Cloud Wars Live with Bob Evans

Episode 44 | How Partners Ecosystems Drive the Acceleration Economy

The Big Themes:

• The four types of partners: Value-add re-marketer (VAR), independent software vendor (ISV), implementation support consultants, and co-creation partners. Each of these partner types multiples a businesses ability to deliver.
• How partners are changing the game: Gone are the days where partners roles are limited to just fulfillment. Now, businesses need partners through every stage of the customer lifecycle "helping build systems that touch every aspect of my business."
• How do we work better with partners?: As tools become more flexible, the way we engage with partners has dramatically changed. "It's also the business demand is changing our need to implement quickly."

The Big Quote: "In the acceleration economy, it's about getting stuff from here to there more quickly, within our four walls, and across of our entire partner ecosystem. And so a vendor, and a co-creator that knows the industry, and has the clout to have people say,' yeah, they probably know what they're doing,' encourages people to then build the connection into them. So I think that's the direction you're gonna see a lot more partnerships go, if the vendors are willing to extend themselves and think 'I'm not just in the software business, I'm in the letting customers use my software more creatively business,' and a customer of theirs steps up and says, 'my secret sauce is not so secret,' not 'I don't want to sell it to other people to help us all improve our business.'"

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Episode 28 | Generative AI and the Impact on Enterprise Software Purcashing, Use, Implementation

The Big Themes:

• Extensive experimentation: Bonnie tested the impacts and effectiveness of generative AI around the area of software selection and implementation, prompting the tool to provide scenarios and advice around purchasing and implementing software, from the perspective of a customer.
• Generative AI as "revolutionary": Generative AI, and tools such as ChatGPT, are revolutionary in the fact that it can organize and synthesize mass amounts of data in a relatively quick timeframe. "Some of the things that I think these LLMs really do significantly well take a lot of random information and net it out into simple bullet points."
• The "not so good": Generative AI is not comprehensive in terms of its knowledge about customer needs, demands, buying habits, or issues. It is not directionally correct when asked to create a "roadmap" for purchasing and implementing software. Additionally, the data is trained from 2021 and prior.

The Big Quote: "AI is also not going to sell your idea internally, or your project internally, and get others on board. We know these projects are successful because of the people who run them, and the effort that gets the commitment of the organization behind it, and stakeholders behind it. AI and robots are not going to do that. So the successful projects can be aided certainly by AI, but it can't be run by them."

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How Workday Adaptive Helps ENMAX with Forecasting Capabilities

The Big Themes:

• Workday Adaptive Planning helps ENMAX discover a single version of the truth: With this software, everyone in the company is working off the same data set and can be used for whatever purpose is necessary.
• A single view across three applications: ENMAX utilizes Workday Adaptive Planning, Workday HCM, and Workday Financials in congruence, which has removed constraints associated with effective planning.
• Flexible solutions that empower users: Workday Adaptive Planning can be easily edited or updated and provides users with the information they need, when they need it, to do their jobs effectively.

The Big Quote: "Adaptive, that was a real game changer for us, because nobody really questioned the data anymore. There was one source of truth, it didn't matter if you wanted to know what was going to happen next month, or in 2024. You went to the same place, the same version, and everyone edited a single version. So that was really key to us, because now we're able to take all that information disseminated out to the different business areas, and they can use it for whatever purpose they need. The second change was, we have the same characteristics on the data for both our actuals and our plan. And that's one of the benefits of being on Workday for both planning and financials. So the data that's actually reflective of historicals plus board looking looks and feels the same. And so it's a little bit easier to interpret. And so that's been very helpful for us as well."

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Episode 27 | Employee Centric-Culture and the Future of the Workforce

Note: this episode contains explicit language.

The Big Themes:

• Layoffs at Salesforce: Salesforce recently cut about 10% of its entire workforce which suggests a big shift in performance culture. Business leaders are now looking for a culture that is employee-centric and produces tangible results.
• A choice for listeners to make: How do we have a legendary culture that produces massive results and is a great place to work?
• Women have gained more jobs than men for four months straight: The Wall Street Journal recently reported that women now hold 49.8% of all non-farm-related jobs. A massive amount of "prime-aged men" aged 25-54, are out of work, leading to a massive hole in the economy.

The Big Quote: "What it means is we need to have a conversation. What's the society we want to have? What's the work world we want to have? What's the work culture we want to have? And how do we create true equality of opportunity, and a meritocracy based on, you know, what the people who do well do well, because they produce results, and the people who don't, don't. And we want equality around access to opportunity based on real meritocracy. I think, I think... here's what I know, I think we need to have this discussion."

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The Big Themes:

• Forget the headlines, what's in this product? Is generative AI and ChatGPT truly the "next big thing," or is this something that has been around for awhile and is just now starting to get popular? When starting college in 1970, Wayne was encouraged to study computing programming because experts were predicting that by 1975, artificial intelligence (AI) would be "writing all the programs in the world."
• The future of generative AI: Wayne suggests that this tool is going to either be the biggest augmentation of human abilities, or it's going to be the biggest disruption... or it's going to be both.
• National Cybersecurity Strategy: The government's strategy outlines the need to "rebalance responsibility." Rather than holding the company that got attacked by malicious actors accountable, the responsibility is now on the vendor to ensure that customers aren't getting "ransomwared."

The Big Quote: "That's how they [generative AI and the National Cybersecurity Strategy] tie together. We're at the beginning of AI broadening into general use. Think about the Internet of 50 years ago. That's where AI is today. A great tool that's starting to reach commercial scale. And so, again, I share your fear when the government gets involved. It often doesn't go well. But this is where we as an industry, the CISOs, the vendors, the CIOs that buy it, have got to be out there with their voices heard. I'm not so interested in anybody suing Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, Cisco and everybody else, as I am in a standard that says, in two years, the product you sell me should have the standards, or else somebody's going to sue... and cyber is becoming existential for a lot of industries, the ransomware attacks, we got to do something. And clearly, as an industry, we have not taken the leadership position."

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The Big Themes:

• Top CEO priorities: To drive digital business, top CEOs are focusing on acquiring and retaining talent, and leveraging and deploying emerging technologies such as AI and ML. Regardless of the company, all businesses must be "tech-enabled" now.
• New business models: The new (and multiple) business models of today are geared to adapt to meet customers where they are. Companies are shifting to subscription-based models and consumption-based models.
• Access to AI and ML data: Many strong point solutions that use AI and ML are out there, but companies cannot access the data from these tools. On the "HR side," Workday has access to the data from over 16 million records.

The Big Quote: "Well, I think our customers are deploying AI and ML, pretty aggressively. You know, as I mentioned, in their core business up front, and now they're turning to HR and financials. ChatGPT is a really powerful technology, it's gotta be used the right way. There's wrong ways to use it. And what I worry about a little bit is that traditional AI and ML... the analytics that you can do with traditional AI and ML are still really, really valuable. And what I see from customers is high uptake in that area. They want products powered by AI and ML. So Skills Cloud would be a great instance of that, where we enable jobs to be broken down into skills and put it in a canonical format, normalized across all of our customers, and then we can help our customers do matching in terms of people they want to hire against the skills they're looking for. So that's all AI and ML-driven."

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The Big Themes:

• What it takes to be great: companies must strongly consider incorporating DEI initiatives into their businesses but must be careful not to let the focus on talent and culture fall by the wayside.
• Go back to the "foundational" piece: The "big initiative" of today's companies should be addressing exactly what the priorities are.
• Attract talent, but know how to retain it: A strong focus on acquiring talent, and a lack of thought about retaining talent, had created a "gap that has really widened in the last few years."

The Big Quote: "What I'm hearing and what I'm seeing in the market today is that DEiI is the only focus. Now, I'm not saying that across the board, I'm just saying generalities. There are great companies that have been corrupted into a single focus over the last couple of years... but it's one of three priorities. It needs to be one of three priorities. It can't be the only priority. And I think what I'm hearing from a lot of my friends in the big companies...they overhired to meet these DEI agendas. And now, they're laying off some of these people that they hired because they didn't focus on the other two priorities: culture and talent. You have to have all three to make, you know, to make a great hire."

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Episode 28 | Supply Chains: The "Orchestrator" of Today's Business

The Big Themes:

• Why AWS entered the supply chain space: The company has the knowledge and expertise to solve critical issues for businesses today. AWS is "putting its competency to work for its customers."
• Customers want to create their own roadmap: AWS Supply Chain is not a "rip and replace solution." The product leverages the already-existing solutions customers are using to further inform decision-making.
• A supply chain is the "orchestrator" of today's business: AWS Supply Chain is industry-agnostic and is a "backbone" to the various solutions already being utilized by customers.

The Big Quote: "Everybody needs to have a good orchestrator, a good supply chain, that can really help this business to be successful. So we're not building this application focused in any specific industry, but we're making the solution, the backbone of the solution, very strong to serve all these different industries. So customers can leverage our investments and in our cloud-native architecture, so they can leverage this technology in different industries like I mentioned before. So, the exciting thing is that since our preview launch, we've been able to have those discussions across multiple industries."

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The Big Themes:

• Fixing human error: The biggest cybersecurity vulnerability companies have is their people, and there's no software tool or system that is more powerful than cultivating an awareness of secure practices among employees.
• Setting the right example: Business leaders must practice what they preach. No more leaving laptops open to email inboxes on our desks. Demonstrate the company's mindset by taking data security seriously and preach it to the whole team.
• How to lead externally: Christian talks about the dangers of "convergence for the sake of convergence," where manufacturers are creating digital products without being thoughtful about the cybersecurity implications of, for example, a poorly designed app for an oven.

The Big Quote: "Unless you start building a culture around the proper treatment of information—who can access it under what circumstances, etc.—and then put real consequences associated with violating the proper handling and use of it, you're never going to really address the weakest link in security."

Want more leadership inspiration from Christian? Connect with him on LinkedIn.

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The Big Themes:

• The automation of knowledge work: This has been happening for a while now—just think of the hours of labor eliminated by search engines—but generative AI takes this automation to a different, higher level.
• ChatGPT is overhyped: The panic over AI tools replacing journalists, teachers, and all human workers is overblown, Tony says. Businesses should be focused on augmenting the work done by people with new technologies.
• ChatGPT is underhyped: "Technological change always precedes cultural change," Tony says, and there are likely to be massive cultural shifts following widespread access to and use of generative AI tools.

The Big Quote: "Oftentimes, we look at these emerging technologies, and we see dollar signs. We think, Oh, my gosh, we're gonna automate this over here, which means we don't have to do that over there... And then we learn over time that these are augmented technologies that are actually accelerating what human beings can do. I would say to senior level executives: train and prepare a workforce to uplevel problem solving and creativity and innovation."

Looking for more insights to transform your business? Connect with Tony on LinkedIn or through his AE Analyst page.

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