Cloud Wars Live with Bob Evans

In today's Cloud Wars AI Minute, I look at how Microsoft is using Work IQ to make AI agents faster, more efficient, and potentially less expensive to operate.
Highlights
00:10 — Today, the topic is going to be Work IQ, and we're actually starting to see Microsoft make very interesting moves inside of Work IQ. We've already seen AI agents doing a lot of really interesting things, specifically around the Graph API. But the big difference here is Microsoft is really looking to monetize the ability for them to be able to do preloaded context, and so this allows us to be able to optimize our token spend.
00:47 — It's already pre-calculated and just provided to you. And what we're starting to see is that, with Work IQ, you can get about an 80% reduction in the amount of tokens that it would require for you to go derive the same sort of information out of your Graph implementation of your data.
01:10 — This is really powerful for organizations who are looking to optimize their token spend. It also means that there's going to be a lot of power coming into Microsoft around the ability for them to monetize this in a way that could be quite effective.
01:57 — This is going to be a very interesting world as Microsoft leans into the ability to monetize all of this context that it has from its Graph. The other thing that's a little interesting about it as well is that it didn't offer it as yet another SKU.

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In today's Cloud Wars Minute, I look at why Microsoft Work IQ could become increasingly valuable as enterprises deploy more specialized AI agents.
Highlights
00:12 — Microsoft's much-anticipated Work IQ is finally going into preview. Quick refresher: Work IQ is an intelligence layer that gives Copilot and AI agents context about how work happens across an organization.
00:27 — That understanding is grounded in business data from D365 and Power Platform. Cloud Wars CEO John Seifert has written up a great analysis of the launch and what it means for customers, which you can read now on CloudWars.com, but I wanted to take the opportunity to look at the wider implications of what Work IQ could potentially mean for the direction of the AI industry.
00:54 — Work IQ really demonstrates a shift in what it means to personalize AI. Up until now, Microsoft, like many other vendors, has talked about AI personalization in terms of your emails, your documents, your preferences. But, with Work IQ, there's a shift towards understanding the individual employee in the context of the organization.
01:23 — Work IQ is coming in at a point where the proliferation of agents has really become quite significant. We're way beyond general-purpose agents now, and we have specialized agents working across different areas like sales, finance, HR, etc. Increasingly, those agents need to coordinate.
01:42 — The question is whether agents can understand the shared organizational context well enough to coordinate with one another, and Work IQ is really enabling that shared understanding. And that links to my final point: the value of Work IQ could increase as Microsoft expands its agentic AI ecosystem.
02:14 — The more agents Microsoft introduces, and the more those agents need context to operate efficiently, the more valuable Work IQ could become as that intelligence layer underpinning them. And I think we could see that exact scenario play out in the companies using Work IQ as well. The more agents they deploy, the more valuable a shared intelligence layer will become.

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In today's Cloud Wars Minute, I unpack Sam Altman's comments on AI safety, security, and responsibility during his Dreamforce conversation with Mark Benioff.
Highlights
00:03 — I wanted to talk today a little bit about a discussion at Salesforce's recent Dreamforce event. It was a conversation with Salesforce CEO Mark Benioff and the CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman, and they talked specifically about this whole notion of AI safety, AI security, responsibility, trust, and the recent disaster that OpenAI had when one of its models went rogue and attacked a Hugging Face server.
00:39 — Altman and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei have become the leading proponents for, "Hey, let's slow down the whole industry." Let's slow down the whole industry while OpenAI gets its stuff together and moves forward. I've got a detailed, extensive article with a lot of verbatim comments from Altman that really do bear out the points I'm going to be making here.
01:35 — One of the big things here is that Altman just seems to be begging to be trusted. He says things like, "You should trust us to do the right thing because we want to do the right thing, and we know that the right thing to do is to do the right thing." I think you want to come in a little bit humble: "Hey, we made some mistakes. Here's what we're doing to correct it. We're going to redouble our efforts here, here, and here."
02:02 — Altman was more like saying, "Ah, you know..." It's almost like he's saying this happened to somebody else. He doesn't refer so much to OpenAI, but he said these big AI companies, and some of these big AI companies might now have more control, and some people are worried about what some of these AI companies might do. It was just a little bit surreal.
02:49 — And then he says, "Well, I'm disappointed in how it was framed." Now, I get to be disappointed. I've made a million mistakes, and I wish people hadn't always discovered them and pointed them out. But those were my mistakes, and I have to be responsible for them.
03:02 — And this was just totally the wrong note to hit, especially for enterprise customers. This whole thing about saying we always do the right thing, but he said now, in some cases, people won't do the right thing. He's talking about the whole industry here. So we always do the right thing, except when we don't do the right thing. It's hard to tell just what he meant.
04:54 — I don't think all this obfuscation and the fog that Altman was pumping out is going to help the case. I think that OpenAI needs to clean this up quickly. You know, spill on aisle six. We need the cleanup team over here. Anyway, check out this detailed article and the verbatim comments from Altman. I'll have that later this morning on CloudWars.com.

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In today's Cloud Wars Minute, I look at how Salesforce plans to unleash trapped data, make software do more of the work, and expand beyond its CRM roots.
Highlights
00:03 — Had some time to digest the big things that happened at Salesforce's recent Dreamforce event, and I wanted to share with you some thoughts of what I think are the five big takeaways from that big combination of Dreamforce, AI partnerships, and Salesforce moving in some new directions outside the traditional CRM space.
00:40 — The big promise that I took away from it was that it is going to unleash trapped data within Salesforce systems and other systems. This is a promise that business people have been hearing about, but not necessarily seeing delivered, for quite a long time.
02:02 — And Marc Benioff made a big promise about this: that this age of software doing a little bit but not quite enough, and forcing humans who want to get higher output to do more and more of that work to get the higher output, is going to be over.
02:38 — I think Salesforce is ready now, with the rise of AI, with some new technologies like AIforce, with some new partnerships I'm going to talk about, I think it's going to spread beyond the traditional CRM boundaries. It'll still, of course, be a major player in CRM, but I think it's going to move into some other areas as well.
04:38 — And finally, Mark Benioff's Q&A with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was absolutely priceless. Altman's one of the creators of the "Let's Slow Things Down" idea and that whole model. And I think Benioff's careful but straightforward, very simple questions really forced Altman to describe in plain language what OpenAI intends to do.

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In today's Cloud Wars Minute, I unpack Workday's move toward agentic contract lifecycle management and greater workflow automation.
Highlights
00:03 — Workday has announced that its next mission is to bring agentic AI across the entire contract lifecycle, instead of just AI for individual contract-related tasks. The company is launching the Workday Contract Workflow Agent, which is now in early access.
00:22 — But before I get into that, I want to share some other findings that kind of support Workday's intentions here. The company recently conducted a survey of nearly 7,000 professionals and found that 89% said their organizations routinely absorbed financial losses from vendor contracts that auto-renew without anybody's knowledge.
00:44 — So, to support this and other processes across contract creation, negotiation, execution, management, compliance, and renewal, the company has launched the Workday Contract Workflow Agent, which is one of a series of major enhancements coming to Workday Contract Lifecycle Management, or CLM, and described as the 'beginning of a new era of agentic CLM."
01:09 — The overall goal is to automate more of the manual work involved in managing contracts, connect those tasks with broader business workflows, and it really chimes with Workday's wider vision, which is to embed agentic AI into enterprise workflows, rather than treating AI as a separate tool.
01:31 — I think that's what makes the company's approach particularly interesting in the enterprise AI space. It's not just about giving employees another AI assistant, but about embedding agents directly into the workflows that run the business.


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