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.
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In today’s Cloud Wars Minute, I discuss the rapid emergence of the Agent Wars, focusing on how top cloud companies — Oracle, Salesforce, Google Cloud, ServiceNow, and Workday — are competing to dominate this new market.
Highlights
00:18 — The Agent Wars are breaking out all over. Right now, in the early days of this, we see at least seven of the Cloud Wars Top 10 companies jumping into this red-hot new market for agents. Agents are seen as orchestrating things across different areas, functions, workflows, and processes, tying things together.
01:09— It’s an evolution up from copilots — that’s one point of view. They are often seen as ways to automate, connect, orchestrate, and optimize, augmenting the human-machine or human-software interaction. Many companies are building their own agents while also offering tools to help customers build their own.
01:58 — There have been several partnerships, including Salesforce and Workday, Salesforce and Google Cloud, and Workday and Microsoft in the realm of agents. Here’s how I would rank the Agent Wars Top 10 —although it’s really just seven. I would put Oracle and Salesforce in a tie for first place. Oracle has 50 agents. Salesforce, led by Marc Benioff, considers agents the big thing.
02:51 — In the number three spot, we have Google Cloud. Five months ago, Google Cloud came out with a wide range of agents across six different functional areas. It had over 100 customers back then using these agents across many areas. In the next spot, we have ServiceNow. A couple of weeks ago, it came out with a big set of agents across many of its workflow areas.
03:35 —Then there’s Workday, which introduced four agents at its Rising event last week. Microsoft wants to tie these new developments with agents to copilots. SAP has been a little quiet so far on what it’s doing with agents. But next month, at its big TechEd show, I think we can expect SAP to be very bullish and ambitious with what it wants to do with agents.
04:34 — As I said at the top of the show, I think the big winners in this will be the customers. Some of these tech vendors will do better than others, of course — that always happens — but the big winners will be the customers.
05:04 — To take this down to an individual level, there are going to be millions and millions of people who, because of these agents, will be able to stop doing so much drudgery and low-value work and be able to move up to higher-value work. So, a big win for everybody there.
