Cloud Wars Live with Bob Evans

In today’s Cloud Wars AI Minute, I break down the rapid rise of forward deployment engineering and why getting AI into production is becoming the next competitive advantage.

Highlights

00:10 — Today, the topic is going to be why we're seeing AI move to forward deployment engineering type of scenarios, and this industry trend has actually increased in just year-over-year growth of forward deployment engineering job postings in just the first half of 2026, increasing by 1,000%.

01:29 — You actually have to get to deployment, and the big problem there is that between 88 to 95% of all AI pilots that are being built today are actually never actually getting to production. So we have a whole lot of interest in the market and a lot of stuff that's being really cool and is being done, but we're not actually seeing it get to production. Hence the need for FDE, or forward deployment engineers.

02:04 — Two, you actually have embedded engineers to go help a client to be able to get up and get going. And just to give you guys a typical situation here, now we're starting to see a lot of the pay for these type of roles. They're getting very, very valuable in this market space.

03:04 — So this is a major, major shift in what we're seeing, and it's also why even in DCI and our training offering, I'm looking at building out how to be able to move toward an FDE-type approach engagement, specifically for partners, because you're gonna really have to think about how you move to AI being able to get about 99% code coverage in order to be able to play in this space and be able to have fixed-fee, high-quality implementations that actually drive into production implementations.

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In today's Cloud Wars Minute, I explain why ServiceNow’s fast-growing security business is becoming central to Bill McDermott’s AI strategy.

Highlights

00:01 — I wanted to chat a little bit about ServiceNow's Q2 performance, but mostly what CEO Bill McDermott disclosed on the Q2 earnings call. Very strong performance across the board. They beat on all their numbers, doing very nicely. And what McDermott did, what he used the Q2 earnings call for in his opening remarks, was to lay out what I think is a significant new direction.

01:15 — Now, on top of that, we see a lot of anxiety from businesses now about — while they see the huge potential of AI, they also see that it raises security to levels that it hasn't been at before. So McDermott is sort of pairing those things up: the fully integrated Control Tower plus security plus governance.

02:14 — He said, “We're going to be able to handle all that simply and easily for customers.” He said that whichever chip wins, whichever lab wins, whichever price-per-token regime wins, he said, ServiceNow is going to be able to handle that. You're not — any of the customers aren't going to be, you know, going down a dead end or a dead-end alley if they choose to work with ServiceNow.

03:23 — He said CEOs have been losing sleep over this idea of risk at scale, and we're going to help those CEOs sleep well at night. So it's a big promise. It's a big adaptation for ServiceNow, but I think it's one that's consistent with some of the steps that McDermott has been making in the past, and it's very timely now to bring these two forces together.

03:59 — Now, one of the things that has made McDermott so successful over his seven years at ServiceNow, and before that at SAP, is his ability to use these earnings calls as almost like a come-to-Jesus discussion of where we as a company are, where the external market is with customers, and how aligned we are not just with where customers are now, but where they're heading.

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In this special episode of Cloud Wars Live, Bob Evans speaks with Manish Sood, founder and CEO of Reltio, about the rapidly changing relationship among enterprise data, AI, and business strategy following SAP’s acquisition of Reltio. Sood explains why trusted, interoperable data is becoming increasingly important as enterprises embrace agentic AI and autonomous business processes. He also discusses why AI models themselves may increasingly become commoditized, how organizations can bridge legacy and next-generation technology, and the ideas behind his new book, Agentic Intelligence: Strategy at the Speed of Data.

Data Powers Agentic AI

Data Becomes the Differentiator: Sood argues that enterprises should stop viewing data simply as another asset and instead recognize it as an interoperable asset that becomes more valuable as it is put to work across the organization. This distinction becomes particularly important as AI capabilities spread. If businesses eventually gain access to broadly comparable AI models, competitive differentiation will increasingly come from proprietary enterprise knowledge: decades of customer information, operational history, relationships, and business context.

AI Creates Unavoidable Urgency: Enterprise transformation once proceeded at what Sood describes as a relatively organic pace. AI has fundamentally changed that dynamic by creating an enormous pull on organizations to move more quickly. Executives might still feel uncertainty about AI, but another fear has become even stronger: getting left behind. That competitive pressure is creating urgency around experimentation, investment, and execution. Sood sees this as potentially healthy because it forces organizations to reconsider technology and processes that previously seemed difficult to change.

Strategy Still Beats Shiny Objects: AI's extraordinary pace doesn't eliminate the fundamentals of good business strategy. Sood notes that every major technology cycle produces a new "shiny object" that organizations race to adopt, sometimes before determining the architecture, strategy, and business value required to make it useful. AI shouldn't become another example. Enterprises absolutely need to embrace the technology, but Sood argues that they cannot sacrifice disciplined thinking about what they are trying to accomplish. That idea sits at the center of Agentic Intelligence.

The Big Quote: "Our thesis has always been that data is not just an asset. Data is the interoperable asset that needs to be used.”

More from Manish Sood and Reltio:

Follow Manish on LinkedIn and learn more about Reltio and SAP at the following links: Reltio: Agentic AI Readiness Research, SAP Business Data Cloud, and Reltio: Building a Foundation for Agentic AI

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Highlights

00:12 — Today's topic is going to be agentic reasoning loops. Everyone's moving to this concept where we can have a planning, act, observe, and reflect type of process, which allows us to be able to get much deeper analysis and much more resilient implementations across AI, across the world.

01:03 — Now, the other thing is with this, we're seeing that about 33% of enterprise software will run on this kind of approach by 2028. Also, the other part of this is that because these different loops are taking place, we're actually seeing that tokens are going to get more and more consumption happening off the back end.

01:38 — So one of the driving factors of this is going to be the increase that we're seeing, and just to give you perspective of what we're starting to see, it's about a 17x on a single chapter that we're starting to see happen as a result of this. So what it used to do when we just did simple RAG patterns.

02:01 — Now we're seeing about 17 times the amount of tokens being consumed, and when we start seeing that level of token consumption, we're going to see that while we're getting better answers, there's also going to be a higher cost that's associated to it.

02:28 — But it doesn't matter that the tokens are necessarily coming down in cost because of the fact that what we used to see is that an average transaction would be about three cents, and now we're seeing it move to about 15 cents across the board, and so this is going to be one of those things that we really need to be thinking about as you start to build out your solutions.

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In today’s Cloud Wars Minute, I explore Oracle’s major $7 billion Pentagon contract and what it means for the company’s government and enterprise ambitions.

Highlights

00:03 —The Pentagon has awarded Oracle a major 10-year contract worth up to $7 billion, sending the company's shares around 3% higher in extended trading. On the news, investors are clearly happy to see another major government win here for Oracle.

00:22 — The agreement will see Oracle's software deployed across on-prem data centers used by the U.S. military, intelligence agencies, and Coast Guard. But the contract covers far more than just software licenses. It also includes long-term maintenance, technical support, and consulting services, which will ultimately provide Oracle with a steady stream of recurring revenue over the next decade.

00:50 — This deal is also pretty significant in the wider Cloud Wars and shows how Oracle's ongoing investment in its OCI platform is helping it win these really high-profile enterprise and government contracts.

01:05 — And also for customers, really its enterprise customers, this contract is a really important endorsement of Oracle's technology and its ability to support some of the world's most challenging and sensitive IT environments, and crucially, at a massive scale.

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