AI Adoption Challenges and Opportunities: CEOs and Industry Leaders Weigh In

CEOs confront AI challenges: Cisco event captures perils and opportunities - SiliconANGLE

CEOs confront AI challenges: Cisco event captures perils and opportunities As a new year begins to unfold, the operative word surrounding the enterprise world's adoption of artificial intelligence is uncertainty. This notable lack of confidence can be seen in survey results recently unveiled by Cisco Systems Inc., which found that only 13% of responding companies were fully ready to capture AI's potential. And that's down a percentage point from one year ago. "They believe there's potential, but they have a lot of fear about what's unknown," said Chuck Robbins (pictured), chairman and chief executive officer of Cisco. "There's so much promise, there's still more to figure out." Robbins made his remarks at the company's AI Summit, a small thought leadership gathering of 150 company executives and analysts held this month in Palo Alto, California. While the event provided an opportunity to showcase Cisco's release of AI Defense, a new tool for safeguarding AI systems, it also offered an intriguing look at the challenges confronting an ecosystem of companies that are focused on moving the technology forward. Those challenges run the gamut, from intense competition for silicon market share, model pricing and security to regulatory concerns, agentic deployment and how to generate meaningful productivity gains from investment. "The ability to make people more productive is hugely powerful," David Solomon, chairman and CEO of the Goldman Sachs Group Inc., said during an appearance at the Cisco event. Solomon, who noted that his firm had been "using artificial intelligence for two decades," revealed that AI is now being used to write the very documents that companies rely on investment banks to provide when submitting public filings. These generally involve drafting a form, known as the S-1 filing, for submitting an application to the Securities and Exchange Commission for an initial public offering of stock. "Today, you can basically have something that's 95% of the way there in a few minutes," Solomon said. "You still have to put a lot of time into differentiating that last 5%, but that's a huge productivity gain." Those productivity gains may become more significant as the capabilities for AI continue to expand. One of the participants in Cisco's AI Summit was Aidan Gomez, founder and CEO of Cohere Inc. Gomez, whose previous work at Google LLC resulted in the development of Transformer deep learning architectures, outlined a progression where AI models were beginning to move beyond mere knowledge aggregation to an ability for insight creation. "Are the models just regurgitating stuff they've already seen or are they actually delivering us new ideas, things that they haven't seen before out on the internet or when they were trained?" Gomez said. "We've already seen instances of generalization and new ideas. They can create things that a human hasn't created before." An example of how far AI has progressed in a short period of time can be found in the release of OpenAI's o1 model in September. Gomez noted that the model, which can decode scrambled text and answer questions with better accuracy beyond Ph.D. level knowledge, is an important step forward in AI's capability. "The big thing right now is reasoning," Gomez said. "The input space of the system is literally anything. The expectation from the user is you have to respond immediately and you have to be correct. That's an insane expectation. Of course we should spend different amounts of compute, different amounts of energy on different problems. What reasoning has unlocked is the ability to do that." Reasoning is expected to play a significant role in the development of AI agents, intelligent pieces of software that can perform tasks autonomously. The rise of AI agents was one of the key tech story lines in 2024, and it has been a major focus for industry players such as Salesforce Inc., Boomi LP and ServiceNow Inc. The effectiveness of AI agents will depend on an ability to gather data from a variety of sources and one of the primary technologies for accomplishing this is enterprise search. This has propelled companies such as Glean Technologies Inc. into the spotlight as users of AI agents must find ways to access massive amounts of data from different applications and products. "Search has now become a core foundation for any AI agent you want to build in the enterprise," Arvind Jain, founder and CEO of Glean, said during a discussion at the Cisco event. "That's why it has become such a hot topic now. There is going to be this amazing team of surrounding AI agents that are assisting you." Yet several of the summit participants expressed a belief that the agentic AI wave may still be a few miles offshore. Cohere's Gomez noted that enterprises must still work on creating an infrastructure that will support the type of data integration necessary to drive agentic AI that is fully autonomous. "It's totally augmentation right now, it's not automation," Gomez said. "We're 18 months away from something really compelling, where you can see roles that can have their day-to-day changed." Not to be forgotten in the world's adoption of AI is the role that hardware will play in facilitating productivity and usage. Although Nvidia Corp. has forged a platform that integrates hardware, software and systems engineering into a massive ecosystem, there are still other companies working with silicon to support the booming AI market. One of these is Groq Inc., a processor company founded in 2016 by a group of former Google engineers who were instrumental in designing the TPU or tensor processing unit. The firm's focus has been on AI inferencing and its LPU or language processing unit that can perform inferencing tasks at lightning-fast speeds. Groq is happy to leave dominance in the GPU or graphics processing unit market to Nvidia, according to founder and CEO Jonathan Ross. "We spotted that inference was going to be a wave," Ross said. "You cannot compete with Nvidia, and the world does not need another GPU manufacturer. What you do is find an unsolved problem and you solve it. The problem we solved was AI was slow. We're still 10x faster than a GPU." Though Groq may have found a solution to speed in AI inferencing, the tech industry is still grappling with an insatiable appetite for data. Scale AI Inc., a startup that feeds data to OpenAI and Nvidia for training models, built its business on an ability to capture and channel vast amounts of information for driving artificial intelligence. However, there are growing concerns that the data well may soon run dry. In December, OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever warned that the industry had achieved "peak data" and the process of pretraining models with massive amounts of information will soon come to an end. That was very much on the mind of Scale AI Inc. co-founder and CEO Alexandr Wang. "We need new sources of data," Wang said at the Cisco event. "How do you produce advanced frontier datasets to fuel the forward progress of these industries? Synthetic data is not going to magically solve all of our data problems." The AI ecosystem is also being forced to confront the prospect of government regulation that could hamper future growth. The industry managed to dodge one attempt at regulation last fall when California Governor Gavin Newsom vetoed a bill that would have imposed new AI safety regulations. However, he did sign legislation mandating transparency in generative AI. At the federal level, President Donald Trump signed an executive order this month that repealed previous government policies on AI which contained guardrails that companies in the U.S. were required to follow. Yet, Trump's order calls for the development of a new action plan for AI within the next 180 days, and it remains uncertain what that will contain. "I'm very skeptical of overregulating AI right now," said Aaron Levie, co-founder and CEO at Box Inc., who expressed concern that companies such as OpenAI, Meta and Anthropic would have been subjected to undue scrutiny if the proposed California law had been signed. "All of a sudden, the AI frontier labs now have to hire dozens, hundreds of regulatory people, policy people, legal folks every time they want to do a new training run. Nearly a dozen players are running at full speed to leapfrog each other in model capability and pricing and innovation. What would happen if every single one of them now went 50% slower?" Despite potential roadblocks involving a lack of data and regulatory oversight, the AI industry continues to roll onward. This was captured in remarks by Fei-Fei Li, one of the world's foremost researchers in AI and deep learning. Li, who was formerly chief scientist of AI and machine learning at Google Cloud and now serves as co-founder and CEO of World Labs Inc., described her current initiative to build LWMs or large world models that perceive and interact with the 3D world. Li's work in spatial intelligence involves equipping robots with the ability to navigate physical spaces. It represents what Li characterized as the "next generation foundation model" for robots, another hallmark in the era of innovation that AI has spawned. "We believe the ability to generate and interact with 3D worlds, real or virtual, is fundamental for intelligent agents," Li said. "AI is real. It really is genuinely the new computing."

AI spurs an explosion in data center spending. Can it all pay off? - SiliconANGLE

AI spurs an explosion in data center spending. Can it all pay off? TikTok returned early this week after a short pause thanks to newly minted President Trump, but it was his other executive orders on AI and crypto that are likely to roil the business world. Meanwhile, Trump's memecoins and loosening of crypto rules provide a way to funnel money to him while he's president: corruption in broad daylight. Not to mention he pardoned the founder of the drug site Silk Road and 1,500 convicted Jan. 6 rioters. And ordered the end of birthright citizenship. And the U.S. is leaving the World Health Organization, just as an avian flu epidemic is raging -- so much for bringing down those egg prices. We're only a week into the new regime. Lord help us. OpenAI debuted its Operator agent system. It's just a research preview for now, a start toward the promised land of AI agents where we might see automated grocery restocking and expense reports (I'll believe that when I see it). But the road will be long and winding. Huge AI and data fundings keep happening in the new year with no slowdown in sight, and this week is was Databricks' and Anthropic's turn. Big spending on data centers also continued this week to support all that AI training and inference, in particular the Stargate joint venture with OpenAI -- of course -- Oracle and Softbank, though it appears much less than meets the eye for now. Even some of it, though, along with many other efforts such as ByteDance's, plus Meta's plans to spend as much as $65 billion this year on capital spending, including a mega data center, suggest a potential data-center bubble. Don't miss this week's Breaking Analysis from Dave Vellante and the Data Gang, who put out their 2025 predictions for data and AI. Antitrust activity continues apace across the pond, even as the new administration here seems likely to deemphasize it. Fourth-quarter earning season kicks off in earnest next week with SAP, IBM, Microsoft, ServiceNow, Meta, Tesla, Intel, Apple, Samsung and more. You can hear more about this and other news on John Furrier's and Dave Vellante's weekly podcast theCUBE Pod, out later today on YouTube. Here's all the enterprise news that fit this week: Breaking Analysis: Predictions 2025: Data renaissance, systems of agency, LAMs, SAMs and security threats OpenAI releases Operator agent as rivals enhance their AI services It looks promising to some but is hardly the seamless agentic AI everyone's hoping for, if indeed that can be achieved for a broad enough array of tasks, and at large scale. That's very far from certain at this point. OpenAI, Oracle and SoftBank to invest $500B in US AI infrastructure building project Given previous announcements, such as Oracle's -- and even Stargate itself, which almost everyone seems to have forgotten -- most or all of this is already underway or planned. It also might be only for OpenAI. And even then, full funding apparently hasn't been secured yet, and the government won't be providing any. Moreover, as Runtime's Tom Krazit noted, this is so huge that it dwarfs what all the cloud providers are doing -- struggling to do because of power considerations. Indeed, KPMG U.S. Technology, Media & Telecommunications Consulting Leader Chad Seiler told SiliconANGLE in an email, "Without access to reliable energy, hyperscalers simply cannot scale the AI capabilities that will drive innovation and further economic growth." And besides adequate power, AI's other, perhaps even more important, gating factor right now is data availability. All of which suggests a looming data center bubble if all those AI hopes don't pan out. Iceberg project leader is bullish on prospects for unified tables and catalogs Trump signs new executive order on AI development, overturning Biden-era restrictions Meta Chief Scientist Yann LeCun says large language models will run out of steam within five years, as world models come to the fore. TikTok's owner joins the AI party too: Report: ByteDance sets aside about $20B for AI spending this year And Facebook now plans to up capital spending on AI and a mega data center this year to as much as $65 billion. Databricks completes $10B funding round, raises $5.25B in debt Google reportedly invests $1B+ in OpenAI rival Anthropic Mistral AI plans IPO (per Bloomberg) AI text-to-code startup StackBlitz in talks for $700M valuation (per Bloomberg) Eleos gets $60M in funding to transform behavioral healthcare with AI agents AI-powered robotics startup Sereact raises €25 million Delivery management platform Package.ai raises $14M for 'Uber-like' customer experience Palona AI gets $10M to build more reliable customer service chatbots that don't make mistakes Google bids for multimodal AI leadership Galileo unleashes platform for evaluating AI agents Hugging Face open-sources world's smallest vision language model API collaboration startup Postman wants to lead the charge in AI agent development DigitalOcean dives into agentic AI creation, making it accessible to every developer TigerGraph revs up its graph database offering with faster setup times and new preconfigurations WebAI's Companion is an AI assistant for enterprise employees that runs privately on their own devices Perplexity launches Sonar API for building applications with search capabilities DeepSeek open-sources its R1 reasoning model series Diesel Labs blends generative AI chat with big-data analysis to create synthetic focus groups for marketing teams Qdrant launches hardware-independent, GPU-accelerated vector indexing capability Nebius AI Studio adds its first text-to-image models to support creative app development CMA opens investigations into Apple and Google over mobile practices Transformation in billing: Metronome offers usage-based tech for the AI era Samsung debuts new Galaxy S25 smartphone series with Google's Gemini AI assistant Google announces new Chrome Web Store for enterprise browser extension control Google announces new educational features for Chromebooks and Workspace CubeFS storage platform graduates from CNCF incubation Gartner sees 10% IT spending jump in 2025, but don't get too excited Render Services raises $80M to try to make AWS and other cloud infrastructure platforms obsolete Baya Systems raises $36M to transform AI chiplet design Prioritizing AppDev resilience in 2025: Insights from theCUBE Research ChatGPT API vulnerability could enable large-scale DDoS attacks, security researcher warns HPE investigating potential breach after hacker claims to steal data Payment fraud risks increase as cybercriminals exploit e-skimming and scam e-commerce SentinelOne report highlights shared tactics between HellCat and Morpheus ransomware groups New Mirai variant 'Murdoc_Botnet' targets AVTECH cameras and Huawei routers Google joins forces with HTC Vive to boost Android XR Development Citrix acquires thin-client provider Unicon to strength endpoint management and security Mitiga secures $30M to expand cloud and SaaS incident response capabilities Hypori raises $12M to expand security virtual mobile access platform DryRun Security raises $8.7M to advance AI-driven application security More cybersecurity news here Trump suspends TikTok ban, signs tech-focused executive orders TikTok restores US service following intervention from President-elect Trump In challenge to TikTok, Bluesky and X roll out dedicated vertical video feeds Trump signs executive order to prevent censorship of online platforms Meta reportedly developing Oakley smart glasses and high-end devices Trump pardons Ross Ulbricht, founder of Silk Road drug marketplace Stablecoin issuer Circle buys Hashnote crypto money-market fund manager