In this episode of Enterprising Insights, Futurum Group Enterprise Applications Research Director Keith Kirkpatrick provides a preview of his fall conference schedule, focusing on the events he will be attending, the key items he hopes to learn, and how these developments may impact the enterprise applications market. He will then move to the Rant or Rave segment, where he picks one item in the market, and either champions or criticizes it.
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Transcript:
Keith Kirkpatrick: Hello, everyone. I’m Keith Kirkpatrick, Research Director with The Futurum Group. I’d like to welcome you to Enterprising Insights. It’s our weekly podcast that explores the latest developments in the enterprise software market and the technologies that underpin these platforms, applications, and tools. So this week, I actually want to talk about some of the upcoming conferences and events that I’m going to be attending this fall. As some of you are aware, as part of my role as an industry analyst, it’s to attend these big conferences. Sometimes they’re big user conferences, sometimes they are just strictly for the analyst community. But really, it’s an important part of my job, because really, by going out and actually meeting face to face with these companies, I can get a lot more insight into the company’s actual direction. Oftentimes, we’ll get previews of new product features on their roadmap. In terms of some of the larger conferences, we’ll actually get to talk to customers on site, gauge their reaction to the new product launches, get their reaction to just the company’s overall direction and strategy. And to be honest, sometimes, we actually get some really good, honest feedback about the company and what they’re doing. And to their credit, most of these large organizations don’t put any restrictions on who we can talk to or anything like that.
So that is very much appreciated, because in the end, what I see my role is being able to take in all of that feedback and bring it back to the company, to hopefully help them actually improve their product, or service, or messaging, what have you. And really, the only way that you’re able to really deliver improvement is to take honest feedback. Sometimes, it’s not always going to be positive, and I’ve found the best way to do that is actually talk to customers. Of course, the other real benefit to being on site and talking to people is you get to talk to a lot of different folks within the company. Everything from the C-suite, across to product managers, product strategists, and other executives who can really give their view in terms of the company’s overall strategy and some of the tactics that they’re using to achieve those goals. And it’s often interesting to be able to pose the same questions to each of these folks and get their opinion, because everyone’s going to have a little bit of a different take on what needs to be done, what the company’s doing, and what the impact is on their customers. So I’m going to take some time today and go through some of the events that I’m going to be attending in the fall. Then, of course, as always, we’ll move to my rant or rave segment, where I pick one item in the market and I will either champion it or criticize it.
So without further ado, let’s just get right into it. So the first event I actually have on my calendar is an analyst-only event at Workhuman. Now, Workhuman is a social recognition platform. Their event is being held in early September, at their new headquarters in Framingham, Mass. And what I’m really interested in hearing about there is really a few things. One is they’re going to provide sort of an overall update on the company’s performance and a roadmap for 2025. They’re also going to be talking about a new launch that they have planned for the fall, and I think one of the things that I’m really looking to hear from them about is how they’re actually incorporating AI into their platform, and what that means for the functionality of their platform and their end users. We’ve heard a heck of a lot about artificial intelligence and how it’s being applied to sort of basic productivity use cases, like summarization of content, content generation, like creating emails from content. But what I’m particularly interested in here is how this company is actually using generative AI within their platform, which is around social recognition. If we think about employee experience, it is not just enough in this day and age to have someone come to work, and do a job, and then you give them a paycheck, and you say, “Thank you very much.” Employees today, particularly those that are in the younger generation, are looking for more in terms of recognition of what they’re doing and that they’re doing a good job, and it isn’t always just about money when it comes to recognition. So it’ll be really interesting to hear how they’re evolving their platform and where the overall market is going. I think that’s going to be really interesting.
One of the things that I know that they are talking or will be talking about is working with new AI assistants. This basically helps coach and monitor the effectiveness of an employee recognition program, just basically to figure out what works, what doesn’t work, because as I’m sure everyone realizes, just asking people for feedback, you’re not always going to get complete insights into what’s working, what isn’t. You actually need to look at the data, in terms of how long are people engaging with specific content or specific initiatives, and what this AI system apparently is going to do is help make sure that the programs are actually specifically tailored to the employees and their program. So we’ll see how well that works in terms of helping to measure the effectiveness of a recognition program. So really looking forward to that event. That is, again, in early September, up in Framingham, which is obviously right outside of Boston. Then, I actually head to a couple of very, very large events, where we will see not only other analysts, but also customers and partners.
The first event of course is Oracle. They’re actually co-locating CloudWorld along with SuiteWorld. So that will cover obviously their enterprise-focused applications, everything from OCI, diffusion apps, and so forth. They’re going to be holding that event alongside of SuiteWorld, which is obviously focused on Oracle NetSuite, which is focused more at the mid-market, as opposed to necessarily large enterprises. So this is taking place in early September, or actually mid-September in Las Vegas, which is, anyone who has heard me talk is probably not my favorite place in the world, but it is certainly going to be great to reconnect with the good folks at Oracle and hear more about what they’re doing. Now, obviously, again, we can’t escape those two little letters, AI. But what I’m particularly interested in hearing is what Oracle is going to be doing in terms of strategy around actually developing… You know, how are these use cases that they’ve developed using AI, how are they performing? How are customers actually deploying this, and what kind of actual ROI are they generating?
A lot of times at these events, we hear a lot of, “Hey, we’re deploying this particular use case for AI.” What I want to know now, now that we’re more than a year down the road in terms of generative AI being sort of generally available in some cases, I would like to really hear specific use cases, with real metrics, in terms of, “This organization deployed this particular AI use case, here is the benefit.” So I’m certainly looking forward to that. I’m sure the teams will deliver what they can in terms of numbers and performance metrics there. Now, of course, this is also interesting, because if we think about what’s gone on over the past, oh, four to six months or so, Larry Ellison actually made a fairly bold statement where he basically said that they’re going to be moving, Oracle is going to move their headquarters to Nashville, and one of the reasons he said that is that he said that Oracle is going to be jumping in both feet to the healthcare industry, really trying to service that market. Apparently, the Nashville area, Nashville and the surrounding area, is home to a number of very, very large healthcare organizations. So I’ll be interested to hear more about that, how are they developing solutions? We got a little preview of that last April or May or so, in terms of various features that are being built out to really address a lot of these use cases, yeah, with respect to healthcare delivery and healthcare administration. So I’m really interested to hear more about that. Then, of course, as I mentioned before, one of the really cool things is they are co-locating CloudWorld along with SuiteWorld.
Now, I also cover NetSuite, which is again more focused on that mid-market customer base. It is an ERP system, and it is one of those. I’ve spoken with their leader, which is Evan Goldberg, and he’s always great about being very, very available to analysts. We can go in in small groups, talk to them, ask questions about where they’re headed, and he has always been very upfront about the fact that, because they are part of Oracle, they reap the benefits of all of the investment that Oracle is making into AI, generative AI, and that obviously is going to filter down where appropriate into NetSuite. I think I am particularly interested to see, again, how AI is actually being applied by these customers, in which use cases, and if that differs for companies that might be smaller, that might be taking perhaps more of a cautious approach to generative AI, because it’s a different equation there in terms of scalability, it’s a different equation in terms of comfort around security. It’s obviously different in terms of the amount of data that a particular company may have, which is ultimately what underpins how well a company can actually deploy AI. As I’ve said it, a number of my colleagues in the analyst community have said, the real key to unlocking the power of AI is data, making sure that it is available, making sure that it is properly prepared, so that when an AI algorithm is applied, that it is actually able to act on as much data as possible, and ensuring relevancy, ensuring timeliness, and of course making sure that it is only acting upon that sort of single source of truth, so you’re not having interactions that are going on that are not being pulled in at once, because that really does throw off the ability of an algorithm to provide the most insight, if there are multiple sources of truth or activity going on within the organization. So really looking forward to that, and that is at Oracle CloudWorld and at SuiteWorld in Las Vegas.
Then, the week after that, I will be headed over to San Francisco for Dreamforce. Now, Dreamforce, of course, is sort of the flagship conference for Salesforce. Salesforce has obviously been doing quite a bit over the last several months in terms of announcements, in terms of announcing, again, the greater integration of artificial intelligence, particularly generative AI, in their various cloud products. One of the things I’m certainly going to be looking for again from Salesforce is not just what sort of features they’re incorporating in terms of the Einstein 1 platform being able to enable generative AI, but also looking at how are the companies that are using Salesforce products, how are they able to leverage the benefits of AI with data that may not be held or may not originate within that Salesforce ecosystem? I had a very interesting conversation at the last Salesforce event, where a product manager actually flat out said, “A lot of our customers actually work in sort of this hybrid environment, where yes, they use Salesforce, but they also have many other applications and sources of data that sit outside of that Salesforce ecosystem.” And it’s really, what Salesforce has really been talking about is using Data Cloud to harmonize all of that data from wherever it may live, or reside, or be generated ,and making that available, so you can apply AI across the entire organization and across entire workflows. So that will be really interesting to see, if they can actually provide some concrete examples of how that is actually working.
Now, of course, the other thing that’s going to be really interesting is, by the time you watch this video, Salesforce’s latest quarterly results will be out, it’d be interesting to see whether or not they will be able to sustain the growth that they’ve had over the past several quarters. If not, it’ll be interesting to hear what the company may be doing to sort of reverse that tide, if in fact we do see sort of a different revenue. We’re in an interesting period, where there is a lot of promise about generative AI. There are certainly some success stories, but really, we’re still pretty early in the game, and if you think about all of the things that companies are concerned about, they’re concerned about return on investment, they’re concerned about things like security, data security, they’re concerned about things like hallucination. They’re concerned about guardrails, making sure that when this technology is deployed, that it is deployed safely and that it is reliable, because in the end, we’re not talking about sort of a science experiment. We’re talking about the use of the technology that has a direct impact on a company’s operations and their financial health. So I’ll be really interested to see what’s going on with Salesforce, and if they can talk more about some of their customers and their success stories. So yeah, so that is Dreamforce, again, being held in San Francisco.
Then, once we hit October, I am going to be going to Zendesk’s analyst event. They’re having an event here in New York. Zendesk is an interesting company, because again, they’re focused more on the mid-market, sort of the higher-level SMBs to mid-market. And then, of course, some enterprise customers. They are really an interesting company, they have a ton for a company that’s focused on sort of a smaller-sized company, they have a lot of customer data or interaction data from which their AI can use to really interact and really, really automate a lot of different experiences. I’ll be very interested to hear about any kind of new features and functionality with their AI, in terms of being able to automate, being able to deliver a more seamless experience within specific channels, instead of having to go outside of them. And then, I’m also really interested in hearing more about Relay, which is a new app they just announced, which essentially offers proactive messaging services for companies that use both WhatsApp and SMS. This apparently allows companies to proactively reach out to customers at scale, using outbound messages, through WhatsApp or through SMS, and actually manage all those conversations from within Zendesk natively.
Why am I interested about that? Well, because, if you think about how outbound used to happen years ago, it was voice. Companies would call up customers, you know, “Hi, how are you? How did things go with the product that you purchased four months ago, six months ago, what have you?” That’s great, but it’s very expensive to do that. It’s also not efficient in the current situation, where we have organizations struggling with being able to have enough labor to handle the critical tasks. Sometimes, this follow-up gets kind of pushed to the side. So a solution like this is very helpful, because if you think about where people are these days, they are not just sitting by their phones waiting for a voice call. They’re on their phones and they have all of these different things, whether it’s SMS, which everybody has, WhatsApp, which is certainly very popular here in the States, in terms of being an application that can operate cross-platform, allows secure messaging. So it’ll be really interesting to hear from Zendesk what’s going on with this, how are organizations using this, and what is the overall impact on customer experience? Because ultimately, the channel is great, and that’s absolutely critical to actually reaching people, but then, looking at what else is Zendesk doing or what else are their customers doing to really look at the messaging strategies?
Is it just sort of a basic, “Hey, how are things going with the particular products of service?” or are they reaching out and personalizing that outreach, offering another commerce-based offer, or are they offering a different level of support? All of that kind of stuff is really important. I think as we continue down this road of more personalized interactions, I think that applications like this will be the key to differentiation, particularly if they can incorporate all of the customer journey information. And then, of course, the other thing that’s critical in this is, depending on the product or service, they’re able to capture any kind of utilization information, to provide even more relevance, if that’s going to be really important. So I’m really interested to talk to the company, to talk to them about what they have planned in the future for that type of service.
So then, after I leave that event, in mid-October, I will head down to Miami Beach, Florida, for Adobe MAX, which is Adobe’s sort of creative conference. If you think about what’s going on with Adobe, well, they are certainly on the cutting edge when it comes to generative AI as it relates to things like image generation. So, again, if you were to use something like Adobe Firefly, and you can type in a prompt, and create an image basically out of nowhere, of course, obviously, the models are trained on content held within Adobe stock, and only within Adobe stock. So we’re talking about licensed images, where creators get paid, or images that are in the public domain. So they’re among the leaders there, both in terms of functionality, but also in terms of safety. When you think about the world we live in these days, where we have to be very, very careful, particularly from a commercial point of view, you can’t just grab an image and then go use it within a major, multimillion dollar campaign if you don’t know, or if you’re not assured that the source imagery has been properly paid for, if it is in fact an image that was created by an artist or a creator, or if it happens to be in the public domain. So they’re among the leaders in terms of being very much about pounding the table, saying, “No, we want to take the responsible approach there.”
Now, what do I expect to hear from Adobe? Well, what I’d like to hear is I would like to hear them more clearly articulate their message to creators about how their business operates to protect creators. Now, there’s a big kerfuffle about two or three months ago, about how they changed their terms of service, and really, it was wording and it wasn’t clear, but if you go onto the message boards, a lot of the creator message boards, a lot of folks were up in arms because it was confusing. And as happens, a lot of times with large companies, all it takes is a kernel of opaqueness or lack of clarity to get a snowball moving in terms of things that may or may not be true. I would really love it if Adobe would come out and be as transparent and clear as possible. They need to really just, again, just clarify and crystallize their message around, “Here is where,” if we’re talking about our Firefly models, “Here, this is in fact the only source of training data. It’s in Adobe stock, and it’s licensed content, or it’s royalty-free, public domain images.” Then, they need to also, again, be clear about what data they collect, what data they do not collect, what they have access to, what they do not have access to. And again, as far as I understand it, they are not scanning local drives or anything like that in terms of content that’s being scanned on their servers. It’s only to prevent things like inappropriate content, pornography, excessively violent content, what have you, basically stuff that we wouldn’t want in anything.
But again, I’m probably not articulating it very clearly, and to me, that means that Adobe also needs to take a look at their messaging and really get it out to this creative community, because I think there are a couple things going on. Number one, I’ve talked to a bunch of creatives at some of their other events and they like the technology. They have said, though, that they are worried about these issues, about content being taken from them or being scanned or whatnot, they’re concerned about that, their bosses, essentially the corporate folks, are worried about data privacy, they’re worried about data leaks, they’re worried about security, they’re worried about guardrails, all of that kind of stuff that of course you should be concerned about if you’re using a large platform to handle all of your content creation and content distribution activities. So certainly, I think it’s a great opportunity for Adobe to really come out and crystallize all of that messaging.
Now, from a technology standpoint, of course, I’m really going to be interested to hear or see any new models that could come out with any new functionality. I would love to hear more, because I know they teased it a year ago about what they’re doing with generative video, generative audio, because I think that is where we’re really going to start to see some really creative stuff coming out, where you’re able to combine the still imagery of Firefly with other tools. They’ve teased various things over the years in terms of using generative technology to improve audio performance, improve video, but it would be great to see, I’d love to even get some teasers about using generative AI to create, say, moving pictures, because I think that could be really interesting. Now, of course, that does bring up a lot of other concerns about things like deep fakes and all of that kind of stuff, but certainly, it is really amazing if you think about where we were just 16, 18 months ago, where a lot of this stuff was just, it wasn’t really on many people’s radar. So again, really interested to see what’s going on with that at Adobe MAX, which will take place in mid-October in Florida.
So those are the main conferences that I’m going to as of right now. Obviously, my travel schedule is constantly updating, and if I do wind up going to other events, I’ll certainly talk about them either before, during, or after, here on this podcast. So certainly stay tuned. So with that, I’d like to move to my rant or rave segment, where I pick something in the market and I either rant about it and complain about it or rave about it and give the old applause. So I’m going to rant today. So I happened to be away about a week or so ago, not on a business trip, but I actually took a trip with my family to London and Dublin. So nice trip, great to hang out with the family and not be thinking about work necessarily. But there was something that kind of annoyed me. Now, I do a lot of traveling for work, but I don’t always do it from a consumer perspective. And in particular, I think this was in both London and it was in Dublin. We went out to several restaurants, and I would walk into the place, and we’d sit down, and no service would come over, no waiters, waitresses would ever come over, and we’d be sitting around going, “Hmm, what’s going on?” It turns out a lot of these places had QR codes on the table and you just had to scan it and then you could order. Now, I don’t know whether it’s just I’ve been out of the loop or whatever, but that wasn’t made clear to me. There was no big sign saying, “Hey, use the QR to order,” and that brings up an issue.
Now, once we did it, it was fine. It worked great. In some cases, you just order through the app. Other cases, a server would come over, what have you. But that kind of, I guess, lack of direction is interesting, because if you think about experiences, it really, it just says one thing, you can’t assume anything. You can’t assume that a customer absolutely knows what to do unless you tell them. And you think about first impressions, if you introduce friction at the very beginning of that interaction, that’s not a great foot upon which to start out a long sort of engagement. So I think that, to me, just raised another issue, which is within applications, we’re typically, if you think about a business application, most people need to be trained on it. And because they don’t know, “Where do I start?” They don’t know, “What button should I push, how do I get going on this?” And a lot of times, if you think about certain applications that offer sort of a free trial, if it isn’t intuitive or there’s no big thing that says, “Hey, start here,” in many cases, you may go, “You know what? This application isn’t right for me.”
And I think that’s where generative AI may actually be able to provide real benefits. Just sort of identifying, “Okay, I’m sitting here, an application, and I’m moving my cursor around, and I’m dwelling on something.” Well, it should be able to identify that I’ve had this cursor over this one menu or this area of the screen for 20 seconds. I haven’t done anything, well, that probably indicates that I don’t know what to do. This is where generative AI can kind of remove that friction and say, “Hey, it looks like you’re looking in this area. What is it that you would like to do?” I see that as a real opportunity for application vendors out there, to utilize generative AI in a very, very basic way, just understanding what is it that that user is doing, so they’re not just sitting there staring at the screen? So this whole rant is sort of a long-winded way to get around to that topic. But it’s that similar sort of first impression issue that I have, like when I’m sitting there in that restaurant, I don’t know what to do, it doesn’t mean the restaurant isn’t good, but it means that I didn’t know how to get started, and it already gave me that sort of negative impression.
I feel that is the same way with certain pieces of software, and it’s certainly, now that we have the technology where it’s being developed, now I think there’s a real opportunity to utilize that, to focus in on that initial experience, where they’re just sitting there and they don’t know what they’re doing, having something pop up based on their action or inaction. If I’m clicking around different things, well, it knows I’m doing that, and then it can hopefully have some sort of assistant pop up and ask me in plain English, say, or whatever native language, and I can hopefully type in or somehow interact with them and say, “I would like to do this,” and then have the application or the assistant walk me through that process. So not that it necessarily needs to do it for me, but it actually takes me through the steps, so the next time I know how to do it. So I think it’s sort of a mini rant, just probably more my fault than anything else in terms of the restaurant experience, but I think it certainly does highlight what I see as a large issue for a lot of application vendors, particularly ones that are trying to gain traction in the market or trying to build up utilization. They need to make it easy for that person who’s just sitting there, not sure what to do.
So that is my rant for the week, and of course, next week I’ll be back with another one, or hopefully a rave. So again, that’s all the time I have today. So I want to thank everyone for joining me here on Enterprising Insights. I’ll be back next week with a new episode, focused in on the happenings within the enterprise application market. Thanks to everyone for tuning in, and be sure to subscribe, rate, and review this podcast on your preferred platform. Thanks, and I’ll see you next time.
Author Information
Keith has over 25 years of experience in research, marketing, and consulting-based fields.
He has authored in-depth reports and market forecast studies covering artificial intelligence, biometrics, data analytics, robotics, high performance computing, and quantum computing, with a specific focus on the use of these technologies within large enterprise organizations and SMBs. He has also established strong working relationships with the international technology vendor community and is a frequent speaker at industry conferences and events.
In his career as a financial and technology journalist he has written for national and trade publications, including BusinessWeek, CNBC.com, Investment Dealers’ Digest, The Red Herring, The Communications of the ACM, and Mobile Computing & Communications, among others.
He is a member of the Association of Independent Information Professionals (AIIP).
Keith holds dual Bachelor of Arts degrees in Magazine Journalism and Sociology from Syracuse University.
