hell.

Yeah, so if I could just give you a quick list of what I've seen on the road, I think you might find that interesting.

And then you could decide which things you want to drill into.

From a customer perspective, the top two issues are pricing and ROI.

which we've already gotten into a little bit, and interoperability and user experience.

So you can think of it in terms of a little bit of that as orchestration at scale as well.

But it's basically this dilemma of like, I'm using Copilot for this.

How do we see companies getting better at measuring AI's real impact on customer experience? It's a very tough

hell.

Yeah, so if I could just give you a quick list of what I've seen on the road, I think you might find that interesting.

And then you could decide which things you want to drill into.

From a customer perspective, the top two issues are pricing and ROI.

which we've already gotten into a little bit, and interoperability and user experience.

So you can think of it in terms of a little bit of that as orchestration at scale as well.

But it's basically this dilemma of like, I'm using Copilot for this.

How do we see companies getting better at measuring AI's real impact on customer experience? It's a very tough

John, anything

to add on your end? These are obviously strong results, and it's important to just kind of mention that off the top.

I definitely perceive these results as a vindication.

For those of us that argued hard that SAS was not dead, these results are just the latest in a series of vindications on that front.

And I would also say the results kind of validate a lot of SAP's strategies to date, including their AI strategy.

But it doesn't mean that there aren't choppier potential waters ahead.

When you look at it from a customer perspective, one of the things I frequently hear is just uncertainty about direction causes a lot of paralysis.

And he's right, 100% right.

Today I was told, "Ah, I don't wanna go into it so much." Um, what's your understanding of who'll be under center to at least start the game Saturday?

I would be absolutely floored and shocked if it was not George McIntyre, and honestly, at this point, I would be surprised if Faizon even got any reps. It's, it's kind of funny how Josh Heupel is doing the whole college football coach, I gotta be top secret.

Everything's super important.

We can't give anybody an advantage.

I said it this morning, it's almost ironic because I think if he'd have been a little bit more honest about Faizon's injury going into the Auburn game, maybe you could have made the switch to George McIntyre, or maybe at least fans would have been a little bit more understanding about how Faizon Brandon looked So bad against Auburn, but instead super secretive, despite maybe Faizon not really practicing much, you know, coming off the Texas debacle into the Auburn game.

And then Faizon looked like a young quarterback who did not get valuable practice reps.

So Josh Heupel kind of has made a bed here, and he has to lie in it as this quarterback position.

I've been impressed.

So why doesn't that come across in spite of companies like McKinsey and Deloitte and Accenture, name all of them, pushing and shoving their maturity frameworks into everybody's face that doesn't want to see them?

So I have this book outline for these provocative AI concepts that I try to put forward to try to get people to think differently.

And one of the core ones is what I call the paradox of AI leadership, where For AI, you need to focus more on business outcomes than ever before to get this right.

But you also need to be more technology savvy than ever before.

And so, like, for example, take video, right? Like, what if you didn't know anything about video and suddenly you were appearing in, like, some cheesy corporate interviews and people were like...

Why doesn't Thomas create his own show with someone like Ralph and have like scintillating conversations? And it's like, well, because you haven't taken ownership of the platform and the technology yet.

And so you don't understand the limitations and the possibilities until you actually start iterating and using the technology in an honest way.

Getting back to away from Sweden to Jörgen, what are the most promising application fields that you see for AI in companies?

Chaz Coleman, tell me what you think about his availability because there are still three months before you kick off the season.

I said I would plant my flag in the Faison Brandon starting camp.

I would plant my flag, build some concrete around it, put a nice roof over it, and call it home on the take that Chaz Coleman's not going to play for Tennessee.

Wow.

Yeah, I think it's gotten to the point.

Once it went national yesterday, and then you saw some of the local reporters finally kind of changing their tune, that Tennessee is quote-unquote getting their ducks in a row, I think the writing is on the wall that Tennessee is not going to put up with this much longer.

And if you think, Chuck...

Carter was going to the NFL, wasn't he, for a minute? Yeah, there was talks about

I

don't know why I do this.

I don't know.

I want to put faith in people, right? So look, vendors are struggling a little bit, I think, right now to present an energizing view of the future.

Vala on Diginomica, you wrote about autonomous enterprises, which I sometimes critique, but you also emphasized how important human relationships are.

You had a really empowering frame for your conversation.

I think a lot of vendors are struggling with that right now.

Sorry.

What says you?

Right.

Well, I'm not going to tell you that there's I'm not one of those.

Oh, here's your bullet point.

Here's what a leader is.

That's not my style.

But I think the right leadership is the right leadership for your company.

And how do you see that? Is it when a leader says we've effed up, when they share their mistakes as much as their successes? What do you look for when you say transparency?

Is there any new learnings? Have you changed your mind on anything? Did you have a blind spot on any coverage and research area? What was an aha moment that you may want to share in the last 12 months or so?

That's a really good question.

I mean, I think to a large extent, my research has sort of validated a lot of my gut feelings that these tools are powerful, but in some ways limited, and that there's a lot of exciting things going on in AI that have nothing to do with the current LLM technology.

But what I will say is that I've learned a whole lot about what it takes to implement these projects successfully.

And unfortunately, what I've also found, Bala, is that there's just so much misunderstood hype that's preventing us from doing that.

So for example, just to pick on one thing, the so-called MIT study that 95% of...

Products never get out of pilot was such a widely distorted and misunderstood study.

What does that mean? Is there a demand for average anymore, given the fact that speed scale and intelligence is moving at a different level?

not about us we appreciate all the wonderful comments but it's about the cool stuff that you have in your head man so

what are the top three event lesson mistakes vendors are making this spring all right I'm gonna get a little grouchy about this but but before I do I just want to say that if vendors had had the good sense to bring folks like like your last uh guests on stage especially Lord Clement Jones and Dr. Bray talking about AI and risk and all of that, then I wouldn't have to be so critical because that was a great discussion.

I think that really clarified a lot, though I want to pick up a little bit on Dr. Bray's comments on creativity, but Let me just say one thing that I think vendors have done a really good job of this spring before I get a little bit grouchy.

I think they've done a really good job of clarifying the profound difference between what we do when we just do that Gemini type prompt that I just did and how Enterprise has really refined this architecture for very, very specific use cases where I think AI can provide a lot deeper and more interesting value.

And I think Enterprise's vendors as a whole have done a good job of explaining the difference between what you see from them and what you might get just playing around with AI on the weekend.

So I want to give a little bit of a props for, maybe you could call it a more responsible version of AI, but a little more credible, you know, field tested version that can really work in certain use cases.

So I want to give enterprise vendors credit for that, but I think one of the really funny things was seeing the battle for who's going to be the agent orchestrator, and everyone supposedly is going to be working through the orchestration, and you're going to own that relationship, and every other vendor becomes subservient to you.

guy?

no it's i feel like

bass is loaded bottom of the ninth what the hell am i supposed to do here yeah i mean we're home run baby hit a home run look i mean look i think we could take this in so many different directions and i think we agree on some things we disagree on some things i think we what we sense i think is that this is a very high stakes and potent conversation and one of the things that that has really become like an obsession because obviously ai has injected new life and a love hate experience in my world around kind of grappling with it and i'm doing it in a couple ways because i'm doing it in a project based i'm putting these things to the project test but then also i'm trying to figure out where it's all going and and ray i think you just raised a really really critically important point because one of the things that's been really bothering me about ai leadership as a topic is that there's not that much awareness that what we're talking about with gen ai and llms is a commercialized version of one strand of ai research that's received a whole lot of attention.

But I actually put a lot of future hope not only in more intelligent and accurate forms of AI, but more decentralized forms of AI that are more affordable and make it much more possible for people to not worry about what Sam Altman ate for breakfast, because I really don't care, right? And you talk about how open AI has democratized all this stuff, fine, but it hasn't turned a profit yet.

So, you know, we're putting a lot of eggs in a handful of baskets right now.

But having said that, I mean, it's also an incredibly exciting time because, Vala, like you wrote in Diginomica, I think what's really exciting about right now, for those of us within investment and enterprise technology, is I think we have a sense, because you wrote a lot about these blockages that are still affecting the enterprise, right? And I think we have a sense that we have a better shot than ever of really making some progress on those.

And I think that's a really, really potent thing that gets us excited again about our work because, I mean, look, we've been doing this a long time.

We've been talking about these same silos and these same disconnects for, you know, since the late 90s.

Yeah,