Cloud Wars Live with Bob Evans

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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In today's Cloud Wars Minute, I examine Microsoft’s plans to more than triple its data center capacity as AI compute demand continues to soar.
Highlights
00:09 — According to reports, Microsoft plans to more than triple its data center capacity, from around 12 gigawatts today to about 38 gigawatts by 2032.
00:23 — So, right now, only about two gigawatts of Microsoft's current capacity is centered on AI-specific chips, but that's expected to grow to around one-third of the 38 gigawatts that it's planning. These data centers will be a mix of owned and leased capacity.
00:56 — Microsoft expects $50 billion in CapEx for the first quarter of 2027 and $175 billion for the 2026 calendar year, and as we've seen across the industry, there really is no getting around these massive CapEx figures. Microsoft needs to supercharge its infrastructure build-up because AI compute demand is so high, and it needs the capacity to support that demand.
01:15 — But I think there's something else telling here: the fact that only around two gigawatts of Microsoft's current capacity is dedicated to AI-specific chips. To me, that's a sign that we're still very much in the infrastructure and preparation phase.
01:49 — There's been so much talk about AI adoption and its increasing integration into companies, but if the infrastructure being built today is any indication, some of the biggest changes could still well be ahead of us. So, if you think we've already seen the full impact of AI on businesses, be prepared for what happens when all of this compute capacity actually comes online.

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In today's Cloud Wars Minute, I look at Microsoft’s new AI-powered Dynamics 365 Activate and what it could mean for Salesforce customers.
Highlights
00:11 — Microsoft has launched Dynamics 365 Activate. It's an AI-powered tool for migrating from Salesforce to Dynamics 365. In practice , this means analyzing a company's existing Salesforce setup, its data workflows, customizations, and integrations.
00:31 — And then mapping what should be migrated, simplified, or redesigned in Dynamics 365. Now, the goal is to reduce the cost, the complexity, and the friction of switching enterprise software. So this is just the start for Activate, and Microsoft plans to expand it beyond Salesforce to other CRM and ERP migrations.
00:55 — The company is really positioning this as a way of getting over vendor lock-in in the CRM space, and here's what Jeff Teper , Executive Vice President, Microsoft Apps and Agents, had to say about it: "Often, we hear from leaders that they feel locked into systems customized over years, surrounded by point solutions, and connected through complex integrations."
01:19 — He says that Dynamics 365 Activate can help partners and customers move to Dynamics 365 faster, with less manual effort and lower migration risk. Now, why would they want to make the jump? Well, Microsoft is essentially saying, "Hey, Dynamics is a cutting-edge AI- and agent-oriented platform, so why stay locked into Salesforce architecture when you could move to a Microsoft platform designed around the AI agent Era?"
01:49 — Now, it's rare that you see such an explicit example of a company targeting another where it hits hardest. In this case, that's Salesforce and its CRM business, where it remains a market leader with around 20% market share, despite all the alliances and partnerships we've seen, and continue to see , in the AI Era. The Cloud Wars are certainly alive and well.

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