by twieberneit | Oct 11, 2024 | Analysis, Blog |
The news On October 9, 2024, Zendesk held its AI Summit in New York’s Chelsea Industrial. The AI Summit is an event mainly for customers to inform themselves about what is new at Zendesk but also to network with each other. The event featured an interesting lineup of customer and partner speakers, headlined by New York Times bestselling author and podcast host Kara Swisher. My estimate is that there have been more than 250 customer representatives in attendance who not only could listen to the speakers but also get in-depth demos of Zendesk’s updated offerings, following real-life use cases. True to its name, the event centered around the use of AI, in particular bots, to increase not only efficiency, but also customer- and employee satisfaction. CEO Tom Eggememeier opened the event with an emphasis that Zendesk’s AI is built to support humans by stating that it “is designed for humans”, and Zendesk’s service solution is built to strengthen the human – AI partnership. Kara Swisher talked about the promise and peril of AI, giving the audience some food for thought on the day after Geoffrey E. Hinton, the godfather of machine learning turned AI warner got co-awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics for his “foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks”. While Swisher sees the value that the use of AI can bring, she, too, warned about the hurdles that still need to be overcome, namely the concentration of power that the technology creates and its immense hunger for energy. The tie into the Zendesk story is that customer service is a prime...
by Marshall Lager | Sep 23, 2024 | Analysis, Blog, News |
Salesforce told us its agents were coming, and it was still a surprise when the agents arrived.If you’ve been conscious for the past year, you know how much news (or noise) there has been about artificial intelligence. Salesforce billed Dreamforce24 as “the largest AI event in the world.” It caught me a bit off guard when I heard Marc Benioff say it, but it probably shouldn’t have; Salesforce has invested heavily in AI for the past few years, ever since it introduced Salesforce Einstein (now Tableau CRM) in 2016. Its latest effort is Agentforce, and the company is really leaning into it.The topic of AI erputed in 2023 once ChatGPT was unleashed upon the general populace, and it’s only fair that a business would leverage the popularity of the topic. While 2024 seemed poised to be “the Year of the Copilot,” since a number of vendors introduced AI copilot apps—digital assistants that automate routine tasks—the fanfare was to be short-lived. Today, the talk is about agents, or agentic AI—AI that acts on its own to accomplish tasks and achieve goals, reaching into the knowledge stored in linked apps as necessary.Marc Benioff declared, “Agents are the third wave of AI.” It’s hard to argue against this. AI agents have great potential to increase productivity and customer satisfaction, and mark a leap forward in AI capabilities. Benioff stated that one of the goals of this year’s Dreamforce was to get 1,000 customers to deploy Agentforce, a goal which I believe they achieved. It’s too soon for there to be any tangible results that anybody can talk about, so we’ll have to...
by twieberneit | Sep 16, 2024 | Analysis, Blog |
The news Dreamforce 2024 has (almost) started and the announcements are pouring in. Unsurprisingly, many of them are about AI, generative AI, Slack, and of course, agents. One of the major announcements that Salesforce made these days is about the release of Agentforce. According to Salesforce, Agentforce is ”a groundbreaking suite of autonomous AI agents that augment employees and handle tasks in service, sales, marketing, and commerce, driving unprecedented efficiency and customer satisfaction. Agentforce enables companies to scale their workforces on demand with a few clicks. Agentforce’s limitless digital workforce of AI agents can analyze data, make decisions, and take action on tasks like answering customer service inquiries, qualifying sales leads, and optimizing marketing campaigns. With Agentforce, any organization can easily build, customize, and deploy their own agents for any use case across any industry. The future of AI is agents, and it’s here.” The platform is intended to bring chatbots to the next level by graduating them from co-pilots that “rely on human requests” to autonomously operating agents that retrieve the right data on demand, build action plans and execute these plans without intervention. The bigger picture According to Salesforce’s Trends in AI for CRM report, a staggering amount of 41 per cent of employee time is spent on low impact work. On top of this, 65 per cent of desk workers believe that generative AI will allow them to be more strategic. Salesforce also maintains that “every company has more jobs to be done than the resource available to do them.” Zendesk postulates that the number of interactions in customer service will grow by a factor of...
by twieberneit | Sep 12, 2024 | Analysis, Blog |
The News On September 12, 2024, Zoho released a new, AI-rich version of Zoho Analytics that brings self-service BI to any persona in business. The release added more than 100 features and now offers powerful AI and ML capabilities. These enable diagnostic insights, predictive analytics, and automatic report and dashboard generation. “Additional advancements to Zoho Analytics include a custom ML model-building studio, seamless integration with OpenAI, and third-party BI platform extensions. The new version of Zoho Analytics has added power, intelligence, and flexibility to serve a broader range of businesses and users than competitors in the market.” The Zoho BI and Analytics Platform now offers more than 500 connectors to other systems, including streaming analytics. Overall, the new release offers new capabilities across four main categories: Data Management Hub: Zoho Analytics has expanded its data management capabilities, ensuring more accurate and applicable decision-making and deeper insights to accelerate business success BI Infusion with Generative AI: Zoho Analytics has introduced Generative AI capabilities across the BI platform to accelerate the adoption of insights for a broad spectrum of user personas. Data Science and Machine Learning (DSML): Zoho Analytics now features the DSML Studio, allowing users to simply and quickly build custom machine learning models, which, for example, analyze or predict customer churn. n of insights for a broad spectrum of user personas. Platform Extensibility: Zoho Analytics is more deeply extensible, allowing businesses to sync and standardize data stored across multiple tools and platforms for comprehensive analysis and insights. Zoho Analytics is a composable platform on which any analytical solution can be built. Alun Rafique, CEO and Co-Founder of Market Dojo...
by twieberneit | Jul 24, 2024 | Analysis, Blog |
The news On Monday, July 22, 2024, SAP presented its numbers for Q2 and H1, 2024. The highlights include: Cloud backlog up by 28% (27% in Q1) Total revenue up 10% (8% in Q1) Cloud and software revenue up 10% (9% in Q1) Cloud revenue up 25% (24% in Q1) Cloud ERP suite revenue up 33% (31% in Q1) This in combination with an increasing margin. The total revenue growth and high profitability needs to be seen in the context of the company’s still ongoing cloud transformation, with continuously decreasing software license and support revenues. Obviously, the financial community liked these numbers, as can be seen by the jump of SAP’s share price by more than 5 per cent from about $200 to $212 after releasing the earnings numbers. According to CEO Christian Klein, a lot of this success can be attributed to SAP’s AI strategy. Klein stated that almost a fifth of all closed deals included premium AI use cases. A grain of salt in the soup is the employee engagement index that is part of the non-financial outlook. SAP reduced the 2024 target from 76 – 80 per cent in Q1 to 70 – 74 per cent. The bigger picture To put this in perspective with cloud juggernaut Salesforce, the total revenue growth is comparable with the Salesforce Q1, 2025 statement. Salesforce’s revenue grew by 11 per cent and the current performance obligation by 10 per cent. Also, in contrast to Salesforce, SAP reiterated and strengthened its outlook instead of painting a more muted picture. The main competition in the next months and years will happen in...
by twieberneit | Jun 12, 2024 | Analysis, Blog |
Zoho’s annual main customer event Zoholics took place in Austin, TX last week. The company presented updates to products and strategy and gave partners the opportunity to present themselves on a big show floor. In parallel to the event, Zoho published some interesting news about product enhancements in four areas, namely security and privacy, CRM for Everyone, collaboration, and platform tools. In addition, Zoho reaffirmed its AI strategy. Of course, CEO Sridhar Vembu set the scene in his usual humble, yet no-nonsense way. He detailed out, why Zoho is truly different. Zoho’s strategy of transnational localism with a clear focus on investing into employees is well known by now, and we see it working. Explaining the strategy with another twist, Vembu laid out five principles that will continue to be essential for every business software vendor to thrive: Investing in a full product portfolio with breadth and depth Offering attractive bundles that have deep value Investing into exceptional service and support Improving interoperability with more prebuilt integrations Getting close to the customer with a strong local partner ecosystem With 55 tightly integrated apps and growing, value-oriented bundles, and a thriving ecosystem, Zoho is certainly on a strong way following these principles. Another topic is the way applications get built by software developers. Vembu compares developers to artisans and postulates that software development will become ten times more efficient with the help of generative AI. The developer’s role will change to become far more one of a scientist, leaving the mundane tasks to the system. This way, the whole development cycle as such changes considerably, also enabling vendors to deliver...
