Cloud Wars Live with Bob Evans

In this episode of the AI Agent & Copilot Podcast, Giuseppe Ianni, AI Practice Lead and industry thought leader, is joined by Nandita Puri, PhD Candidate at Georgia Tech and founder of Illumia.bio. Puri discusses how AI is transforming drug discovery by creating massive therapeutic libraries, connecting fragmented biomedical knowledge, and dramatically accelerating research timelines. Their conversation explores the convergence of AI, structural biology, and life sciences.

Key Takeaways

AI Expands the Search Space for New Therapeutics: Traditional drug discovery focuses on identifying a single drug for a single target, but Puri argues that diseases are complex biological systems requiring broader approaches. Her team is building an AI-generated library of more than 10 billion molecules across multiple therapeutic modalities. By treating drug discovery as a combinatorics problem, researchers can explore vastly larger therapeutic possibilities.

Connecting Fragmented Scientific Knowledge Accelerates Discovery: One of the biggest bottlenecks in pharmaceutical research is the fragmented nature of scientific information. Researchers often spend years reviewing hundreds of papers before forming a hypothesis. Puri describes how her team is integrating 60 to 70 public databases into a connected knowledge platform that links diseases, genes, proteins, pathways, and drug candidates. As she notes, "When we type a disease, we know exactly the gene, we exactly know the protein." This consolidation dramatically reduces research time and enables scientists to make more informed decisions earlier in the discovery process.

AI Creates New Opportunities for Rare Disease Research: Rare diseases have historically been underserved because of the high costs and long timelines associated with traditional drug development. Puri says that bringing a drug to market can require "$1 billion and about 10 years." By shortening research cycles from years to months, AI lowers the barriers to investigating diseases that pharmaceutical companies may have previously avoided. This acceleration enables smaller teams to pursue treatments for conditions affecting fewer patients while increasing the likelihood that promising therapies can move forward to validation and clinical testing.

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In today's Cloud Wars Minute, I examine how Google Cloud is using AI Threat Defense to help customers fight AI-powered cyberattacks.

Highlights

00:03 — If you're going to be number one on the Cloud Wars Top 10, you've got to fight to keep that position and stay ahead of the incredible and highly capable competition across the Cloud Wars Top 10. Google Cloud, I believe, has taken yet another big step in ensuring that it remains the number one company on the Cloud Wars Top 10 by launching a new cybersecurity approach.

00:57 — The person leading that is Francis deSouza, who is the Chief Operating Officer of Google Cloud, but also president of its security products. In a blog post last week outlining what this new AI Threat Defense is all about, deSouza said it's time now that business customers be able to fight AI with AI, to defend against these very powerful incursions that the bad guys are going to be making using AI.

01:58 — So, there needs to be, among customers, a big shift in how they do things. It can't be, "Let's just do a little bit more of what we've always done." There's got to be a new approach, and Google Cloud believes it's got that now with this AI Threat Defense for Google Cloud. I believe this is the latest in an ongoing series of steps they've made around cybersecurity.

02:54 — About a year ago — or several months ago — the company announced its intention to acquire Wiz, with its end-to-end threat monitoring and awareness capabilities. That deal has now been completed, and the most recent step, I believe, is the launch of this new solution called Google AI Threat Defense.

03:56 — Now, I'm not trying to read more into that than needs to be said. Maybe Google Cloud AI Threat Defense seemed overly clunky, but I wonder if, in some ways, parent company Google is riding this high now. Google Cloud itself had a growth rate of 63%, up from 48% in the prior quarter, so the company is definitely on a run here.

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In today's Cloud Wars Minute, I analyze how Marc Benioff is using Agentforce to drive larger deals, stronger customer spending, and new AI metrics.

Highlights

00:02 — We see Salesforce is off to a good start here in its fiscal '27. For Q1 ended, let's see, April 30, it reported that overall revenue was up by 13% to $11.1 billion. I want to look into some of the big numbers within the Q1 presentation, and also the earnings call. It, I think, revealed just how heavily AI, and in particular Agentforce, have become the growth engines here inside Salesforce.

00:31 — Salesforce, after wandering for a few years trying to get its margins right to please institutional investors, is now riding the AI Revolution. So, I've got 10 numbers that I pulled out from that presentation and the earnings call. Agentforce was involved in, and Benioff said drove, almost half of the company's 100 largest Q1 deals. It had 98 that were $1 million or more.

01:15 — Agentforce was in about half of those. The most active AI users that Salesforce has, the ones doing what it calls agentic work units, detailing specific tasks that agents have completed, it said the most active AI users now have increased their spending with Salesforce by 1.5x from the previous year. So clearly customers are seeing the value in this now.

01:46 — Benioff said that over the years Salesforce has generated many, many millions of leads, more than its human salespeople could follow up on over that time. It put Agentforce on it, and autonomously it contacted 220,000 of these customers interested in Salesforce but who never got a call back, generating $42 million in pipeline from that.

02:45 — One other interesting point I'll note here is that Salesforce began to list Now tokens processed in the quarter, and it said it was 28.3 trillion tokens processed in Q1 through Salesforce as agents and applications. Now that's a number that it says it's going to be revealing every quarter here, and I think it's a great idea. It carries some risks.

03:13 — It's a great idea because it shows not just what people are spending on AI, but the work that is getting done in what they call these AWUs, or Agentic Work Units. Salesforce said that relative to Q1, the average work units undertaken by Salesforce customers was up 152%. That's sequential, quarter-to-quarter.

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In today's Cloud Wars Minute, I look at how Microsoft and EY are combining engineering and consulting expertise to scale AI transformation.

Highlights

00:10 — Microsoft and EY have announced a substantial enhancement to their existing partnership, committing to invest over a billion dollars over five years into a new initiative aimed at helping organizations to scale AI.

00:40 — So, what's the plan for it? Well, it will combine Microsoft's forward-deployed engineers, or FDEs, with the expertise of EY industry professionals to accelerate AI adoption. Their approach focuses on, and I quote, “change management delivery models powered by Microsoft's FDE AI-native hypervelocity engineering approach.”

01:05 — Now, this initiative will see teams of EY business consultants and Microsoft engineers co-develop AI solutions tailored to address clients' highest-value business opportunities. This collaboration is steering companies toward the goal of becoming frontier firms. It's a term coined by Microsoft that I've used many times, that's gaining traction across the industry.

01:29 — Frontier firms are organizations that integrate agentic AI with the human workforce at scale and continuously optimize AI initiatives while adapting their company culture to thrive in this new future. Now, an interesting aspect of this collaboration is that EY, already closely aligned with Microsoft in terms of partners, was in fact the client zero for the initiative.

01:56 — This means they [the EY team] have an insider's understanding of what works well, how to adapt to Microsoft products, and how to effectively share this knowledge with potential customers and clients.

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In today's Cloud Wars Minute, I break down why Workday sees agentic AI as the key to defending its 80 million-user base.

Highlights

00:02 — Workday co-founder Aneel Bhusri resumed his position as CEO. He wanted to help guide the company through the AI Revolution and help bring a solid knowledge of what's happening and how Workday as a company has to be able to innovate and create and get with the AI-native program as rapidly as possible.

00:45 — It's got to be able to move fast, and the margin for error is slight. The Q1 results, which came out last week, I think prove that Bhusri's got the company on the right track. Subscription revenue up 14.3%, almost $2.4 billion. Their total subscription revenue backlog was up 11% to over $27 billion.

01:23 — It's now got 80 million users under contract. Now, the good and the bad of that is those are 80 million users who are heavily dependent right now on yesterday's technology. So, the good thing for Workday is they've got these 80 million users, and Workday's got the first shot at converting them.

02:23 — Bhusri said, “In technology transitions — and I’m old enough to have lived through a few of them — you have to put that new technology front and center. It’s got to be your absolute top priority in everything you do.”

03:38 — Bhusri said customers seem to want to have both open technology and the ability to use agents from lots of vendors, but they've also got to ensure that they've got the proper guardrails for compliance and legal compliance, and ensuring the privacy and safety of their customers. He also said it's really important for Workday to reinstitute and reinvigorate a startup mentality.

04:48 — So, Aneel Bhusri is one of the good guys in the tech industry. He's been around a long time. His return here, I called him back in February “the reluctant CEO,” because he was eager a few years ago to get out of the CEO role, but he knows now that with what's going on in the market and this vast change of technology brought forth by AI, he needed to be CEO.

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