business decisions. Focusing on CX, SAP announced the availability of a number of AI driven assistants that cover the whole chain from marketing through service but also lead into fulfillment. With all these, SAP is in tough competition. The company is not perceived as a CX leader, some people even doubt it being serious about CX at all and also question the company’s...
by twieberneit | Oct 19, 2023 | Analysis, Blog |
The news On October 4 and 5, 2023, SugarCRM held its Connected event followed by an analyst summit in London. The first day – Connected – was targeted mostly at customers while the second day focused on analysts. The event started off with an intense speech by Katherine Grainger, DBE, a British rowing champion. Her core messages were about team bonding, the importance of communication, continuous improvement, and perseverance (well, at least that’s my take). This was followed by information about what is new in the software and, more importantly, a customer panel. The main sponsor, Mobileforce, placed some words about the partnership. In addition, the analysts had 1:1s with customers, partners, and Sugar executives. The second day was filled with information targeted at analysts. CEO Craig Charlton and his executive team shared about financial status, strategy and more in-depth product news. Sugar being a privately held, VC backed company, the financials are of course under NDA, so it suffices to say that the company is not one of the biggest players but on a solid trajectory with high win and customer retention rates. According to Charlton, this can be attributed to the word “ease”, which later got confirmed via a marketing study related by CMO Clare Dorrian. Going forward, the continuation of this growth shall be supported by verticalization, a concentration on AI and a focus on the upper mid-market and lower enterprise market. This is based on the assessment that CRM can become an assistant to its users via the smart application of (generative) AI to “let the platform do the work” for the users. The industry strategy got explained by the...
by twieberneit | Sep 12, 2023 | Analysis, Blog |
The News Dreamforce 2023 has started. It is the first post-Covid physical Dreamforce. The event has more than 40,000 participants from all over the world, which is almost small, considering past events. As usual, Dreamforce was opened by a keynote that was accompanied by a flurry of announcements. In an interesting twist, the keynote was accompanied by an analyst watch party held by Salesforce’s analyst relations. There was a “competing” watch party by the CRM Playaz. Not surprisingly, the topic of AI was front, right and center of the keynote after some emphasis on a culture of giving and the celebration of Salesforce as the #3 software vendor worldwide with an expected revenue of $34.8B US while continuing to lead the CRM market by a considerable margin. This is, indeed, quite an achievement. However, the focus of the keynote was set in the watch party by Salesforce’s Chief Enterprise Strategist Bruce Richardson with the following posting in the chat: “gen AI to boost global economy by $4.4 trillion. Since the release of ChatGPT in November 2022, it’s been all over the headlines, and businesses are racing to capture its value. Within the technology’s first few months, McKinsey research found that generative AI (gen AI) features stand to add up to $4.4 trillion to the global economy—annually. Source: McKinsey (August 23, 2023)” Consequently, much of what Salesforce currently does, capitalizes on this opportunity and helps businesses work with this opportunity. The key vehicles for this are the new Einstein 1 Platform and Einstein Copilot that comes together with a low code development environment Einstein Copilot Studio. Einstein Copilot is an “out of the box conversational AI assistant built into the user...
by twieberneit | Jun 23, 2023 | Analysis, Blog |
The news During the Salesforce AI Day on June 12 as well as the Salesforce AI Industry Analyst Forum on June 20, Salesforce provided a lot of interesting information on how the company addresses the challenge – or should I say problem – of trust into artificial intelligence. Salesforce sees this gap caused by hallucinations, lack of context and data security as well as toxicity and bias. According to Salesforce, this gets compounded by the need for integrating external models into business software. To address this problem, Salesforce has announced its AI Cloud that combines an “Einstein GPT Trust Layer”, Customer 360 and its CRM to offer AI-powered business processes that are built right into the system, based on an AI that can be trusted. The main vehicle is the Einstein GPT Trust Layer that takes care of secure data retrieval from business applications, dynamic grounding to reduce the risk of hallucinations and to increase response accuracy by automatically enriching prompts with relevant business-owned data, data masking, the anonymization of sensitive data to avoid its unintentional exposure of sensitive data to external tools, toxicity detection to make sure that generated content adheres to corporate policy, is free of unwanted words or images, and unbiased, creating and maintaining an audit trail, the external (or internal) AI not retaining, storing, any corporate information that gets sent to it via the request. This trust layer sits in between the used AI models and the apps and the respective development environments. All requests to the models, along with their data, get routed through this layer, ensuring authorization protected retrieval of data, the grounding...
by twieberneit | May 11, 2023 | Analysis, Blog |
The News On May 4, 2023, Zoho held its Zoholics conference in Austin, TX which included a media and analyst track in addition to the customer track. After all, Zoholics is a customer event. During this event, about 80 participants of the former track had ample opportunity to learn about and discuss the latest news at Zoho. We also had the opportunity to listen to – and question – a panel of customers who gave candid answers about their journey with Zoho and challenges they faced. Of course there was plenty of room for mingling and networking with Zoho executives and, of course, with analysts and customers. In addition to the breaks between the tracks, there was a pre-evening reception, a dinner on the event day and a casual brunch at the Zoho farm just outside of Austin. As usual for Zoho, the sessions were less about feeding us with PowerPoint (or Zoho Show, to be precise. Why would Zoho not use a Zoho product?) but about giving good information and a genuine interest in getting feedback. This was evident not only during the sessions but also by the customer panel and an open Q and A with representatives of the Zoho leadership team. Of course, the customers were reference customers. Still, they openly admitted challenges. In one case e.g., it became evident that Zoho’s HR software has scope for improvement, another example was users preferring MS Teams to Zoho Cliq. The sessions covered four grand themes: The release of Ulaa, a privacy orientated browser Zoho’s upmarket momentum A kick-start set of solutions to help solopreneurs and very small businesses to...
by twieberneit | Mar 16, 2023 | Analysis, Blog |
The hype around generative AI, in particular ChatGPT is still at a fever pitch. It created thousands of start-ups and at the moment attracts lots of venture capital. Basically, everyone – and their dog – jumps on the bandwagon, with the Gartner Group predicting that it is getting worse, before it is going to be better. According to them, generative AI is yet to cross the peak of inflated expectations. Gartner Hype Cycle for Artificial Intelligence, 2022; source Gartner There are a few notable exceptions, though. So far, I haven’t heard major announcements by players like SAP, Oracle, SugarCRM, Zoho, or Freshworks. Before being accused of vendor bashing … I take this is a good sign. Why? Because it shows that vendors like these have understood that it is worthwhile thinking about valuable scenarios before jumping the gun and coming out with announcements just to stay top of the mind of potential customers. I dare say that these vendors (as well as some unmentioned others) are doing exactly the former, as all of them are highly innovative. Don’t get me wrong, though. It is important to announce new capabilities. It is probably just not a good style to do so too much in advance, just to potentially freeze a market. This only leads to disappointments on the customer side and ultimately does not serve a vendor’s reputation. For business vendors, it is important to understand and articulate the value that they generate by implementing any technology. Sometimes, it is better to use existing technology instead of shifting to the shiny new toy. The potential benefits in these cases simply do not outweigh the disadvantages, starting...
