Welcome to the Cloud Wars Minute — your daily cloud news and commentary show. Each episode provides insights and perspectives around the “reimagination machine” that is the cloud.
In today’s Cloud Wars Minute, I dive into Microsoft’s explosive growth in AI agents and what it means for the future of business innovation and competition in the Agent Wars.
Highlights
00:15 — The Agent Wars are kicking up a lot of opportunities for companies. Microsoft, for example, says it has 160,000 agent customers. And those 160,000 agent customers have built 400,000 AI agents. These numbers indicate enormous demand and interest on the part of customers.
01:19 — What if a lot were done in workshops? Not a big production-level agent. But if 1% of those 400,000 are production agents, that’s 4,000. If 5% of those 400,000 turns out to be production agents, that’s 20,000. If 10% of these 400,000 are production agents, that means there’s 40,000 AI production agents now working with Microsoft technology.
02:34 — Because while Microsoft and the other Cloud Wars Top 10 companies will all be making and selling their own agents, those will be just a tiny percentage of the overall agent population that’s going to be in use. The important thing here is the rush to help customers be able to build their own. It’s not a specialized thing that only developers can use.
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03:39 — Everybody’s into the game right now, but who among the Cloud Wars Top 10 will be able to do it at the most significant scale? In an interview next week, Oracle’s Chris Leone said that, ” . . . within three to six months . . . we’re going to really see an explosion in these department-to-department, end-to-end, multi-function, more complex agents.”
04:29 — Things are happening very fast. Hats off to Microsoft for this. This is just the beginning of what is certainly going to be an interesting series of conflicts and escalations in the Agent Wars. I have no doubt that in the Agent Wars, like in the Cloud Wars, the biggest winners will be the customers.
