by twieberneit | Sep 19, 2024 | Blog |
Oracle Cloud World is in the books, Dreamforce just wrapped up, Hubspot’s Inbound event is still on, and there is one key theme that overarches all three events. And no, it is not Larry Ellison getting all cozy with AWS (or Azure, for that matter). It is also not that his keynote was distinctly geeky, after some years of Oracle putting business solutions to the front. Or that Mark Benioff apparently tore up his keynote in the last moment. It is also not that Hubspot CEO Yamini Rangan found that the sales process is broken and that customers know more about you as you about your customer. No, the theme is … drumroll … you will have guessed it … AI agents. Oracle’s Steve Miranda talked about them at length in a line of business context, while Larry focused on IT, security, and database-oriented agents. For Salesforce, agents are even more of a topic, dubbing Dreamforce the biggest AI event and Salesforce the most successful AI CRM – both technically right but probably somewhat short selling the full value of both. For Salesforce, the next big thing is Agentforce, it’s AI Agent platform. And Hubspot announced Breeze, its AI to power the customer platform, which, you guess it, includes agents. CEO Yamani Rangan talked about marketing, sales, and service agents. Co-founder and CTO Dharmesh Shah then spent considerable time in his keynote, talking about agent.ai, Hubspots “professional network for AI agents”. What struck me watching all three keynotes – Ellison’s, Benioff’s and Shah’s – is the change from last year’s messaging to this year’s messaging. Last years it was...
