Cloud Wars Live with Bob Evans

Key Takeaways
AI investments: Simms explains that a top priority for organizations currently is determining how to get value out of AI investments. He says an estimated 80% of AI initiatives aren't seeing the value that was anticipated, which begs the question: Are you choosing the wrong initiatives? Are you using the correct data? Have you defined the processes correctly? "All the underlying pillars that are required for these things to actually work and actually provide value, those need to be revisited and looked at," he says.
Data readiness: Data readiness is, in Simms' opinion, "the biggest single issue that's out there right now" as it relates to AI projects. He suggests that organizations need strong data governance and an "iterative approach" to ensure both structured and unstructured data are clean, organized, and ready to support AI systems and workflows at scale.
Adoption: Simms says his approach to AI adoption is different because he focuses on building the right organizational and process foundations first, rather than rushing to implement technology. He compares it to building a house, noting that "you don’t put on the shingles and the shutters and the paint before you actually build the foundation and the frame."
New roles defined by AI: Simms expects AI to create and reshape job titles and also create demand for expertise that helps organizations adopt, manage, and govern it. Specifically, he foresees roles focused on governance and engineering, as industries determine how to implement and maintain AI systems.

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In today’s Cloud Wars Minute, I look at how SAP is moving industry AI into the mainstream while expanding its autonomous enterprise strategy at Connect.
Highlights
00:03 — SAP is having a big event in Las Vegas this week called Connect, and whereas its Sapphire event every year really is aimed at its traditional IT audience, and lays the technical foundation for its strategy, Connect, now in its second year, was brought about to focus on the LOB users, business users, non-tech users.
00:24 — And this year at Connect, SAP is getting ready to crank up its promise of the Autonomous Enterprise with a lot of new Joule AI-powered agents and assistants that SAP believes will help customers be able to leverage the full power of the autonomous enterprise on an end-to-end basis.
00:57 — Now, the promise that SAP has with the autonomous enterprise is it's going to be able to push this now across the enterprise. So at Sapphire, it really laid the tech foundation, putting together the SAP Business Suite with the SAP Business Data Cloud. It's now calling that the autonomous enterprise.
02:14 — What SAP is doing now with the autonomous enterprise and a lot of these new agents is it is using Signavio and LeanIX to be able to help people make the best decision, be able to map out exactly, you know, what processes to map, how to map those, what KPIs to put together with it.
03:09 — So it feels like this is going to be, with the Autonomous Enterprise, not just the technology, but very, very strong guidance, best practices that customers will be able to use to put together full end-to-end solutions.

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John Siefert sits down with Christopher Jones, Vice President of Ecosystems and Partner Alliances at T-Mobile, to explore why enterprise connectivity is becoming foundational to the AI Era. Jones explains how T-Mobile for Business is moving beyond the traditional perception of a telecommunications provider to become an infrastructure layer supporting distributed workforces, AI agents, enterprise applications, and data at the edge.
AI Runs on Connectivity
The Big Themes:
Connectivity Underpins Enterprise AI: AI may dominate enterprise conversations, but Jones argues that connectivity remains the foundation that makes AI useful. Applications, agents, enterprise data, and mobile workforces all depend on networks capable of delivering reliable access wherever work happens. That makes connectivity increasingly important as AI pushes workloads and data beyond traditional office environments and toward the edge. T-Mobile for Business is positioning itself not simply as a telecommunications provider but as an underlying infrastructure layer supporting whatever technologies enterprises deploy today and tomorrow.
Co-Creation Replaces Technology Silos: The conversation repeatedly returns to co-creation. T-Mobile doesn't want partners to build specifically into its solutions, nor does it necessarily want to embed itself deeply inside an SI's technology. Instead, Jones describes a co-sell and co-creation model in which different providers contribute their respective expertise toward a common customer outcome. An SI may own the application or industry solution while T-Mobile provides the connectivity that allows that solution to operate reliably across locations and devices. That distinction matters as enterprise architectures become more complicated. Rather than expecting one vendor to provide every component, customers can benefit from ecosystems that combine networking, applications, cloud, AI, consulting, and domain expertise while keeping each participant focused on what it does particularly well.
Resilience Requires Multiple Paths: One example of T-Mobile's infrastructure strategy is SuperBroadband, which Jones describes as pairing its 5G network with Starlink in a managed connectivity solution. The objective is to provide two independent connectivity paths rather than leaving an organization dependent on one. T-Mobile's current materials describe SuperBroadband as integrating its 5G Advanced network with Starlink and supporting capabilities including failover and load balancing. This reinforces the broader message of the conversation: as organizations place more mission-critical workflows on cloud applications and AI systems, network resilience becomes inseparable from business resilience.
The Big Quote: “No one owns the whole solution. It's how do you bring together a variety of partners that have their own individual expertise [to] work together for the joint customer outcome.”
More from T-Mobile:
Learn more about T-Mobile for Business Advanced Network Solutions and T-Mobile SuperBroadband.

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In today's Cloud Wars Minute, I explain how AWS is combining custom silicon, enterprise applications, and agentic AI to drive its resurgence.
Highlights
00:02 — I wanted to talk about an interesting development at AWS, which over the past several quarters has been on a very nice upswing in its business, powered in part by their development of what is now a very large and extremely fast-growing custom chips business.
00:37 — That comes down to a billion-dollar chip deal that AWS has just secured with Synopsys, a chip designer that AWS has been working with closely over the last several years, as AWS has built what is now a custom silicon chip business that has an annualized run rate of $25 billion.
01:09 — This new deal between AWS and Synopsys calls for the creation of new chips that they say are “application-optimized solutions.” So, the incredible advances in the power and capability of silicon now being tied directly into helping enterprise applications run more quickly, more securely, more insightfully, and to handle the incredible volumes of data and transactions in the AI economy.
02:28 — And I think this is something that, as I mentioned, has been a huge part of the resurgence of AWS. Last quarter, ended June 30th, AWS's growth rate jumped to 37 percent, by far the highest it's had in several years. We'll see some new numbers from AWS coming out at the end of this month or early November for Q3.
03:41 — So, this demand for more speed, more power, more insight, more security for all of these, I think, comes along at a time when business customers are starting to say, “Yeah, I'm going to use a lot of agentic AI, but I'm also going to continue to use the enterprise applications that are such an integral part of my business and how I work and where I work.”

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In today's Cloud Wars Minute, I explore why Gartner expects many agentic AI projects to disappear as enterprises get more serious about measurable business value.
Highlights
00:14 — We're starting to see some interesting analysis coming out of organizations like Gartner. Gartner is saying that 40% of agentic AI projects die by 2027. There are a lot of projects that are going on within organizations that don't actually have good business value or good return on investment.
00:52 — And we already started to see a lot of pilots that were just failing over and over and over because people were trying to implement technology just for technology's sake. So, I think we're going to definitely see an improvement across organizations around the world.
01:33 — And so, what we want to see is a separation between organizations that are just basically doing what we refer to as agent washing, which is just taking and putting in an agent, whether that agent is actually doing anything of value or not within their organization or as a product. They're just following that trend.
02:02 — Agents or AI technology that's coming in to actually solve new problems, not just put a fancy UI on top of an existing API. So, those types of things, we should continue to see organizations getting better at this, but it will mean we will see a reduction in the number of players in this space over time.


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